Crescent Hill Baptist Church

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky

The Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 28, 2006
W. Gregory Pope

ON BEING GOD’S POEM OF GRACE AND GREAT LOVE

Ephesians 2:1-10

“The Sycamore” by Wendell Berry

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

(Berry, Collected Poems, North Point Press, 1994, 65)


SERMON

Most things in life take place over time through process. Very few things can be mastered in three steps. And even if steps are involved, like a 12-step recovery program, the twelve steps are never completely over and done with. Recovery is a process you live with the rest of your life.

Another instance in process is our men’s and women’s softball teams. So far we have been Christian enough to allow the other team to win each time. It’s worth it just to see the smiles on their faces as they rejoice in victory. Not really!

We desperately want to win. And we are making strides toward improvement. However, one of my strides toward home plate last Monday evening resulted in a pulled hamstring. I’m not sure how it happened. Before the game I watched Jeff Cavalcante stretch - and I thought to myself how I glad I was that I’m not so old that I need to do that before each game.

It must have been the result of my blinding speed. I’m sure you’ve heard about it from my teammates. There was even an article in the paper about it. It is something to watch!

When I came home that night with an ice pack in my hand, my wife wanted to assure me that whatever I had done I was still getting up in the middle of the night to help with Ryan. I returned the same kindness when she came home Tuesday night from her game with a large bruise below her knee where the ball got her. It’s a crazy kind of love we share.

As my family laughed at my injury, I assured them that pulled hamstrings happen to professional athletes, and that this was just one of many signs that I am a professional athlete. In fact, my standing before you here today almost fully healed is yet another sign of my athletic prowess. Pay no attention to that ESPN report that I do not run fast enough to severely injure my hamstring! That is simply not true!

The point is, our softball teams lay it on the line each week as we struggle for our first win. And we know that even in our defeat and injury God is at work in the process. Preachers can spiritualize anything!

God’s work in us of Christian Spiritual Formation is our focus these days as we immerse ourselves in this letter of Ephesians.

We continue to live and worship in the season of Eastertide, the season of new life. This is the Seventh Sunday in the Season of Easter. The Great Fifty Days of Easter culminate next Sunday on Pentecost.

Our text for today is an Easter text. Within this text we move from death to life.

We were, all of us, DEAD in our trespasses and sins. All of us doing what we felt like doing. Letting the world teach us the values by which to live. Living by the spirit of this world, rather than the Spirit of God.

Spiritually speaking, DEAD is what we are if we are living in opposition to God. We’re dead because we’re not in touch with the reality in which we were created. We were created for a different way of life than the one we learn from this world. This world teaches to live a self-centered life where we seek all the pleasure we can, doing what feels good, disregarding the welfare of others. Some would call that “living.” The Bible calls those who walk in that way “the living dead.” It is a hollow life. Like “The Sycamore” tree whose hollow is its death.

But that is not the end of our story. The great good news of the gospel is that God, who is rich in mercy, with arms of great love, took us when we were dead in our sin and selfishness, and raised us up, made us ALIVE with Christ, so that we might rule and reign over the powers of this world that seek to destroy us and destroy our world.

The Bible would have us know that the power of resurrection is in our hands through the Spirit of Christ who lives in us. Sin does not have to reign over us. There are choices we can make because of what God has done for us.

And what has God done? God has poured out upon us mercy and love and grace and kindness that we might live and breathe those gifts every day of our lives throughout eternity.

We have to be reminded often that we are no longer dead in our sins. Sin still has its powerful sway in our lives. And it will til the day we die. I tell every person I talk to before baptism that baptism will not make them a perfect person. We will have our moments when sin gets the best of us. But every time our selfishness and sin take over and slowly begin to kill us, God is waiting to embrace us with boundless mercy and great love, and the Spirit of God is ever present to breathe life back into us again.

We were dead in our sin but God has made us alive with Christ. In other words, we share in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and this union with Jesus is the relationship that guides and sustains our spiritual formation.

Christian Spiritual Formation is rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We die to sin as a way of life and live in the power of resurrection. Eugene Peterson calls it “formation-by-resurrection.” (Peterson, Living the Resurrection, NavPress, 2006, 24)

We have been made ALIVE to become a person participating in, immersed in God’s world of grace and great love. Grace and great love is the world in which we’ve been given to live.

For by grace, goes those familiar words.
For by grace you have been saved through faith.
It is not your own doing.
Salvation from beginning to end is God’s doing.
It’s not because of anything you or I have done.
If it was, all we’d do is brag about it.

No.
We are only what God has made us.
God has made us and God has saved us.
God has done it all.

In our better moments, we are most of us willing to admit that our salvation is by grace. But the work of grace goes deeper than that. The work of Spiritual Formation is God’s work of grace as well.

Only God can liberate us from our bondage, heal our brokenness, cleanse us from our uncleanness and bring Life out of our deadness. We cannot do it ourselves. (M. Robert Mulholland, Jr., Invitation to a Journey, 1993, 16)

Christian Spiritual Formation is not of our own doing. It is not about learning special techniques from best-selling books that guarantee our spiritual growth. It is never as neat and orderly as the steps spiritual gurus want to lead us through.

You are well aware of a huge religious marketplace that has been set up full of conferences, books, videos, and seminars custom-designed to give us just the spiritual lift we need. They promise to let us in on the Christian “secret” of whatever it is we feel is lacking in our lives - financial security (though Jesus wasn’t much into that), weight loss, exciting worship with celebrity teachers who all smile a lot and are good-looking.

I’ve always thought that if there were “secrets” Jesus wanted to know he would have told us. Instead, he said with clarity difficult sayings like:

Take up your cross and follow me.
Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation.
Feed my sheep.
Sell what you have and give to the poor.

Most of us prefer best-selling authors who look good and smile a lot to the difficult sayings of Jesus. But because most of us are looking for a quick-fix, for something new, we buy what’s being offered. And then later, when it wears off, we’re back to buy more. If we’re not careful, we become consumers of packaged spiritualities.

We don’t think anything is wrong with this because everything we’re buying is defined by the adjective Christian. But in many cases it is nothing more than God depersonalized and made available as a technique or a program.

Now I’m not saying all Christian books are bad. I have over 3000 of them. So it can’t be bad. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t go jumping from one fad to another for the latest in spiritual growth techniques. Because Christian Spiritual Formation is not about finding the right techniques or meeting goals or assessing progress of self-improvement or self-actualization. You cannot pin down and measure Spiritual Formation.

Others speak of levels or stages of spiritual growth. I don’t find them very helpful because life is such a long journey, and because of our frailty and the ways in which tragedy and traumatic change can enter and reenter our lives, the levels and stages of our spiritual growth change all the time. When you go through a death or divorce or unemployment, who wants their spiritual growth levels checked during those times. Sometimes the reality is two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes three steps forward, five steps back. Spiritual Formation is almost impossible to measure.

There are spurts of growth in our spiritual development. And we tend to languish as we wait for another spurt to come along. What we don’t realize is that often a period of apparent spiritual stagnation is filled with nurturing down below the surface that we never see. (Mulholland, 21-22)

Christian Spiritual Formation is such a mystery primarily because we’re talking about what God is doing in our lives. And you can’t measure God.

Salvation and Spiritual Formation are works of God in our lives. We are not saved by our good works. That’s not possible. What could we ever do to merit our own salvation? We are not saved by works. But we are saved for good works.

And WORK is a word we need to relearn when it comes to spiritual formation In the spiritual life, it is not about doing all these things for God, or striving for mastery, but cultivating sensitivity and awareness of what is going on in our lives. And participating with God. Spiritual Formation is a process of our involvement with God’s work in our lives. We just have to make sure we do not try and take over. Peterson says that if we try to take over the process of God’s work of spiritual formation in our lives we will be part of our de-formation. (Eugene Peterson, Soulcraft, Audio CD, lecture given at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia).

We are what God has made us,
created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

We are God’s poiema, in the Greek, God’s poem, God’s special creation, God’s work of art, crafted in grace and great love.

We are God’s poem of grace and great love. Born into grace and love. Saved by grace because of love. Shaped by grace and surrounded by love. “Grace hath brought us safe this far and grace will lead us home.”

Divine generosity has been lavished upon us. We are God’s poem of grace and great love.

I would remind you that poems are not passive. They are active. They evoke change in the world and in the human heart. They bring beauty to the world. And so is the intention, God’s intention of your life - to bring beauty and change to the world.

As God’s poem we are not called to passivity. We are called to be expressions of God’s grace and great love in the world.

In many ways our work is what Stanley Hauerwas calls “the art of ordinary living.” (as reported to me by Dorothy Spurr from a recent commencement address by Hauerwas)

When I read Wendell Berry’s poem “The Sycamore,” I see ways in which we are being shaped as God’s poem as God does the work of spiritual formation in our lives.

There is a hollow within us that is our death. We are not immortal. Death is at work with in us all.

Though death is not the only thing at work within us. It is not even the most important thing at work within us. Life brims at the lip of darkness and flows outward from our being.

And we can’t hide our scars. We sometimes succeed in covering them for awhile. But the scars are there. And we need not try and hide them. The gnarls, the rough and tough places of our history, though healed, are still present. And the gnarls and scars rise to a strange perfection in the warp and bending of our long growth.

Our lives, like the sycamore, have gathered all accidents into its purpose. Though death is at work in us, our lives are radiant, sublime, mystical, unassailable.

And then perhaps my favorite line of Berry’s poem: “In all the country there is no other like it.” Just like a poet never repeats a poem, never writes a poem just like a previous one, so God has never and will never make another work of art, will never write another poem, like you. In all the world, there is no other like you.

Grace and great love have shaped each of us differently. Through death and grief, divorce and shame, pain and sorrow, God’s grace and great love have been our salvation and our hope. You are God’s beautiful work of art - radiant and sublime, mystical and unassailable. And there is no other like you in all the world.

In the silence, I invite you to write in free verse the poem God is writing in your life. Where do you feel like Berry’s “Sycamore”? Where has God’s grace and great love met you? Write it however you like. Work on it later today or this week. Keep on working on it the rest of your lives, knowing you are always God’s work of art in progress. What poem of grace and great love is God wanting to write through you. Let this be our prayer.


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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425

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