"Releasing and Receiving God's Grace" Ash Wednesday February 21, 2007

(First, read the text for this sermon: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21)


There was a night this past October when I thought I was going to die. I was still at home. It was before I went into the hospital. I couldn’t lie down flat in the bed, because that provoked violent coughing. I could only take shallow breaths. I knew what it would feel like to die of respiratory failure.

At one point, in the middle of that night, I got up and pulled out the medical “Advance Directive” form that I had had for more than a year. I wrote out some instructions (knowing that they didn’t have any legal weight, because they weren’t witnessed and signed by a non-family member – but I did it anyway). And I made some notes about wishes for my funeral.

I was so frightened that night!

A week or so later, I truly was at the edge of death, in the hospital. I don’t remember much about those days. (As a respiratory therapist said, “Yeah, we have great drugs.”) There were periods during those days when I was awake and even communicative, but because of the sedation, I have little memory even of those periods. It was later on that Patty told me about those terrifying days while they were desperately searching for a diagnosis. She lived through those days consciously, of course, while I was sedated. I experienced the terror in retrospect, when she told me about what I had put her through.

But that’s all in the past, right? Now I’m all better! I’ve even been blogging to an audience far and wide about how strong I am! How I’m back to activity in the work I love. How I’m eager each day when I wake up. I’ve put all that medical trauma behind me!

And one of my wise correspondents is impatient with that. She wonders why it is that I’m covering up the terror of the hospitalization? Here’s part of what she wrote in her most recent letter:

What you’ve just experienced, what you’ve gone through won’t come to an end. You can’t shut the closet door on it, and jog on up the hill, leaving it filed away to be used as sermon illustrations when appropriate. It’s you. It’s another precious part of your time on earth.

Please revel in your soon-to-come bike riding, foot stompin’, hymn bellowing good health. I too give sincere, heartfelt thanks for its return. But also, in the goodness of time, please make friends with what came upon you. I believe there is wisdom and confidence and, most of all, compassion to be learned from meeting terror, feeling boundless love, and soaring with the spirit at a whole new level.

“Make friends with what came upon you,” she writes. Wow. What courage that would take. What I want to do, instead, is to cover it all up! To regain the illusion that I’m in control of my health and my longevity! Just to stuff all that unpleasantness down into my subconscious!

But there it would sit and fester. And there it would block God’s grace. I have received physical healing. But can I receive God’s spiritual and emotional healing, if I pretend that what’s down there isn’t down there? No. Of course not.

I’m using my experiences simply to point to something we all tend to do. There is much to be afraid of in our daily lives. Instead of confronting that and dealing with it, it’s much less threatening to try to cover up what scares us. But does that make it go away?

Andrew Wyeth is one of my favorite painters. Are you familiar with his work? At first glance, his paintings are of bucolic scenes. They remind me of where I grew up, which is only a few miles from where he lives in Pennsylvania. But Wyeth paints with the awareness that there is chaos just below the surface of what seems to be so peaceful, and that the chaos can erupt at any moment. If you’re alert to that, you see that in his paintings. Isn’t that true of our lives, too?

I’ve been talking with my cousin, Michael, during these weeks after the sudden death of his wife, Nancy, at age 54, of a meningitis infection. He’s the one who wrote the piece in the Baltimore Sun that I forwarded to you all. One of the readings that he named in that article is by Calvin Trillin, about his wife, Alice, who suffered from cancer. In one place, Trillin writes, “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” In another place, Trillin writes of how Alice would always be taking care of someone: “a former student who couldn’t find a job or a friend who was having difficulty coping or a great-aunt who couldn’t manage to work through the maze required to become eligible for Medicaid or, increasingly, someone who was trying to deal with the terrors and bewildering logistics of being treated for cancer.”

We would rather not think about such things. We would rather push our fears down into a compartment of our unconscious and pretend that they’re not there. But they are there! And they hold us captive. Our fears block us. They close us off from God’s grace.

God calls us to release, so that we can receive God’s grace. That’s what repentance is. It is returning to God. It is releasing whatever it is that is closing us off from God’s healing grace.

Here’s the thing. Here’s the shocking good news: God is in the terror, right there with us. That’s what it means to confess that God became human flesh in Jesus the Christ: that God is in the midst of every human experience. And so, as you and I return to God, we name what it is, in us, that prevents the love of Christ from flowing into us. What is it that blocks that healing grace? That’s what we will enact liturgically, in a few minutes, by speaking words of confession. Lent is a grace-filled opportunity for candor, for release, for receiving grace from God.

What do you need to release?

Is it an emotional wound that you received? Is it a childhood message that you heard (even if it wasn’t spoken in so many words) – a message that you’re really not good enough; a message you haven’t been able to overcome? And so you can’t release; you can’t receive that grace from God that overcomes such a destructive message?

Are you held captive by a need to achieve for yourself, to earn what you deserve? That’s a feeling that you need to release, to receive that healing grace from God, grace that is entirely undeserved.

Are you held in bondage, perhaps, by an inability to feel thankful for the grace-filled blessings of each day? Why is that? Where is that coming from? How can you release that, to receive God’s grace?

Is there some other darkness inside that frightens you, that you’re afraid to admit is even there?

All of that stuff deep inside holds us in captivity, if we are unwilling to enter into the darkness and to “make friends” with it, so we can release it. I wonder what practices you can engage in, during this 40-day period of Lent (plus seven Sundays), to confront the demons, so that they will let go of you; so that you can turn away from them and turn towards God; so that you can release and receive God’s grace?

That, after all, is the purpose of the three faith practices that tonight’s gospel passage names. The purpose of generosity is to empty yourself, so that God can fill you up with grace. The purpose of prayer is to enter into God, which is a frightening thing to do when you’re being honest! The purpose of fasting is to let go of compulsions, to open up that tightly clenched fist. To release. To receive God’s healing grace.

Perhaps you and I can only gain the courage to enter into the darkness, to empty ourselves, to open our hands, when we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. Out of such honesty, comes true hope. Because who entered into the deepest darkness of human life, and then overcame it? God did – in the flesh of Jesus the Christ.

That allows us to release and to receive God’s grace – because the only life that continues is life in God.

It is all grace. The season of Lent is a special opportunity, to turn towards God, to release, to receive grace.

In the name of God who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.


Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia