This sermon was preached for Trinity Sunday, June 12, 2022 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15, and Psalm 8.
A couple of years ago a teen riding an old rusted bike with no brakes crashed into an older gentlemen’s car and dented it. A few days later, the owner of the car returned and presented the teen with a brand new bike with brakes. A photo of the presentation of the gift was passed around the internet - in it, the boy is clearly extremely touched by the older man’s gift, hiding his teary face in his hands. The photo made the rounds again in 2021 and popped up again on thousands of people’s feeds this week. I suspect the reason this picture keeps getting shared is not just that it is an uplifting moment in a time of stress and strife between generations. It may also be because so many of us can recognize ourselves in the two people: in the young kid who made a mistake, limited by the inadequate tools he had available to him, and in the old man, who is extending forgiveness and generosity out of experience and understanding. Offering another chance, this one with better tools and perhaps a little more wisdom.
There’s this one theme that’s come up a lot in my conversations with parents of adult children recently. It’s the hard-won wisdom that your children must learn things on their own in their own time. Lessons you learned the hard way, they must learn the hard way, too. Things must be told and taught and advised at the right time for them to be truly heard and absorbed. I have great admiration for parents who know this well, because it’s often a lesson learned the hard way in itself, sometimes born out of dented cars and not quite developed frontal lobes.
Giving grace to others’ mistakes isn’t unique to parent-child relationships, of course. Sometimes each of us needs to step back and recognize when the other person is careening through life without a full set of brakes. Here’s to everyone who’s ever bitten a tongue back when a friend has fumbled into yet another mistake. Here’s to all of you who’ve ever graciously swallowed the phrase, “I told you so.”
If we are called to be like that with one another, how much more must God be like that with us? Lovingly guiding, perhaps sighing and chuckling, as each of our lives imperfectly unfold.
And what might it look like to be that grace to ourselves?
“...we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Today’s excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Romans can be read as an admonishment to be grateful for the trials and tribulations of one’s life, for how they teach and shape us. Sometimes, especially in the midst of suffering, I don’t find that sentiment particularly helpful, although I see why others might. What I have learned to hear in that instead is an invitation toward grace. A reminder to give oneself the time and space to learn. There are stages to growth that sometimes can’t be sped up or skipped over. There are things we cannot grasp, or see clearly now, or even bear, not until we get to the other side of this particular challenge.
One of the greatest honors of being a priest is the privilege of walking with people toward the end of their lives, when they reflect over all they have done and learned, their regrets and their gratitudes. I have borne witness to folks choosing to overcome the minor and major sufferings of old age not through denial or secrecy, but through openness and faith. I have seen how the wisest few develop a new kind of quiet strength in the end, even as their bodies and minds weaken. It takes strength to give over one’s independence with dignity, true humility to gratefully accept help from one’s children and friends, and holy, holy grace to let go of the abilities and gifts that used to define your identity and worth. And forgiving oneself in the end? Well, that takes all three: strength, humility, and grace.
One of the wisest Christians I have ever known served as a teacher for many years - both in her secular life and at church. Ruth viewed everyone around her as constantly learning, and would remind them of that fact - even, and perhaps especially, her priest. We are all students of life, she was fond of saying in Sunday School classrooms and vestry meetings alike. But the true secret to her wisdom was that she regarded herself as a student in all things, even right to the end. She spent her whole life giving herself that grace to be always learning, room for her vision to expand even in her last days in hospice care, which was when I had the great privilege of meeting her.
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” Jesus says at the end at the table with his friends. There is so much more to come, so much more to be revealed and learned. Our Christian faith is not a closed book, it is also a work in progress.
Jesus wanted his followers to understand that God would still be speaking to them, in new times and new places. Even today, I believe we are still learning new ways of loving and believing and relating to God: ways, methods, and practices inconceivable, and yes, perhaps even unbearable for our ancestors. God is still speaking, as my favorite United Church of Christ slogan declares. Never place a period where God has placed a comma.
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now." Soon it will be the Spirit’s turn to speak them to the Church. When my former boss explains how he first began to wrap his head around the evolving position of the church on queer rights issues, this is the verse he cites. It's the one I think of every time I encounter someone who is incredulous that I, a woman, am allowed to be a priest. And it's the one that comes to me when I contemplate all the surprising ways the Spirit may be asking the church to change and grow to meet the new challenges of our time and place.
I’ll never forget standing on the floor of the House of Delegates at the 2015 General Convention of the Episcopal Church when the final ballots electing the first African-American Presiding Bishop were tallied and announced. Standing near me was an older member of the Union of Black Episcopalians. Shaking her head in bewilderment, tears in her eyes, she told me she never thought that she would live to see the day. Just then the Church spontaneously broke out into a hymn of praise, hundreds of delegates and spectators singing and crying, and in four-part harmony, too. You’d better believe the Spirit was there in our midst.
We are all flawed students of life, whose progress and process is never fully complete. We must, each of us, travel this road at our own imperfect pace. Our choice is in trusting that the lessons will unfold when and how we need to hear them. We cannot speed up so much of life, but we can choose to be patient in the “I don’t know…yet.” We can move ourselves from the unforgiving paralysis of "I should have known" to the grace-filled kindness in "Thank God I know now." We can learn to approach the unfolding with faith, with grace, and more than a little self-forgiveness.
On a communal scale, collectively, the Church both moves too fast and too slow, all at once. And yet we worship a God who meets us where we are and loves us too much to leave us there. We have been given the Holy Spirit to guide us from challenge into endurance, into character, and onto hope.
Amen.
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