Sermon for
April 24, 2005
5th Sunday of Easter
“We Believe in Love (1 cont’d)
—Amazing Grace Before You Were Born”
Gen. 1:27; Luke 12:22-24, 27-28, 31
What do we believe?
Is there a distinctive United Methodist character to our faith? If
anybody asks you, “What does this church believe?” what do you tell them?
Well, you tell them we believe in love.
That’s what John Wesley discovered.
This eighteenth century priest of the Church of England who began the
movement that became our United Methodist Church discovered the grace of
God. It was John Wesley who, upon experiencing in his own heart the
assuring love of God that was the image of God in which he was created,
described most articulately this grace and love of God. You will remember
he called this grace “Prevenient Grace—“ grace that “comes before—” the
image of God, the love of God in you put there by God long before you were
born.
It all goes back to the garden of
Eden. It all goes back to what theologians call the Fall of humanity. In
the garden we lost the gift God gave us, the incredible give of life. God
gave us in the garden everything we would ever need. That gift, secured
by the image of God in us, gave us all the knowledge, all the spirit, and
all the will we ever need to live life in the fullest of joy. That gift
of the image of God in us shows us the way, guides our choices in life,
and never fails to discern for us the way that leads to life. As long as
the image of God remains firmly in the center of our hearts, the way is
always clear, wisdom prevails, and the will to choose the path that leads
to life always remains steadfast. As long as the image of God in which we
were created is the center of our lives we live a life of trust because we
never lose the confidence that God will always give us everything we need.
In the garden we disobeyed God. In
the garden we didn’t trust the provision God gave us and tried to take
some of creation for ourselves. We made wrong choices, followed our own
way, and center our lives no longer on God but on things of our own
selfish choosing. By that choice the image of God in which we are created
is no longer firmly established at the very center of our lives but
pushed-aside, off-center, ignored, rejected, and denied. Of course life
has never gone well for us ever since, that’s why theologians call it “the
fall.” But we persist anyway in our self-centered ways.
We lost the gift. Since then life
has been so elusive. But John Wesley believed that all hope was not
lost. He discovered this longing, this yearning in you for relationship
with God. He identified this longing, this yearning as the image of God
in you seeking to again center your life God alone. This came to him
originally as an argument against predestination, one of the prevailing
religious understandings of the time. This insight, this term “Prevenient
Grace,” is unique in the Christian tradition. That is the distinctive
United Methodist character to our faith. [The
Roanoke Times, March 6, 2005, A 11]
After I had already prepared the
Easter sermon I learned of another tribe of people who also survived
because they never lost the gift. On the March 20 edition of CBS News’
60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon interviewed the members of the Moken
tribe, sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea who have lived for hundreds of years
on the islands off the coast of Thailand and Burma. “They are,” Bob Simon
reported, “of all the peoples of the world, among the least touched my
modern civilization.” The more I learned about their ancient culture the
more I was struck by the ease and confidence with which they accept the
gift of life given in the beginning.
The Moken are a remarkable people.
Born on the sea, they are nomads, moving from island to island
following the ebb and flow of the bounty the sea provides them, living
more than six months a year on their boats. Bob Simon observed their
lifestyle:
At low tide, they collect sea urchins, and
catch eels. At high tide, they dive for shellfish. They’ve been
living this
way for so many generations that they’ve become virtually amphibious.
Kids learn to swim before they can walk.
Underwater, they can see twice as clearly as the rest of us
and by lowering their heart rate, can stay underwater twice as long. They
are truly sea urchins.
[copyright MMV, CBS Worldwide, Inc. Sixty Minutes March 20, 2005]
When the sea receded, they
remembered the story of the wave they had learned from their ancestors, a
campfire legend passed down through the generations. Not all of them
believed it, especially the young people, but the elders would have none
of it, and grabbed their sons and daughters by the hand as they all
climbed to the safety of higher ground. All were saved but their village
was destroyed.
But there are other Moken islands
than these near Thailand. The tribes who live off the coast of Burma
where a dictatorship had closed the territory to the outside world had not
been heard from. The news crew accompanied the world’s foremost authority
on the Moken, French anthropologist Jacques Ivanoff, who has studied them
for more than 20 years, on the night-long journey by boat to discover
their fate.
They first came upon two boats.
While the Moken tribe near Thailand was on dry land, these Moken were in
their boats when the tsunami struck. But they also knew what to do. They
headed for deeper water.
The same wisdom that protected them
from whims of the sea also guides their life. For example, there is no
word in the Moken language for the word “want.” How often do we use this
word in our daily lives….”I want this. I want that.” It is a completely
foreign concept to them. The sea provides enough for all. There is also
in their language no word for “take.” Imagine what life would be like if
we took those two words out of our vocabulary. We wouldn’t want for a
thing. There would be no reason for us to “take” anything when all is
already given as a gift. Now I don’t want to make too much of this in
terms of how much closer ancient peoples are to the origins of life as God
originally created it, but this sounds an awful lot to me like life in the
garden of Eden—plenty for everybody; no need to take more than you need;
just complete and utter trust on the One who provides it so bountifully.
I believe that is exactly what Jesus
is trying to describe to his disciples when he said,
Consider the raven: they neither sow nor reap, they
have neither store-house or barn, and yet God
feeds them. Of how much
more value are you than the birds!…Consider the lilies, how they grow:
they
neither toil nor spin; yet I
tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of
these. But if
God so clothes the grass of the
field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how
much more will he clothe you—you of
little faith!
-Luke 12:24, 27-28
Jesus introduced his encouraging
words about the raven and the lilies by saying,
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about
your life, what you will eat, or about your body,
what you will wear. For life is more
than food, and the body more than clothing. -Luke 12:22-23
That, by the way is another one of
those words that are missing from the Moken language: “worry.”
Just like the Onge people of India,
the Moken people on the islands near Thailand and Burma never lost the
gift. They never lost the gift of discernment in their very nature. They
never lost the gift of trust in the bountiful provision God provides them
along with the remarkable ability to acquire it.
In the fall humanity gave up,
denied, traded in a life of trust and provision for a life of
self-centered strife and worry. We lost the gift.
Is there any hope for us? That’s
exactly what John Wesley wondered in his own life. He, too, felt the
despair of a lost humanity deep in his own soul. But then he discovered
the grace of God. That image of God in which we were created is still
there (in our hearts). It is off-center, it is pushed aside, it is
denied, but it is still there. That’s what resonates in you when you hear
the word of Jesus today describing a worry-free and trusting life. That’s
what tugs at your heart in the midst of your emptiness when you say there
has to be more to life than this. It is that image of God in you calling
you back to center your life again upon God. It is that yearning in you
for the gift of life that God will surely give you again if you but accept
it and give up on all those other things. It is that grace of God John
Wesley called “Prevenient Grace—“ grace that “comes before.” It is your
long-forgotten experience of life in relationship with God that is denied
but never ultimately forsaken.
It’s still there in you. All is not
lost. All is never lost with God. Accept the grace of God and get your
life back!
