Imperfect Vessels of God's Grace

Brad Sullivan

Proper 9, Year B

July 5, 2015

Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13

Did you notice that Jesus didn’t send out his disciples to preach and to heal people until the disciples had seen Jesus rejected in Nazareth?  I wonder if they needed to see that, to know they might be rejected before they were sent out.  Maybe they needed to be kept from being too elated, as Paul wrote about himself.  Paul wrote that he was made weak and tormented by a messenger of Satan, and that he prayed to God for it to leave him.  In response, God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” 

Not exactly the response Paul was looking for, but he understood.  We can get too puffed up, too strong on our own, and then we tend to give too much glory to ourselves.  Even when our words say otherwise, pride ends up telling us that we are great.  Feeling self-sufficient can leave us isolated, closed off.  We can end up scornful and contemptuous of those needing help…even if we help them.  “Thank God we’re not like that.” 

Imagine if the disciples went to heal people and to preach repentance while thinking in their hearts, “Thank God we’re not like those people.”

Paul said, when we are weak, then we are strong – because we have to accept our dependence on others, and we have to accept our dependence on God. 

Jesus certainly made sure his disciples would not be self-sufficient when he sent them out to preach and heal in the villages around Nazareth.  They weren’t allowed by be strong so that they had to rely on the charity, meaning love, of others.  Go in weakness so that God’s love may be made strong.  Allow the strength of others to care for you as you go, so that God’s love may be made strong.  Go also realizing that you may be rejected, just as I was rejected, and allow God’s grace to be sufficient for you. 

Jesus was rejected in Nazareth because he called up short those in Nazareth.  It is one thing for someone who is supposed to have life all figured out to teach us about life.  (clergy, life-coach, counselor, Oprah) We can have the experts teach us about life, because then we’re comfortable in our place.  We don’t feel threatened because, well, they’re the expert.  We don’t have things as together as the expert, but we’re not supposed to, we think.  They’re the expert.  They’re on a higher level, so their teaching doesn’t threaten my worth on the lower strata where I reside.

When someone who seems just as like us begins teaching us, then we have problems.  They’ve risen above their station because they’ve risen above us.  If they, who were just like us, are now “above” us, then my place in the universe, in society is threatened.  I feel less, because they are more.  I feel threatened by one of my own teaching me.  “Who the hell do they think they are,” right?

Jesus teaching in Nazareth exposed the people’s weakness in ways that the religious elite teaching them did not.  They didn’t like feeling weak, so they shut out the teaching.  They closed themselves off to Jesus, and put their armor in place so they wouldn’t be hurt by their acknowledged weakness.  They felt stronger.

Their armoring up, however, was not strength.  It was shame and fear.  Jesus called his Nazareth brothers and sisters to repent, to be the light to the nations God made them to be, to show the world the love of God.  They heard his message, however, and they felt exposed.  Through one of their own preaching to them, their armor of fig leaves dropped off, and they had to take seriously their own weakness.  I’m guessing they didn’t like what they saw, because you tend not to reject someone who makes you happy.  They felt weak, so they got angry with Jesus, and they put their armor of fig leaves back on, and they pretended that it made them strong, but strength is not pretending that we have it all together.  Strength is not fooling ourselves into thinking that we are righteous and self-sufficient.

Strength is acknowledging our weakness and asking for help.  In doing so, we risk having to change.  We risk letting Jesus in and letting Jesus’ teachings in and changing us.  We also risk connecting with others.  Acknowledging our weakness means our armor comes off.  We drop our fig leaves, and you know what everyone can see then.  When we drop our fig leaves, we let others in.  We let God in, and God is made strong in our weakness.  Love is made strong when we are connected to one another and vulnerable with one another.

We are all imperfect vessels of God’s grace.  Our church is an imperfect vessel of God’s grace.  That’s why we need God’s grace.  We’re doing the best we can, muddling through, doing well, messing up, revealing our strengths and our weaknesses as we go along.  Rather than being made perfect, we are told, God’s grace is sufficient for us, and with God’s grace, we continue to muddle through. 

The focus is not our muddling, but God’s grace. 

Go not only to give, but also to receive.  Go to accept God’s grace, to give God’s grace, to proclaim God’s grace, and to continue on the work that Jesus gave his disciples.  Go to help heal the world, and to be healed in the process.  Go to help reconcile people to each other and to God.  That is what Jesus came to do, to transform the world through reconciliation. 

As Presiding Bishop-Elect Michael Curry said in his sermon to General Convention:

[Jesus] came to show us therefore how to become more than simply the human race – that’s not good enough – came to show us how to be more than a collection of individualized self-interests, came to show us how to become more than a human race.

He came to show us how to become the human family of God. And in that, my friends, is our hope and our salvation, now and unto the day of eternity.
Or to say it another way.

Max Lucado who’s a Christian writer says “God loves you just the way you are, but he [doesn’t intend] to leave you that way.”

Jesus came to change the world and to change us from the nightmare that life can often be to the dream that God has intended from before the earth and world was ever made.

Fooling ourselves into thinking we are self sufficient keeps us in a nightmare of life, leaving us believing we don’t need the grace of God.  Fooling others into thinking we are self sufficient them in a nightmare of life, thinking they are even more damaged than they are, that they only need God’s grace because they aren’t as good as the folks who have it all together.  Thinking that we have it all together, or expecting that we do, keeps us in the nightmare of life in which we cannot be fully reconciled with each other and with God. 

Jesus came to change the world to change us from than nightmare of disconnection to the dream of connection and love that God has intended from before the earth and world was ever made.

So go, as imperfect vessels of God’s grace.  Go as part of this Episcopal Church, this imperfect vessel of God’s grace, into an imperfect world in desperate need of God’s grace.  Go acknowledging your weakness and our weakness.  Go, believing that even as we continue to muddle through, God’s grace is sufficient.  For when we are weak, then God is strong.  Amen.