Grace And Peace

March 31, 2019

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:2)

That bit of scripture is not found in today’s lectionary readings.  In fact, this particular verse isn’t found in any of our Sunday lectionary readings at all…not for this year “C” nor any other year in our three years’ cycle.  I used to think that if you attended church regularly, through the passage of time, you would encounter every part of the Bible.  But I discovered that belief of mine to be false…one of the many I have discovered to be false over the passage of years.  It is a great spiritual blessing to discover that what you once believed strongly and for a long period of time was actually wrong—that you, yourself, have been full of gas. The word for that is “conversion.”

This salutation of grace and peace--for that is what it is--comes in the opening verses of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi, an important city of that time on the northeast coast of Greece.  The city was named for Phillip the Second of Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s father.  Alexander was called great not because he was a great guy but rather because he won a great many battles, killed a great many people, and conquered a great many lands. Paul’s letter to the Philippians is a quick read and shows the church there to be one of the few of Paul’s developing missions that is getting along just fine—not plagued by the arguments, struggles and dissentions present in Corinth or Ephesus. The Philippians seemed to manifest grace and peace in their community.

Grace to you and peace, from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ.  Grace and peace. It comes from God the father and God the son with the Holy Spirit in there somewhere.  It is not earned, it cannot be manipulated by power and control, it cannot be bought or sold.  It is a gift.  Grace and Peace. These words, like many profound words are poetic, multi-vailent, having many meanings.

When my son was in his early thirties he had a roommate named Ruben. Ruben was over six and a half feet tall and weighted over 350 pounds.  Ruben was great, not just because of his size, but because he was a great dancer.  Where one might expect a man of his size to be ponderous and lumbering, Ruben moved with fluid grace, perfect rhythm, he could leap high and twirl.  As he moved himself, he moved others physically and emotionally.  He was also that gentle giant who was kind and loving.  He was graceful and grace-filled.  He brought grace to the space he occupied by virtue his presence. No doubt he had practiced this grace for a long time.  It showed. This is one understanding of grace…the way one moves and occupies space in God’s creation.

Another common usage of the word grace is that prayer said before meals.  It can vary from the rambling, theologically dubious and loquacious, to the terse and rote.  For a wonderful example of the former, see Will Farrell’s grace in the movie Telladega Nights.  Got to YouTube and search for Telladega Nights Dinner Scene. Visit the bathroom before you watch it. It is hilarious.  I know, I know, it is bad form to make fun of our simpler Christian brothers and sisters. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  But lighten up!  Grace often flourishes at those edges of propriety where humor is found.  You should read what Martin Luther has to say on the subject of grace and humor. But I digress.   As to the latter--the terse and rote--think of the ubiquitous children’s camp grace, “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub, yay God! There is, of course, a wide variety of forms and styles in between.

But regardless of form or content, these pre-meal prayers cause us to pause for a moment, if just a moment, at least a moment, hopefully and prayerfully not too long as our food cools, and give thanks for the food we have, the hands that planted and harvested and prepared it, and particularly for the grace of a an all-loving God that pours out on all creation that which is also known as grace—the source of life and growth—causing the wheat to sprout and ripen, causing the yeast to do wonderful sexy things in the dough and must, bringing out bread and wine for our tables and our altars. 

By virtue of the wonderful scientific world in which we live, we can see scientific evidence, observable reality, of what happens when we stop to receive grace, when we stop to say grace before meals.  In a wonderful moment in time, we can measure blood pressure that drops, respiration that slows, steadies and deepens, a heart that slows while, counter-intuitively, blood flow increases to the tongue and stomach, thereby making the meal more satisfying and easier to digest.  If like many of us you struggle with your weight, grace—both that said and that received—can give you more pleasure and nourishment with fewer calories. That is not a matter of faith, but hard science.

Sadly, in this busy and driven world, the opposite is also true.  Stress brought to the table has the reverse effect physiologically.  If you are selling food commercially and you want people to drink more than they should and eat more than necessary, you make the service fast, the place acoustically hard, noisy, and full of energy.  Move the kitchen out where people can see the rush.  Sit them right at the grill and have the chef twirl sharp knives and light volcano fires in sliced onions. What is needed for a good meal is not stress and showmanship, but good food, good company, and grace.

Grace and peace to you, from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Grace and Peace... That is another word with multiple meanings.  Perhaps the most common understanding, and the least satisfactory, is that peace is the absence of fighting, the absence of war, the absence of observable confrontation, conflict and combat.  That sort of peace can be enforced by power and control.  The Roman government enforced that kind of peace in Palestine in the time of Jesus.  You’ll hear about it again in our readings as you walk your way toward Easter Sunday. Back then, troublemakers, dissenters, rabble-rousers and activists got what Jesus got.  There wasn’t just one cross with a body hung on it back then, there were hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands on the hilltops and at every crossroads.  A more modern example of this sort of peace and the inevitable result is the former Yugoslavia.  Under the power of the Soviet Union and the control of Marshall Teto, there was no fighting in Yugoslavia. If it started, the tanks would roll in and crush it.  But as soon as that power structure dissolved, literally all hell broke loose in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Enforced peace, whether in nations or in churches or in families, is like a pressure cooker that will eventually blow, always and inevitably.  Our own Civil War has been won and lost for over a century and a half. And yet for many, many, there still is no peace.  There is an enforced peace in the neighborhoods of Chicago, yet people continue to shoot each other in those neighborhoods.

Peace is an elusive thing. Internal and external peace cannot be got by force, cannot be bought or sold, you cannot make it happen, but like grace it can be practiced.  And it is contagious. People who have received peace, who practice peace, who are peace-full, full of peace, spread it around.  But first you have to have it. You can no more share what you don’t have then you can go back to where you haven’t been. 

We talk a lot about peace in church. We practice “passing the peace” –stopping in the middle of whatever we are in the midst of to offer a hand and a blessing. “The peace of the Lord be always with you.” We have a prayer in our prayer book written by someone during World War I and attributed to St. Francis wherein we ask that God will make us instruments of peace (because we can’t do it by ourselves) We talk about a peace that passes—that is beyond—human understanding.  In our Eucharistic Prayer we pray that God will sanctify us so that we might serve in unity, constancy and …peace.  At the end of the service we are told to go in peace to love and serve the Lord and, at the end of his service, at the end of his life, our Lord Jesus said, “My peace I give to you, my own peace I leave with you—the peace of Jesus, right here in our midst, right here, right now, how about that? Grace and peace.

Grace and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

I suspect that most of you have heard this’s morning’s Gospel reading from St. Luke many times before. In the very first lines you recognize it as the parable of the prodigal son.  The plot summary is this: The younger son goes to his father and asks for his inheritance…his half of the father’s wealth.  The father gives him the money and one must presume herds and produce and oil and olives as well, and the son goes off to the first-century equivalent of Las Vegas and spends most of the money on feasting, liquor and women…and the rest of the money he wastes.  He ends up in dire straights and decides to return to the family home and begs to be received as a laborer.  The father, upon seeing him approach, welcomes him with open arms, treats him like a prince, gives him a new robe and a ring and throws a party.  The older son, who has, in his own bitter words, “worked like a slave” for his father, is angry and jealous.

It is an outrageous story, seasoned with very predictable behaviors.  The fact that the young son would even presume to approach his father and ask him such a question is outrageous.  What would you do if your 20-something got himself off the couch, put down his game or his smart phone, and asked for half of all that you had  worked for so hard?  The little twit is treating you as if you are already dead!  He couldn’t care less about you.  But in Jesus’ story, the father says, “okay.”  It is outrageous.

The behavior of the younger son, the excess and squandering and loss of the inheritance is completely predictable.  That’s what kids are wont to do. The desperate return of the son is completely predictable. The eventual jealousy of the older brother…predictable…normal.  But the lavish reception the father provides for “this son of his” that has lost half his money is, again, outrageous.  It’s one thing to give him bed and board and a stern lecture with high emphasis on the son’s irresponsibility, bad judgment, low morals and lack of integrity, but a ring and a robe and a banquet? Outrageous!

It is easy…too easy…for those of us who are familiar with this story to miss the outrage.  Like a joke repeated for the umpteenth time, the surprise is gone, we know the punch line. For us, the story of the prodigal son is part of our church, Luke’s Gospel, read at least once every three years in thousands of churches.  We are taught, and some have come to believe, that the father in the story is God, and that this is the way God will respond when we each of us personally repent of all our waste and self-absorbed living and return to God’s loving embrace.  It is comforting.  It is good to know that we have that fallback position, particularly for those of us (and I include myself) who have not yet run out of money, those of us who are still in the midst of our selfish, privileged lives, those of us who have not yet hit bottom.  It’s good to know that God the Father is waiting with that kind of a reception.

Where Jesus’ parable stops, however, is not the end of the story.  This morning’s reading actually brings us to the beginning of the story.  What sort of man will the younger son become? Will his father’s loving reception encourage future bad behavior? Having been spoiled, will the younger son ever gain responsibility?  Having lost half of their wealth, will the family struggle and suffer? Will the reduced dowry limit the daughters’ marriage prospects? Does the father’s wife support his actions, or will she be sullen or bitchey and on his back for the rest of his life? Will the older brother ever forgive his brother and his father and reconcile, or will the bitterness grow and fester inside him until it dominates and eventually ruins his life? After the father dies, will the elder son be driven by his pent-up anger and his bitterness and his jealously and murder his brother…as so often happens in Bible stories?

We don’t know.  We are at the beginning of the story. It could go any way. We don’t know how the story of the prodigal son will end, and we don’t know how our own stories will end either.  And we don’t know what will happen in the middle. Will there be a happy ending or a tragic ending?  Will the story be full of joy and happiness and abundance or pain and sorrow and grief? Probably some of both, but how much of any, we do not know.

What we do know is that the stories of the future—that our story of the future--will be shaped, in the main, by two things:  Grace and peace, by the abundance or lack thereof, so the story will be shaped.

Let me encourage you to spend some time this holy lent seeking, finding, practicing and resting in both grace and peace. Shut off the phone, get away from the screen.  That which is most important to you and your story cannot be found there. It cannot be bought or sold, it can’t be controlled or manipulated, you cannot make it happen.  It is a mystery beyond your understanding and above all else, it is true. Grace and peace to you, from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.