Sermon
The Rev. Noah Van Niel
March 11th, 2018
St. John the Evangelist
Lent IV (B): Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3; 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
I don’t have any tattoos, in case you were wondering. I don’t have anything against them, I just never really understood the urge to get one. Plus I’m afraid it would hurt too much—I’m sort of a wimp about those kind of things. But the one tattoo I do understand and probably the only circumstance where I might consider getting one would be if I made the Olympics. There’s a tradition among Olympians, whether they medal or not, to get a tattoo of the five Olympic rings. It’s a marker of all the hard work, sacrifices and incredible achievement of being one of the best in the world at their sport. That’s a tattoo I understand. And perhaps that is something of the motivation for other people when they get their tattoos: that, after having had an intense, powerful experience—whether it’s an epic adventure with your friends, or an incredible accomplishment, or a memory of a lost loved one—there is a desire to etch it into your body so you can be sure to carry something of that experience with you wherever you go.
Knowing my crowd here I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of you share my aversion to tattoos (no need to tell me if I’m wrong), but I also know that all of us do find ways to fill our lives with tokens of remembrance that seek to capture experiences of beauty, or intensity or love and keep them present for all time. It’s the same impulse that causes you to put that foul ball you caught at a major league game up on the shelf, or keep mementos and pictures of family and friends around the house. It’s the impulse behind the entire market of kitschy souvenir shops in airport terminals where, as you prepare to leave behind a wonderful vacation, you’re compelled to buy just a little something to remind you of that glorious trip. So that when, say, March is roaring in with Nor’easter after Nor’easter you can look at that bobble-headed hula dancer on your desk and be transported back to those pristine Hawaiian beaches.
Whether it’s a tattoo, a souvenir, or a memento we, as human beings, are always keen to take moments of importance and try to incarnate those thoughts and feelings into something tangible; to fashion touchstones that are filled with meaning and memory.
This same impulse holds true in our life of faith, and perhaps to an even greater degree. For the activity of God occurs most often in the ineffable realm of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And it is perhaps the hardest part of the life of faith to try and take those intangible brushes with divinity and make them tangible; to take formless moments of the Spirit and give them form, in the hopes of holding on to them. Because experiences of God are slippery. Just when you think you’ve grabbed Him, He wriggles out of your grasp. So from time in memoriam people of faith have made holy things out of holy moments. Hoping to grab hold of some small thing that reminds them: “God was here.” For example, this bronze serpent that Moses fashions to save the people of Israel from their snake bites becomes a talisman of God’s healing power. Just as, for the followers of Jesus, the Cross, which was an instrument of execution, became a trophy of life’s victory over death. In both cases, the agent of affliction becomes the agent of salvation through the work of God. And these tangible objects become emblems of God’s power. To gaze upon the Cross is to be reminded that God can heal and save just as to look upon the staff of the serpent is to be healed and saved by God.
Over the years, the Church has gotten really good and creating these kind of sacred souvenirs. And we have a word for them: sacraments. Sacraments are visible things meant to communicate God’s invisible grace. Grace is God’s favor and love towards us, the gift of God’s forgiveness, the gracious Spirit that “enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts and strengthens our wills” (BCP p.858). And it is given to us freely and without restraint from the moment of our creation through no effort of our own. That’s the gift we are trying to capture in the sacraments.
And it’s worth capturing because unearned gifts are so rare for us to receive in our lives. We are used to earning our rewards. At least a dozen times a day I’m negotiating with my kids by saying something like, “If you eat three bites of broccoli you can have some fruit for dessert.” Everything about the way we look at this world is conditioned to be on an earned basis. But not grace. The idea of grace, that you are just given it, that’s cultural blasphemy and therefore it can be hard for us process. And that’s why God took on human form in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the most visible form of God’s invisible grace. He was meant to show us, in flesh and blood, that God loved, SO loved the world. And He was given to this world as a gift, not because we deserved him, but actually because we didn’t. For grace comes to us most clearly and most directly when we least deserve it. Jesus came to us because we had gone off course. He came as a candle into an ever darkening world; a shepherd to a bunch of lost sheep.
Grace is unearned and undeserved. And those things make it a gift only God could give. A gift so powerful you can see why the church might try to bottle that grace and give it some form so that we might take Jesus with us on our journey of faith. It is no accident our weekly worship centers around the most precious sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. We cherish deeply those elements of bread and wine because in them are represented the one in whom the grace of God found its fullest form. And we come again and again to this table and receive these tokens of grace over and over because when that grace was in the world in the person of Jesus Christ, the world couldn’t handle it. We just couldn’t accept that God loved us that much. The light he brought in to the world, was too bright, so we snuffed it out, choosing darkness instead. And we come again and again because even then, even after we took that loving gift and threw it away, God did not stop. Even in the complete rejection of his most personal and precious gift, God says, “I still love you. And so I will raise him up from the death you put upon him and shake the world to its core so that what you couldn’t see in the Incarnation perhaps you will be able to see in the Resurrection: that I still so love the world, that I still so love you, that I will give you yet another and another and another chance to receive my grace.” Amazing grace, indeed. And so we come each week to this altar rail to receive that which we rejected, to make right that which went so wrong before, and be fed from the bountiful table of God’s grace.
When it comes to emblems of grace there is none more powerful than the Eucharist. So when you come forward to receive this sacrament of bread and wine in a few minutes come with open hands and a grateful heart, and partake of the gracious gift it represents. Hear in it the sweet, sweet sound of that amazing grace. Take it as a sacred souvenir that recalls God’s never-ending love for you. And tattoo it on your hearts, that you may carry it with you wherever you go. Amen.