Whose Inheritance Is It?
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Object:
The Holy Spirit gives us our inheritance. It does not come from our parents or grandparents, our nation or our race. Our inheritance is a gift from God. We have it as a dominion and domination. Domination -- when we get first things absolutely first -- is not a bad thing! Once we know the source of our inheritance, no other gods can rule us. Saints are the people who know this. Saints know who gave them what they have -- and they don't imagine that they are like the used car dealer who, having inherited the car dealership from his father, declares himself a self-made man. Saints are God-made men and women, not self-made men and women. In fact, that "self-made" theory is one of the most dangerous of all. It broaches a dangerous idolatry that somehow creation didn't happen in us, just in others.
Surely we do make parts of ourselves. Life is what we "make" of it -- and the Creator God, living now in us as Holy Spirit made this very clear. We were created and then left to make something of ourselves. We were given all the raw material and set free to be co-creators with a divine God. Had God wanted to have us as puppets, God would have "over made" us. Instead God "under made" us, leaving the finishing work to us. It is like we are a toy that comes in a large box at Christmas: some assembly is required.
While acknowledging the debt we owe to our Creator God, and giving it the nuance of our personal assembly, our personal "get up and go," we then return to the extraordinary dependency we have on God. Some of us get good chemistry in our brains; others get a propensity for depression. Some of us get good genes; others get early cancer. There are degrees and layers of awesome chance in the very physical make up that we have. Each is created and developed, made and given, determined and wildly open and free.
There is an old saying that every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts that stood their ground. Often we interpret a quote like this as saying that we make ourselves by our decisions. It could be that the real trick to being human -- much less being a saint -- is that we stand in our created ground and light. We know God makes us. We know that it is God who has made us and not we ourselves. Saints align themselves as spiritual inheritors: we know of whom and who makes us. Does that imply that we can all be saints? Indeed it does. We can all be people who know to whom they belong.
Similarly, there is an old saying, "The apple never falls far from the tree." Many have said this to me about my children, intending it to be a compliment. I know too many really fine parents whose kids turned up far from the tree, let's say on drugs, to accept the compliment. What I know is there is some awesome chance and even more amazing grace at the heart of parenting. We do not make our children, either. They participate with us and with God as gifts of grace. They do require some assembly. We can rejoice in trees and apples, particularly if they don't fall from the tree. But taking credit is a crime. We do not take credit for what God has wrought by grace. In fact, the surest way to un-saint or de-saint or non-saint ourselves is to start taking credit for the gifts that God has given us by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Saints are different from normal people in that they understand this. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they remember God's creation in each moment. They stay alive to it.
We will not always be on the right path. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour. We will forget the source of our inheritance and take wrong turns. What the Holy Spirit gives to saints is like a map. We are shown the way to be people who know who they are. One of the great markers of our being on the right path is that we live more by grace than boasting. When the boasting comes out, watch out. You are probably on the detour. Enjoy the scenery, understand that you can be forgiven, don't get upset, but do get back on the right road.
Saints are not just known by their humility and thanksgiving and inheritance. They are also known for not being lukewarm. This message is found throughout scripture. A heart that is on fire, even if it bewilders us at times, is equipped to serve. God freely chooses his saints from among the great sinners, but never from among those who are lukewarm -- from those who do not risk anything. Indeed, some of the greatest saints are people who know the scenery on the detours: They know they have spent a lot of time on the wrong path and are thrilled to have a chance to get back on the straight and wide, which some erroneously call the narrow path. I think of people who have become regulars at Alcoholics Anonymous, or people who have served time in jail. These people know what it means to be lost -- and are excited about what it means to be found.
Excitement about God may be something that you have given up on. You may think you are too old for it or too bruised for it or too used up for it. You may think, therefore, that you cannot be a saint. You can. Saints have seasons, too, just like vines. In our lives, we must learn that we cannot always live in the springtime of the rising new sap, or the summer of growth and formation; we cannot always live in the autumn of rich fruit bearing, or in the winter of rest and seeming deadness. Each of these seasons has its place, and all are interdependent and necessary. God's inheritance is for young and old alike, rich and poor alike, strong and weak alike, gifted and ordinary alike. No matter who we are, we can be saints by the simple act of recognizing God as the source of our power and life. We trust the sap of vitality and purpose when we get off our path and purpose -- and then we rise again from the dead. Indeed, as William Stringfellow once said, life is all about conquering death and deadness every day. We are to resist death, particularly the death of the Spirit, on behalf of life.
People who refuse the art of sainthood are handicapped. The physical eye easily spots physical deformity and blemishes in others and in oneself. It is not so easy for the eye of the spirit to spot a spiritual dwarf, hunchback, or cripple. Yes, it is always easier to see these spiritual deformities in others than in oneself. The spiritual eye knows how to be grateful for what God has given and avoids both detours and handicaps. The spiritual eye knows that when we are not in a state of grace and gratitude, that we are probably off the path and letting our handicap overcome us.
Such spiritual X-ray work is sometimes called the "naked truth," or the "unvarnished truth." In literature and art it is called realism, but to spot ingratitude in one's would-be saintly self is not only difficult but also painful, and no one wants to take the descending path to that naked, unvarnished truth, with all its unacceptable humiliations. It is much more comfortable to stay on the level of the plain and ordinary, to go on being just plain and ordinary. Plain and ordinary people are out to get something. They forget that they already have something. We all have spiritual money in the bank. We have a divine inheritance. We don't talk about the unsaintly marks of the ungrateful, but all of us have them from time to time. We have private jealousies, resentments, fantasies, and greeds. We want something that we already have!
The great Sojourner Truth, who is a saint by most people's standards, when told that she was less than a mosquito, responded, "But I sure can make you itch." She knew her inheritance. She knew to whom she belonged. Nobody was going to make her feel small.
We need to be very careful to assure that our gratitude for our inheritance is authentic. Some of us fake gratitude and live in an underground world where we are actually deeply greedy for more. Dietrich Bonhoeffer often spoke of cheap grace as meaning grace at bargain-basement prices, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, and cut-rate sacraments. He also spoke of grace as the church's inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without costs. Costly grace is the gospel that must be sought again and again, the gift, which has to be asked for, the door at which we must knock. It is costly because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live. It is costly because we have to give up the fantasy that we are self-made people. It is costly ... above all, because it was costly to God. "We were bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:20). Nothing can be cheap to us, which is costly to God.
If you find yourself oddly judged by the absence of gratitude for your inheritance in your life, find a way to slow down and remember who you are. We must develop a "path of more resistance" to the shouts from culture that tell us we need more, from the whispers from culture that say we are nobodies and must become better and more. The beginning place for sainthood is the knowledge that we are the people to whom God has given a great inheritance. When we start there, we have nowhere else we must go.
I like to think as a gardener when it comes to this question of being made by God or owing success to self. There is little risk in becoming overly proud of one's garden, because gardening, by its very nature, is humbling. It has a way of keeping you on your knees. A similar posture is due the God who grows humanity. We are best served by using our knees when it comes to our inheritance.
Like Cole Porter's famous dictum that every one of his songs should have a "lemon line," so that the other lines look better, saints are advised to double their portions of humility. Catholics whose priests have "gone bad" can take heart: the sacraments withstand the sinner. Protestants whose preachers are boring can take heart: The Word of God survives most clergy. Saints are often confused with clergy, and this is a significant mistake. Clergy are not any better than anyone else -- they can be, by understanding by whom they are made and whose word they carry.
When we ping the saint for the saint's crystal, when we try to discern if "this" is the Holy Spirit speaking, we often travel through the following matters. We remember our baptism -- we have a visit from our humility -- we acknowledge our lemon side -- we give thanks to God that we might be able to be a saint and not be either holy, perfect, or superior to others. The shiver of grace in the saint begins right here: God might use us! We know this use may be a mistake, that God may have placed a bet on the wrong horse. Many clergy and many saints shiver. We shiver -- and then break the bread and pour the wine. Like Moses, we see the trace of God in our life. We allow that shimmering thread of an experience, whatever it is, to carry us to altars and beyond. We dedicate our fragile vessel to the Word and sacrament of God. We carry the Word. We spill the wine. We break the bread. We lead the church, the body of Christ, as part of the body with special responsibilities, whether we are lay or clergy, saints or people on a long detour. Still we try to get back to the main road, for our main chance.
When we shiver as saints with grace and thanksgiving for our inheritance, everything changes. We are no longer people who hold up their own weight. We float with the Spirit. Steven Wright, the famous physicist, swears he woke up one morning and "all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates." When we tip toward sainthood, when we receive our inheritance, we experience this kind of change. Not only do we change, everything around us changes!
The appreciation deficit is gone. The gratitude famine is gone. The empty cup is gone. We fill up and spill over like an endless waterfall of appreciation for what God has done to and through us. Amen.
Surely we do make parts of ourselves. Life is what we "make" of it -- and the Creator God, living now in us as Holy Spirit made this very clear. We were created and then left to make something of ourselves. We were given all the raw material and set free to be co-creators with a divine God. Had God wanted to have us as puppets, God would have "over made" us. Instead God "under made" us, leaving the finishing work to us. It is like we are a toy that comes in a large box at Christmas: some assembly is required.
While acknowledging the debt we owe to our Creator God, and giving it the nuance of our personal assembly, our personal "get up and go," we then return to the extraordinary dependency we have on God. Some of us get good chemistry in our brains; others get a propensity for depression. Some of us get good genes; others get early cancer. There are degrees and layers of awesome chance in the very physical make up that we have. Each is created and developed, made and given, determined and wildly open and free.
There is an old saying that every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts that stood their ground. Often we interpret a quote like this as saying that we make ourselves by our decisions. It could be that the real trick to being human -- much less being a saint -- is that we stand in our created ground and light. We know God makes us. We know that it is God who has made us and not we ourselves. Saints align themselves as spiritual inheritors: we know of whom and who makes us. Does that imply that we can all be saints? Indeed it does. We can all be people who know to whom they belong.
Similarly, there is an old saying, "The apple never falls far from the tree." Many have said this to me about my children, intending it to be a compliment. I know too many really fine parents whose kids turned up far from the tree, let's say on drugs, to accept the compliment. What I know is there is some awesome chance and even more amazing grace at the heart of parenting. We do not make our children, either. They participate with us and with God as gifts of grace. They do require some assembly. We can rejoice in trees and apples, particularly if they don't fall from the tree. But taking credit is a crime. We do not take credit for what God has wrought by grace. In fact, the surest way to un-saint or de-saint or non-saint ourselves is to start taking credit for the gifts that God has given us by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Saints are different from normal people in that they understand this. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they remember God's creation in each moment. They stay alive to it.
We will not always be on the right path. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour. We will forget the source of our inheritance and take wrong turns. What the Holy Spirit gives to saints is like a map. We are shown the way to be people who know who they are. One of the great markers of our being on the right path is that we live more by grace than boasting. When the boasting comes out, watch out. You are probably on the detour. Enjoy the scenery, understand that you can be forgiven, don't get upset, but do get back on the right road.
Saints are not just known by their humility and thanksgiving and inheritance. They are also known for not being lukewarm. This message is found throughout scripture. A heart that is on fire, even if it bewilders us at times, is equipped to serve. God freely chooses his saints from among the great sinners, but never from among those who are lukewarm -- from those who do not risk anything. Indeed, some of the greatest saints are people who know the scenery on the detours: They know they have spent a lot of time on the wrong path and are thrilled to have a chance to get back on the straight and wide, which some erroneously call the narrow path. I think of people who have become regulars at Alcoholics Anonymous, or people who have served time in jail. These people know what it means to be lost -- and are excited about what it means to be found.
Excitement about God may be something that you have given up on. You may think you are too old for it or too bruised for it or too used up for it. You may think, therefore, that you cannot be a saint. You can. Saints have seasons, too, just like vines. In our lives, we must learn that we cannot always live in the springtime of the rising new sap, or the summer of growth and formation; we cannot always live in the autumn of rich fruit bearing, or in the winter of rest and seeming deadness. Each of these seasons has its place, and all are interdependent and necessary. God's inheritance is for young and old alike, rich and poor alike, strong and weak alike, gifted and ordinary alike. No matter who we are, we can be saints by the simple act of recognizing God as the source of our power and life. We trust the sap of vitality and purpose when we get off our path and purpose -- and then we rise again from the dead. Indeed, as William Stringfellow once said, life is all about conquering death and deadness every day. We are to resist death, particularly the death of the Spirit, on behalf of life.
People who refuse the art of sainthood are handicapped. The physical eye easily spots physical deformity and blemishes in others and in oneself. It is not so easy for the eye of the spirit to spot a spiritual dwarf, hunchback, or cripple. Yes, it is always easier to see these spiritual deformities in others than in oneself. The spiritual eye knows how to be grateful for what God has given and avoids both detours and handicaps. The spiritual eye knows that when we are not in a state of grace and gratitude, that we are probably off the path and letting our handicap overcome us.
Such spiritual X-ray work is sometimes called the "naked truth," or the "unvarnished truth." In literature and art it is called realism, but to spot ingratitude in one's would-be saintly self is not only difficult but also painful, and no one wants to take the descending path to that naked, unvarnished truth, with all its unacceptable humiliations. It is much more comfortable to stay on the level of the plain and ordinary, to go on being just plain and ordinary. Plain and ordinary people are out to get something. They forget that they already have something. We all have spiritual money in the bank. We have a divine inheritance. We don't talk about the unsaintly marks of the ungrateful, but all of us have them from time to time. We have private jealousies, resentments, fantasies, and greeds. We want something that we already have!
The great Sojourner Truth, who is a saint by most people's standards, when told that she was less than a mosquito, responded, "But I sure can make you itch." She knew her inheritance. She knew to whom she belonged. Nobody was going to make her feel small.
We need to be very careful to assure that our gratitude for our inheritance is authentic. Some of us fake gratitude and live in an underground world where we are actually deeply greedy for more. Dietrich Bonhoeffer often spoke of cheap grace as meaning grace at bargain-basement prices, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, and cut-rate sacraments. He also spoke of grace as the church's inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without costs. Costly grace is the gospel that must be sought again and again, the gift, which has to be asked for, the door at which we must knock. It is costly because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live. It is costly because we have to give up the fantasy that we are self-made people. It is costly ... above all, because it was costly to God. "We were bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:20). Nothing can be cheap to us, which is costly to God.
If you find yourself oddly judged by the absence of gratitude for your inheritance in your life, find a way to slow down and remember who you are. We must develop a "path of more resistance" to the shouts from culture that tell us we need more, from the whispers from culture that say we are nobodies and must become better and more. The beginning place for sainthood is the knowledge that we are the people to whom God has given a great inheritance. When we start there, we have nowhere else we must go.
I like to think as a gardener when it comes to this question of being made by God or owing success to self. There is little risk in becoming overly proud of one's garden, because gardening, by its very nature, is humbling. It has a way of keeping you on your knees. A similar posture is due the God who grows humanity. We are best served by using our knees when it comes to our inheritance.
Like Cole Porter's famous dictum that every one of his songs should have a "lemon line," so that the other lines look better, saints are advised to double their portions of humility. Catholics whose priests have "gone bad" can take heart: the sacraments withstand the sinner. Protestants whose preachers are boring can take heart: The Word of God survives most clergy. Saints are often confused with clergy, and this is a significant mistake. Clergy are not any better than anyone else -- they can be, by understanding by whom they are made and whose word they carry.
When we ping the saint for the saint's crystal, when we try to discern if "this" is the Holy Spirit speaking, we often travel through the following matters. We remember our baptism -- we have a visit from our humility -- we acknowledge our lemon side -- we give thanks to God that we might be able to be a saint and not be either holy, perfect, or superior to others. The shiver of grace in the saint begins right here: God might use us! We know this use may be a mistake, that God may have placed a bet on the wrong horse. Many clergy and many saints shiver. We shiver -- and then break the bread and pour the wine. Like Moses, we see the trace of God in our life. We allow that shimmering thread of an experience, whatever it is, to carry us to altars and beyond. We dedicate our fragile vessel to the Word and sacrament of God. We carry the Word. We spill the wine. We break the bread. We lead the church, the body of Christ, as part of the body with special responsibilities, whether we are lay or clergy, saints or people on a long detour. Still we try to get back to the main road, for our main chance.
When we shiver as saints with grace and thanksgiving for our inheritance, everything changes. We are no longer people who hold up their own weight. We float with the Spirit. Steven Wright, the famous physicist, swears he woke up one morning and "all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates." When we tip toward sainthood, when we receive our inheritance, we experience this kind of change. Not only do we change, everything around us changes!
The appreciation deficit is gone. The gratitude famine is gone. The empty cup is gone. We fill up and spill over like an endless waterfall of appreciation for what God has done to and through us. Amen.
