Grace from the Get Go

Text: Genesis 9:8-17

Christians, and especially Protestant Christians, and especially Lutheran Protestants, seem to think they have a lock on grace. We seem to think Luther discovered grace, which was conveyed to us only through Jesus Christ. But this is neither true nor generous. Grace is a characteristic of God. Grace is God’s work. Jesus is an embodiment of grace, but Christianity did not invent grace.

The story of Noah is a very long story as Bible stories go, taking up the better part of four chapters. It is about human wickedness and God’s saving power and the re-creation of life, and it reaches its satisfying conclusion in today’s reading from the book of Genesis. With an act of pure Godly grace.

The story starts with God’s observation that people are wicked. Not a surprise to us and perhaps not to God—though I’m not so sure about that—but certainly disappointing. God created the whole world—which was good, God said at the time, very good. But within five chapters there have been murders and general mayhem. “The Lord saw,” it says, “that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil—and all the time.” The world was corrupted—meaning not so much moral unpleasantness, but rather violence and destruction. God created; humans destroyed. God sees this all, and as a consequence proposes Plan B, which is the bulk of the story of Noah—about the flood and the animals and all that—and about which we are not going to talk today. Except to say that the story is less about anger than it is about God’s regret, less about judgment than God’s grief.

Today’s reading describes what happened after all that rain had come and gone, and God and Noah have a little talk. Or rather, God has a little talk and Noah just listens. This is a post-event evaluation. God says to Noah: I’m not sure what your plans are, but as for me, here’s what I’m going to do. And God establishes an agreement—a covenant—with Noah and humans and every living creature.

It is an odd agreement. For like the conversation it is totally one-sided. Only God agrees to do anything. Only God is bound by it. Although humans and the rest of the earth seem to be the beneficiaries, it only describes God’s duties and responsibility. Never, never, never (God says it three times)—never will I do this again. The actor is God—who speaks in the first person ten times in these verses we just heard. There are no conditions. God’s promise is unconditional—the covenant is an example of God’s grace. It requires nothing of humanity. No repentance, no turning over a new leaf, no promise to try better.

The flood does not wash clean the wickedness of people, who in fact are hardly changed at all by the flood, and who get in trouble again almost immediately. Extracted from chaos, humankind seems inclined, against the hopes of God, to return to chaos and nothingness.

God’s desire for good creation is at odds with God’s love for it. Unhappy with human’s tendency to undo what God has done, rather than threaten them with Plan C if they do not shape up, God instead promises not to. Knowing that in fact humans are human and that if you love them, you have to take the inevitable bad with the amazing good. Humans are not going to change, it seems to say. So God will have to—or better, is willing to—live with that. We sometimes act—in spite of our Lutheran theology—as if in order for things to be all right, we have to conform our soft selves into an inflexible mould that is God. But this story seems to say that God is unchanging only in God’s refusing to give up on us, in refusing to hate us.

This may not be all that easy for God, though, which we conclude because God creates a sign in the clouds. Not a sign to remind humans of God’s promise but to remind God of that promise: I have set my bow in the clouds, and when seen, I will remember my covenant. The bow means both the weapon—which God in restraint sets aside, pointing away from earth—and the rainbow, which is how we more often interpret it. Rainbows appear frequently enough that God will remember—perhaps in the face of strong temptations to forget—what God has agreed to. It is a seal on the deal. And conveniently it does remind us that God is being reminded.

At the time this story was recorded, people would certainly have accepted that it was God’s prerogative to flood the earth and to save no one. The world was God’s to make and unmake. But the story tells us that God purposely refuses that right and purposely limits God’s self, in an agreement that lasts forever. In agreeing to those limits, God gives up authority and power. Rather than insisting on the right to make the world perfect, God agrees to live with the grief and disappointment, along with the joy and hope, that is the life of humans in the world.

This is not so strange—it is what happens all the time in relationships of respect, guidance, and love. People purposely relinquish power in favor of the life of another. Parents, spouses, lovers—step back for the sake of those they love. If we are lucky, so do bosses and leaders for those they lead and honor. The willful reluctance to not exercise power, though usually difficult, is a blessing. It is a means of grace that we inherit from being made in God’s image. And which we might exercise more often.

God’s wish for a perfect and peaceful world logically clashes with God’s compassion for people, even corrupt and destructive ones. God’s graceful choice is compassion over perfection, for which we should be grateful. And which we should and have the power to emulate.

But nonetheless, there is a gap, a tension in such a choice. Lent is a good time to contemplate that. Just because God lets us off the hook does not mean that God thinks everything is great. We know that it is not. The violence that saddened God continues to sadden us.

The covenant made with Noah and us all is a sign of grace. In it, God reveals a nature that loves even in the face of imperfection, and more: even in the face of stupidity and wickedness. But that love does not require or even excuse stupidity and wickedness. As the Apostle Paul later pointed out, just because we are allowed to do something does not mean that we should, or that it is good. Nor do we have to slip into violence just because we are inclined to.

Lent is an especially good time to ask ourselves this: what are we to do on our unnecessary, unpromised, but nonetheless compelling side of the covenant? What are we creatures, who are made in the image of a graceful God, called to do?

Will I Be Able to Play the Violin?

Text: Mark 1:40-45

Why all the healing? This is the third healing story in the first chapter of Mark. Jesus has healed a person with demons, Simon's mother, and now a leper, and evidently so many more that it overwhelms even Jesus, who has to leave town. Why are these stories here? What do they tell us about the mission of Jesus in the world?

There is that old joke about the man who is about to undergo surgery. He asks his doctor whether, after the operation, he will be able to play the violin. The doctor says, Of course you will. That’s great, the man says, because I never could before.

This is a joke because we expect that when someone is healed, he or she will be restored to some previous good state, not that they will emerge a new person, with a new personality and new skills. Illness of any kind is a distortion in the way things ought to be, and we hope that healing will fix that. If all goes well, things will be back to normal. But healing never restores things to the way they were, even when it works perfectly. It does more than that.

The man in the Gospel story has leprosy, meaning in Jesus' time an assortment of various skin diseases. A person with leprosy was legally unclean. The man would have been shunned and an outcast. He would not have been able to go into the city and associate with other people.

The man seems to know something about Jesus. He knows Jesus has healed other people. The word had spread. Whether or not Jesus wanted to be known as a healer, he was. People needed him to help them, and they found him, and he healed them. So when the man says, If you choose, you can make me clean, he uses strong words that convey his trust in Jesus. More like: If you choose, and you do, you can heal me.

Jesus touches the man, and declares the man clean, and so he was. But in the process, by his touch, Jesus has himself been rendered unclean. The man now is free to go into the city. But Jesus is not.

There is something about this man, or this man’s situation, that gets to Jesus. The words in our Bible disguise the ferocity of Jesus interaction with the man. He did not only pity the man, as it says, but his stomach turned. His gut hurt. He was deeply and painfully moved. He did not only speak sternly to the man, but he snorted in anger and distaste. He was furious and indignant. Not at the man himself, I think, but at the injustice of things, at the sorrow of life lived in oppression, at the inadequacy of people’s compassion for one another, and at their fear of risk. And also, perhaps, at the sorrow and unfairness of life. We need to be healed because things break. Things go wrong. They need to be patched up. That is how life works, but how sad and frustrating that it need be so.

It was great that Jesus could make the man be clean. Once an outcast, he could now join with others, walk freely again among them. But things are not back to the way they were before the man was ill with leprosy. He is better in many ways, but he is not restored.

Healing does not undo experience in suffering. It does not erase illness and broken things as if they had never happened. They did happen, they are in our memories and the memories of others, for good or ill. We are not the same person we were before. People will not see us as they saw us before. We will not have the same hopes and fears we had before. It may be better or worse, but it will not be the same.

Healing does not make one perfect. It does not fix everything. It does not enable us to play the violin if we never could before. It does not ensure happiness or resolve all issues. Its scope is limited. As a corollary to this: healing is not permanent. Chaos is not forever put at bay, the principles of entropy not invalidated. What breaks can break again, or in a different way.

But healing is not acceptance, or resignation, or surrender. It is not just putting a good face on a bad business. Or simply looking at the half-filled cup in a new way.

Healing is not restoration. But it is transformation. Things change, have changed. The future we fear or anticipated turns out differently. It changes the healed, and the healer, and everyone else.

The man, healed, is changed. He goes about proclaiming and spreading the word, Mark tells us. The word is: Look at me! I am no longer unclean. I am clean. Look what this Jesus did to me! The man is freed to go about the country. He can claim what was denied him. He can become something different from what he could have become. Healing frees us from something—illness in mind or body—that bound us before.

Jesus, healer, is changed. Having touched the leper, Jesus himself is now unclean, and he is bound (for a while at least) to the outskirts, to be alone or with the other lepers. To heal someone or some situation is risky. It takes effort and energy. And it makes you see things in a different way. Helping others connects you to them.

And everyone else is changed. The way the townspeople see the man and their behavior toward him. To them, he is a different person. No longer unclean, they do not need to fear or loathe him. Healing enables others—family, friends, and enemies—to cross over from cruel wariness.

The leper is trapped in one story. The story is full of anger, shame, fear, and distrust. By healing him, Jesus writes a new story, in which the man and others have new roles. The tale is new, the outcome has been changed. The man is clean. Jesus sends him back to the priests, who before had nothing to do with him but now must attend to him, and the people of the town, who now may welcome him. The plot is different, and the outcome, once known (and dismal in this case), is now uncertain (and hopeful).

To heal is to create a new story from old events. Trauma is converted into an event—a bad one, perhaps, but just an event. This healed knee, this reconciled relationship, this fed hunger, this ended war—loses its power. Its memory persists, but its hold on us is relaxed.

Healing is a form of forgiveness (or maybe the other way around: forgiveness is a form of healing). Just as forgiveness frees us from the power of sin (not eradicating the sin itself but the power it had over us), so healing frees us from the power of illness. Not the memory of the illness, but the power it had over us. Like forgiveness, healing gives us a new story.

The world into which Jesus came—then and now—is broken. The story we tell is a vile one. Hatred of others, indifference, oppression, greed and violence that comes from fear. We can understand the ferocious indignation of Jesus. And take heart from his gut-wrenching compassion. He did not come into the world to condemn, it says in the Gospel of John, but to save it, using a word that means to heal it.

We do not need the world restored to normal. We need it to be transformed. We long to be able to tell a new story. We need to be healed.

Recall

Text: Isaiah 40:10-31

It is self-evident that God created the universe. Even to those who do not believe in God.

The modern western understanding is that the universe is complete in itself and more or less consistent. It is of one piece of seamless cloth. It has room for mind-boggling complexities, ineffable mysteries, and anomalous miracles. But it is not arbitrary or inconsistent at its foundation. When the prophet Isaiah talks about God the creator, when he says “Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,” he is arguing for one God, one universe. Gods of sun and moon and stars and thunder and water are not the creator. Their power is imaginary. The idols that people worship are created things. They are made by woodworkers and goldsmiths, Isaiah says. The universe is of one whole pattern, and the faithful ascribe its existence to God.

Yet, Isaiah writes, Israel has forgotten this. The passage we just heard comes from chapter 40 of the Book of Isaiah. It is the opening chapter in what people call “Second Isaiah.” The consensus is that Isaiah was written over a period of more than two hundred years, and that this second part, from chapter 40 to chapter 55, was written to the Israelites in Babylon, near the end of their period of exile there. They were beginning to forget about God, the God of their ancestors, the creator of all things. They were being seduced by the multiple gods of Babylon.

Isaiah writes to refresh their memories. First, this is the God who created the world. Who was here at the beginning. He reminds them of the creation stories in Genesis and Psalm 104. Second, this is the God who is good. The God who freed them from slavery. Who was with them as they became a nation. And third, this is their God. The one who made a deal with them: I will be your God and you will be my people. Who has promised to be with them forever. “The God of forever,” it says. Do you not remember this God? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Isaiah asks them: Why do you say, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord and my right is disregarded by my God?

But we know why. When times are rough, we wonder: where is God? The Israelites are in exile because their nation has been conquered and the leaders taken away. God was in the land, Jerusalem was God’s home, the Temple there God’s house. Yet now the the land is occupied, and the Temple is rubble. Where is God now?

What can the exiles have thought? They do not complain that God does not exist. They do not complain that God is wicked or intends to punish them. Instead, they conclude that God does not see them. That they are hidden from God. That God is not attending to them. That God is disregarding their suffering. The power of God seems diminished to them, and they—like many people who suffer—have begun to accept the power of their captors. Under constant leveraged persuasion, and being disadvantaged, they grant power to people, structures, systems—laws and markets and politics—that are not God. Our faith is built on memories—that’s why we tell each other these stories—and the Israelites are forgetting.

The God of Israel is powerful, Isaiah reminds them. God stretched out the heavens, measured the waters of the seas, constructed the mountains. God is more powerful than all the temporal things of the earth. All the nations—including (and especially, in this case) Babylon—are as nothing. They are, Isaiah says earlier, like a drop from a bucket. Dust. Less than nothing. The rulers are lightweights—like chaff in the wind. Time is long, but the times of nations and their rulers are so short as to be meaningless.

Yet this same powerful and timeless God, Isaiah reminds us, is close to us, to humans. Like a shepherd who feeds his flock, he says, who cares for them and leads them. God supports the weary, and gives strength to the powerless. What are humans, the Bible asks repeatedly, that God is mindful of us? And what is God, that God is mindful of us?

We should not be harsh on Israelites. It is easy to understand how they might have forgotten. Circumstances can be difficult, preoccupying. Hardships can make us crazy. Sorrow and pain are mind-numbing. It is hard to think beyond the moment; the future seems cloudy at best, or impossible. Our imaginations become diminished. Where is God? Things other than God—idols, Isaiah would say—become seductive solutions.

It is we who disregard God. Which leads us in turn to rely on ourselves. Which leads us—being not very reliable—which leads us in turn to panic. We need, as the Israelites needed, to be re-called. To be repeatedly called back to God. We need to hear in Isaiah a call to us, who are not in exile like the Israelites, but can be just as afraid, just as short on hope, just as attracted wishfully to other gods.

God is big and timeless, says Isaiah in so many words, and we are small and quick. Does it comfort you to know that God created the universe and is mindful of us? That we are just one part of God’s great creation? Or is it distressing, that we are as dust and our history and institutions come and go in a second? Or does it matter?

Is the fate of the present and the future in our hands alone? Is this our job? We humans are not quite up to the long-distance trek of history, nor to the complexity of events and circumstance. It is hard to take comfort in or be hopeful about a universe in which we are careening about and in which our existence is merely a collateral consequence. Once we have forgotten about God, to whom do we turn?

We tell ourselves the story of God’s history for the same reason Isaiah spoke to the Israelites. Because it reminds us that God’s universe is part of that story, that the universe has a trajectory. And that God cares about us—is mindful of us. And that what has gone before leads us to be be hopeful of what will happen in the future, and that God’s promises are reliable. And that though God is universal and beyond comprehension, God is also particular, and is a companion, and a shepherd. God is here.