Advent 2 2006 | Luke 3:1-6

When I was a student at California Baptist College, the pinko intellectual clique with which I hung out, the Socratic Club, scored quite a coup. We procured for ourselves an abandoned garage smack dab in the middle of campus, and over the summer those of us who lived on campus full-time set about fixing the place up so that when the new school year started, we would have our own coffee-shop, a haven for free thought, liberal politics, mayhem, chess, and really, really bad coffee. One day I was trying to fascen squares of cork board to the central piller of the building, and discovered that although I had the cork board and the glue, I had no means of applying the glue to the piller. So I went in search of a brush.

I thought that the art department was a likely place to look for such an item, and found, to my surprise, the whole section wide open. Mac, the art professor, was not there, and neither was anyone else. And there, in front of me, was a cup holding an assortment of battered brushes that has obviously seen better days. I snatched one up and examined it closely. It was just the thing. Without another thought I bounded down the stairs and used my new-found prize to hang the cork board. When I was done, I simply discarded the brush. It was, after all, not good for much else after its introduction to rubber cement.

I pretty much didn’t give the incident another thought until September rolled around and I caught my first glimpse of Mac, the art professor. From the first moment I saw him I had an instant shame attack. I began making nervous excuses whenever he would enter our new coffeeshop, and it began to eat away at me. I couldn’t be in his presence without feeling overwhelming guilt, and I started to obsess about it. Finally, one afternoon, I climbed the stairs to Mac’s lair, and was relieved to find him alone, cleaning up after a class. I asked him if I could talk to him for a minute, and he gladly gave me his full attention. Of course, I instantly burst into tears and spilled my guts about stealing one of his brushes. I expected him to be angry, to demand restitution, and I was completely unprepared for his actual response.

He laughed. “Is that what’s been eating at you?” He asked, and laughed again. “John, it was just an old brush. It probably did more good for you than it would have here.” He put a hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Don’t give it another thought, okay?”

But I didn’t know how to do that. There was nothing in my experience that told me how to handle that kind of grace. I had done a bad thing, and I felt like I should be punished. Mac should at least yell at me and be angry for a few days. But no, he just grinned at me, without a trace of negativity anywhere in him. Instead, he was showing me nothing but love, and it kind of blew my mind.

I gave him a huge hug, more for my sake than his—Mac was never much of a hugger—but he hugged me back and continued to chuckle. I bounded down the stairs drunk with grace, uncertain how to assimilate what had just happened. It didn’t feel right, you know? No justice was done, the rules had not been followed. Mac had just handed over a bagful of grace and it felt awkward in my hands and I did not know how to hold it.

I’m not alone in this, I know. Real grace is a tough one for most of us. It was hard for me to receive Mac’s grace not because he was holding any kind of a grudge against me—he wasn’t. But I held a grudge against myself, and because of that, his grace, so freely offered, was almost impossible for me to receive.

This was the most difficult thing Jesus had to deal with, I think, when it came to people understanding what he was trying to teach. He was reared in a culture that declared that God was a just God, that restitution must be made for sin, that God holds grudges and will punish the people unless they do certain things in just the right ways. His message went completely counter to this.

He drove the people concerned with purity crazy by embracing those who were impure and insisting that God loved them just as they were. He infuriated the people obsessed with rules and laws by ignoring those laws when they got in the way of simple human compassion. And he confounded all those who had been told all their lives that they were worthless: the sex workers, the political traitors, the uneducated, the poor. He treated them as if they were real people, as if they mattered, and he showed them, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that their lives mattered. That God did not hold any grudges against them, but loved them just as they were.

The problem is that this runs completely counter to the wisdom of the world. The Greek word for “world” in the New Testament is “kosmos,” and it is an often-mistranslated term. It refers not to “planet earth”—a much better translation is “the system,” with the very same perjorative content our current slang contains. The System says there must be justice, but Jesus says, no—God just loves you, no matter what you’ve done. The system says “an eye for an eye,” but Jesus says no—grace is free. The System says “there is no free lunch,” but Jesus says no—come to my table and eat as much as you want. The System says there are acceptable people and unacceptable people, but Jesus says there is no “us and them” there is only “us” and no one is outside the circle of God’s love.

Of course, that didn’t mean that everyone was comfortable being inside that circle of love. It was, for a lot of people, a most uncomfortable place to be. More people walked away from that love than were able to embrace it, because unconditional love is an unfamiliar animal to most of us and it scares us to death. We don’t know what to do with it, how to receive it, let alone how to turn it around and extend it to others.

Perhaps this is why, in our mythology, John appears BEFORE Jesus does. Real love can blindside us if we’re not ready for it, so John says, Love is coming. Get ready for it. Do what you need to do so that when Love Comes to Town, you can recognize it, and what’s more, can reach out and receive it. Deal with your stuff, confront your issues, cultivate the self-awareness you need so that when love is offered to you, you can reach out and accept it without hesitation, without fear, without guilt, without apology.

This week, one of my clients said something that made the hair stand up on the back of my arm. He said, “God is always standing there, waiting to be let in. But we have to open the door.” There is nothing we can do to earn God’s love, or to feel worthy of that kind of love, or to somehow make it an even trade, and as long as we try we are still taking our cues from the System. But we do have to prepare ourselves, we have to be willing to open the door in our own hearts, we have to do the inner work so that when love is offered we possess enough awareness to say, “Yes, and thank you.”

Just think of how hard that is. How many times has someone simply said, “Thank you,” to you, and you have batted it away like it was a bumble bee? “No, it’s nothing,” we say, or we make some excuse that minimizes the gift or the importance of the gesture—anything to avoid the simple gift of grace contained in those two words, “thank you.” Most of us have actually had to do some work in therapy so that when someone says, “Thank you” to us, we can simply smile, accept the gift, and reply with only two words of our own, “You’re welcome.” How hard is that? How sick is that? What is wrong with us?

What is wrong with us is that we have been duped into believing that the universe is a place where grace is a rare commodity that must be hoarded and doled out only to those who deserve it, and we have been told that that “worthy” group rarely includes us. But then Jesus comes along and says “Baloney. I love you. And so does God. And you don’t have to do a darn thing to earn that love. I love you because you’re you. I love you because you ARE.”

So get ready. Because you never know when love will arrive, and you never know what it will look like. It might look like a beatnik art teacher, or it might look like a newborn baby, or it might look like a total stranger, or an old friend. And when that gift of grace is handed to you, are you going to juggle it like a hot potato, or are you going to hold it like the precious gift it is, press it to your bosom and say, “Yes, I’ll take that. And thank you.” I guarantee you I know how Love will respond. Love will smile and say, “You’re welcome.” Let us pray…

God of infinite mercy,
You hold the whole world in love.
You have drawn the circle of grace so large
That no one is outside of it.
And yet because of our own shame,
We often run, trying to find the edge of the circle,
We want to put ourselves outside that circle
because we do not feel worthy of being within it.
But “worthiness” is not a word that has any meaning to you,
Nor does “good” or “bad” or any of the other labels that we use
To separate ourselves from “those people,”
Regardless of whether we deem “those people” to be
the acceptable people or the unacceptable people.
Help us to prepare the way within ourselves
So that when you knock on our door,
We have the common sense to turn the knob.
For we know that Love is not a rare thing to be hoarded
We know you come to us in every day and in every hour.
Help us to recognize you when you arrive.
Help us to hold out our hands and receive the love that scares us so much.
And the simple grace to say “thank you,”
And “yes.” Amen.