“Grace As First Aid”

I love this sermon title Pastor Jen suggested for today, “Grace as First Aid.”  It would have gone great with Girl Scout Sunday – because like many of you, I’m guessing, I got my First Aid merit badge in the scouts.  It’s great to have that training, but we always hope we never have to use it.  And most ordinary days we don’t.

Some of you have heard how the very first youth retreat that I helped to lead ended for me in a wild ride down a winding North Carolina mountain road with the head of a gasping boy on my lap. He had a nasty bee sting on the tongue that was rapidly swelling, and he was in real danger of losing his airway.  But I have to confess that my prayer that hour was for him, sure, but it was mostly for me: “Please, oh please, God, don’t make me do an emergency tracheotomy in the backseat of this Mustang.  I’m no good with blood and I’m already car sick.  This kid deserves a better than a Girl Scout.  He deserves a real doctor who won’t throw up on him.  Please God, I’ll never eat another Pop-Tart if you’ll help me just keep this one down all the way to the hospital!” 

In case you are wondering, my prayer was answered.  He lived, and though I have since tasted a Pop-Tart, it is true I never ate a whole one again.  They taste too much to me like my first enormous free sample of death.

The truth is most of us push the taste of death to the far back corner of our soul’s pantry whenever possible. I mean, who could go out the front door in the morning if we thought too much about what could happen to us, or to our children?  One small slip on the front stairs can land a person in a coffin or a coma.  A simple Sunday drive can end with broken glass, twisted metal, and a blood-soaked highway.  So we mostly make the safest choices possible in our lives, and we push accident, crime, and cancer statistics to the back shelves of our minds.  On Sundays we may proclaim the Good News of Jesus, thank him for being our Savior, but if we are like most people, we may secretly hope that the “amazing grace” of God in Christ that we accepted at baptism or confirmation is something we won’t have to call upon for a very long time, or maybe ever.  It’s a lot like that First Aid training we got in the scouts decades ago – something nice to have as a back-up, for some future emergency, but something we hope we’ll never have to use – at least not until we whip it out like a Green Card for St. Peter, at Heaven’s Gate.

So we go about our daily lives like so many immortals – functioning as gods in our safe little worlds.  We drive a little too fast, maybe drift over the yellow line while talking on a cell phone.  We drink just a little too much, eat just a little too much bacon... or Doritos.  We avoid exercise and apples.   We put off quitting smoking until after taxes are done, or until after the summer bathing suit season passes.  We put off the medical checkup that is due; we skip wearing sunscreen or tick repellent; we stand on that tip-top step of the ladder even though it’s clearly labeled “caution” in 3 different languages.  And at the end of a long and stressful day, do we thank God for that day’s deliverance or do we roll out our long list of that day’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and start to whine and complain to God as the Israelites did before Moses? 

That’s why, I’m sure, God instructed Moses to put that snake up high above the people, for them to gaze upon it – that “snake on a stick” as Al Miller calls it!  This is what Solomon meant in Proverbs when he writes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”   It is an old-fashioned idea maybe – and a good one for the day after St. Patrick’s Day – but we need to remember that what the snake told Adam and Eve in the garden really WAS a lie – we cannot eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and become “just like God.”  We are mere mortals, and our perspective is always limited.  In most pagan cults of the Goddess, the snake was an oracle – a symbol of divine power because it mysteriously descends to the world below in winter and arises from its cave alive in spring.  It was a symbol of immortality and omniscience.  But “snake on a stick” says we are not immortal.  We are not all-knowing.  We are not gods.  Only God is God.

The truth is, frail humanity rests in the palm of God’s hand every day, not just when we are sick or in trouble, or locked in a battle for our lives.  God’s grace is a daily reality, available to all who call upon the Lord to renew their strength.  “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and give thanks in it,” says the Psalmist.  But counting our blessings and giving thanks becomes a tougher and tougher discipline when life takes a turn for the worse and we find ourselves out in the wilderness, wandering among the snakes and living on bare survival rations like newly freed slaves.  At least they could give thanks for the food they were about to receive, right?  Remember the line that brought down God’s wrath on the Hebrew children in the desert?  “We detest this miserable food!”  What hard-working mom wouldn’t want to kill after hearing those words?  As King Lear said, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child!”

Growing up with my 80-something grandmother Lela in the bedroom next-door to me taught me to give thanks every day – not just after a near-death experience like my harrowing car ride down the mountainside.  At her age, she’d come to the breakfast table and read the obituary section first, to “check on what my friends are up to!” She’d say, “Any day that begins with waking up is a good day.”  My Mam-ma had the misfortune of losing her 4-year-old baby sister in a freak accident when she was only 9 – the little girl tripped playing tag and hit her head on a sharp brick that lined the front walk and never woke up again.  I think she counted every day after that as a bonus. 

What is wrong with us that we so often fail to count ourselves blessed, as we have been challenged to do during this year’s Stewardship Campaign?  I read a blog this week by a young man working at very low income for an urban nonprofit and he pointed out that – as much as we love to complain about the 1% or the 0.1% of the rich in the United States and count ourselves “poor” – as much as we are tempted to do that, he points out that anyone who makes more than $41,000 is actually in the top 1% of our WORLD population.  Think about that when you decide which bill to pull out of your wallet for this year’s One Great Hour of Sharing collection.  Are we poor, or are we rich?

In our church, we give to world missions only once a year – to help the poorest of the poor overseas – so let us “count ourselves blessed” that we are able to do that.  We don’t have to suffer with no clean water to drink, with drought and starvation, as they do in the Sudan; we don’t have to fear vigilante gangs as they have in the Congo, or Islamic terrorists as Christians face daily in places like Egypt, Pakistan or Indonesia.  Last fall, I met one of our missionaries to Colombia, from my home state of North Carolina, and he does actually have to worry about a slum lord or drug lord one day taking his life, because of what he does to advocate for the poor in that country.  I try to think about him whenever I feel tempted to complain about something in my ministry, at this church.  I try to stop, and breathe, and count my blessings instead.  I try to center myself again in the bright sunshine of God’s amazing grace, and set aside the burden of my “works.” I have to remember that without the strength and wisdom God gives me, I am nothing.

And so, although it might sound negative to suggest we live in the shadow of the cross and remember the limits of our lives, it is the discipline and tradition of Lent to do that.  I encourage you to remember that you can call on God at any time during your day when you feel a little fallen, a little sunk down from that state of “original grace” that your Creator wishes for you.  Remember the words of today’s prayer (Psalm 107) and pray them again if they apply to you: “God of grace... too often we find ourselves wandering in the desert wastes of our lives, hungry and thirsty, our souls fainting within us.  Some of us sit in darkness and gloom, prisoners of our misery, in rebellion from any wisdom or guidance you would reach out to offer us.  Some days, we confess, our hearts get bowed down with hard labor – and we fall down and forget to ask you for help.  Remind us of the depths of your love, the cost of your mercy, and the wonder of your deeds that we might offer you thanks and praise in the name of our Savior Jesus....”

We can also remember those powerful words from Ephesians, the letter that scholars view as a great summation of the Good News of Christ:  “⁸For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— ⁹not the result of works, so that no one may boast. ¹⁰For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

Grace was never meant to be First Aid.  God’s amazing grace is meant to be a way of life – it is available to us all day, every day, even to the end of all days. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Numbers 21:4-9

⁴From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. ⁵The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” ⁶Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Ephesians 2:1-10

2You were dead through the trespasses and sins ²in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. ³All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.

⁴But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us ⁵even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— ⁶and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. ⁸For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— ⁹not the result of works, so that no one may boast. ¹⁰For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.