Sermon: “Lead Me”

Jesus came to call not the righteous but sinners – sinners like Levi, the tax collector.  It’s important to know that tax collectors back then were not quite as reputable as they are today.  If you want to understand how dishonest and outside-the-law they were, and how hated by the people, just think “protection racket.”  They were not regulated very carefully by the government and didn’t keep records on computer that could be audited.  They often kept as much as they passed on to Rome.  So they were very very bad.  And yet Jesus could love them, and even call one of them to follow him.

In a way, that not very good news to people like us.  After all, we are good citizens. We are God’s devoted flock. We are the hard-core faithful – the ones who bothered to get out of bed and drive through snow to get to church this morning.  Do we really want to be reminded that we’re not as good as we’d like to think – that we all stand in the need of God’s forgiving grace?  As Paul wrote in the third chapter of his Letter to the Romans, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.[1]

So congratulations, I guess, to you new members who have joined us today.  You have now united with a congregation full of sinners – imperfect human beings just like you.  You have not found the perfect church or the perfect pastors – because they do not exist.  Instead, you have found a place where I hope you sense Christ is alive and leading us as a humble and repentant people.  This is a church where broken souls are being healed and strengthened, and led by Christ to proclaim the Good News of God’s grace.

It’s a basic truth of Christianity that our confession of sin is what unites us and calls us to the table when we take communion.  We all stand in the need of God’s grace, because we cannot perfect ourselves.  It’s so great, I think, that when we join the church, we unite our voices in saying, “We confess our sin and are made whole solely by the grace of God in Christ.”  That line reinforces our Reformation roots in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where he preaches so passionately his message of salvation by faith alone, and not by works.  As I said Ash Wednesday, the spring heart-cleaning of Lent – our season of repentance – helps us make room for the Holy Spirit to enter us and live in and through us, and for God to go to work on us. 

I know all this sin-talk might sound awfully negative.  Many of you have said you love how positive our worship is here, and how much you appreciate that we don’t dish out the shame and guilt as generously as some other churches do – maybe churches that hurt you in the past.  I’m not trying to do that, but I did want to share with you what I’ve learned about allowing God’s grace to work in me.  I’d gone to church my whole life, but I didn’t know what it meant to be saved by grace until I went to acting school.

Worry was always a favorite hobby of mine – I especially worried about making any kind of mistake.  I was a perfectionist, raised by two English majors – one who was a newspaper editor.  As you might guess, I hardly ever made a spelling or grammar error, and I always worked hard in school and made good grades.  I was always trying to do the right thing, and be a nice person.  Like Paul, and like the Pharisees (and like you, maybe – a good, church-going type) I always did my best.  I attended church school and worship every Sunday, sang in the choir, played in piano competitions, and I earned tons and tons of merit badges in the Girl Scouts.  And I did well in drama classes too.

But when I got into more advanced acting study in San Francisco, in graduate school at the American Conservatory, for the first time in my life, I was no longer at the top of my class.  One classmate had been in Evita, one had been on “Eight is Enough” – Remember the old TV series? – and one was making a good living off residuals from TV commercials as a tap-dancing frozen pea!  I was so intimidated.  But the hardest thing for me was how the teachers there were trained that the way to bring the best out of actors in rehearsal was to love them unconditionally and encourage them to make lots of mistakes.  This really was new for most of us.  My Shakespeare-in-the-Park director, for instance, was known to reduce actors to tears by screaming German swear words at us  when we couldn’t get things right the first time.  “Fail big!” was the school motto, but I never could quite manage to succeed at failure.  I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but my very best.  I was terrified of being awful, and because of that, I was usually awful.

It was in my first end-of-the semester scene workshop, where I was performing in front of the entire school, not just my class of 20, that my worst nightmare finally came true.  I was apparently so tense and so bad, my teacher actually stopped the whole scene.  I had been shaking so much I actually threw a prop – a hot, steaming artichoke – off the stage and into someone’s lap.  “OK, Bryn.  Enough!” she said.  “You don’t have to try so hard.  We are all here watching because we love you.  We want to see this wonderful play.  We want to see radiance coming through you – and we do, because you are beautiful and perfect just as you are.”  And she came onstage and hugged me, and I cried.  It was classic San Francisco hippie acting class – very different from what my friends in New York were experiencing.  But I think real transformation came for me because the worst had happened.  I had actually failed – and in a very big and public way.  So when we started the scene over, a strange peace came over me – it was what Jesus called that “peace that passeth all understanding.”  I was finally giving myself fully over to the spirit of the play – and they applauded wildly at the end.  And not because I was so good, but because they had seen this amazing change take place right before their eyes.  They had seen another human being let go of fear and doubt and really trust in the power of love.

But that was on stage, and not in real life.  In my real life the greatest thing for me was my weekend gig playing piano for a small Baptist church in a neighborhood full of crime and drugs – where I was hearing sermons unlike any I’d ever heard before in the United Church of Christ.  All the preaching was about God’s amazing grace – that Christ had come not for the righteous, but for sinners – and they really meant that part.  We had a few prostitutes from time to time wander in off the street after a night of work.  They were shouting out with tears of joy at how much God loved them.  And that’s when it dawned on me – they were doing exactly the same thing in their faith as my teacher had gotten me to do on stage.  They were fully surrendering to the Holy Spirit and allowing Christ to lead them in his way.  They were saying to God, as the Psalmist did, “Teach me, O Lord, and lead me in Thy paths.”  That’s when the theology I’d heard my whole life finally began to make sense.  I began to let the love of Jesus save me, and to let him lead me into the fullness of life that comes when we know we are free to make mistakes.

You may have experienced that kind of surrender in other areas of your life – where you had a great mentor to teach you and mold you into your very best self.  I shared some of your examples last week: maybe it was not a director or a preacher but a sports coach or a scout leader or a math teacher.  Maybe it was a parent or grandparent.  But the difference, I’d be willing to bet – the thing that allowed you to surrender fully to their leadership was the knowledge that they truly loved you.  That’s how much Jesus loves us – enough to teach us and guide us to new ways of living, in his name.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Mark 2:13-17

13Jesus went out again beside the sea; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. 14As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. 15And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. 16When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 17When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”