Lenten Noonday Preaching Series
Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
April 3, 2001

A Moment of Grace
The Rev. Dr. Bill J. Leonard
Dean and Church History Professor
Wake Forest University Divinity School
Winston-Salem, North Carolina

(This sermon is also available in audio.)

The text for this morning is found in Matthew's Gospel, the tenth chapter, and following, hear the reading of the Word of God. I am going to sort of skip around. You'll just have to trust me that it's really in here, okay?

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: do not take the road to the Gentile lands and do not enter any Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. And as you go proclaim this message, "The Kingdom of Heaven is upon you. Heal the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse the lepers. Drive out demons. You have received without cost, give without charge. Take no gold, silver, or copper in your belts, no pack for the road, no second coat, no sandals, no stick the worker deserves to keep. . . Be on your guard for you will be handed over to the courts. They will flog you in their synagogues, and you will be brought before governors and kings on my account to testify before them and the Gentile. But when you are arrested, do not worry about what you are to say, for when the time comes, the words you need will be given you. It will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking in you.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. May we pray:

You woke us up this morning, one more day oh God, and we are grateful. And so again in this good place, we gather around Your word and hope that it will find its way into our lives here and now, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

It was Ash Wednesday several years back and a friend and I arrived at St. Luke's United Church of Christ in Jeffersonville, Indiana to conduct our first-ever Ash Wednesday service. My friend was interim pastor at the church, and he invited me, the church historian and Baptist, to join him in that somber celebration which marks the beginning of Lent. We were both very excited about our spiritual adventure and thought we were well prepared for the beauty and dignity of that great observance.

Then came the crisis. "Where are the ashes?" we inquired. "What ashes?" the deacon replied, driving us from paradise. "The minister always furnishes the ashes." Panic seized us. Like Reverends Laurel and Hardy in clerical vestments, we searched madly in closets and desks, but to no avail. Where could we get ashes? Then came the obvious. Why not improvise? We could build a fire, put it out, and make our own ashes. A deacon rushed in with a newspaper--the New York Times, the Louisville Courier Journal, the National Enquirer, I know not which--we burned it in the kitchen sink, doused it with water, and created of course, not ashes, but soot--soggy, messy soot. No time to quibble. We searched for suitable vessels, and again we improvised. Cereal bowls contained our precious treasure, and off we went to worship.

Amid hymns and prayers, at the appointed time, the faithful came to the chancel to hear the ancient words of repentance and mortality, "Remember, my brother, my sister, that you are dust and to dust you shall return." With that word they received the emblem of faith--a soggy, sooty, thumbprint on their foreheads. After that, the Lord's Supper, done the way most free church Protestants improvise it with tiny, little pieces of undissolvable bread-- Baptist chiclets, I call it, or tooth cappers-- and little, plastic shot glasses of temperance grape juice. What a farce that evening!

Isn't it just like a couple of Baptist preachers to turn Ash Wednesday into Saturday Night Live? Think about it. We took soot, Baptist chiclets, and welch-ade and claimed the presence of the living God. If that's not improvising grace, nothing is. But something happened that terrible Wednesday evening to my friend and I, and even to a congregation of saints in Jeffersonville, Indiana -- something good, something crazy, something akin to grace. In spite of all our bungling, we encountered the elusive presence of God. It was a moment of grace I shall never forget.

Aren't the people of God always grasping the grace of God's presence like that? Seizing the half-baked idea or the unexpected moment of boredom or tragedy as an occasion for grace? Isn't that what Jesus is getting at when he commissions the twelve and through them, the rest of us, sending them out like a dozen Don Quixote's on a deadly serious errand? With an almost frivolous method he calls them to announce the Good News of the Kingdom without a contingency plan, without a Gospel first aid kid. He sends them out of the warm womb of his presence into the brave new world of danger and discipleship. He asks them to jettison the things that might give them security, to live at the mercy of others and to make themselves vulnerable to the vicissitudes of political and ecclesiastical policy-makers. "You are on your own," he says. Go out and grow up. Heal, raise, cleanse, cast-out, and don't so much as pack a bag. Don't take your charge cards or your running shoes. Don't even stop for a "Happy Meal." Do not try to anticipate every possibility. Live by faith, and when the going gets tough, when the grand jury indicts you, be not afraid. The Spirit of God," Jesus says, "your Father speaks through you. There will be grace to make it -- grace alone for the journey."

Starting a new divinity school, I re-read this Matthew text consistently, and this phrase leapt out at me every time I read it, just as today. Do you know what Jesus says in there? "And when you are arrested." He doesn't say if, should, might, could -- "And when you are arrested." You know what I've decided we need to do at Wake Forest Divinity School? We need to get an endowment for bond money, just in case Jesus' words come true to a new generation of divinity school students.

Now, I know that most of us will never attempt to carry the Gospel exactly like that. Most of us will never have that kind of vulnerability, but there is a sense in which this calling toward and dependence on, even improvisation of, grace belongs to every one of us.

It belonged to Martin Luther, God knows, but he was a long time discovering it. Oh, there was no shortage of grace in the medieval church. It was there for the taking, but it was less improvised than grace for every contingency. Ultimately, Luther discovered that we don't hold grace captive. It holds us. The church, he concluded, was attempting to shackle spirit to structure his words, to second-guess God and anticipate how and when and why God would act--to create a doctrine to cover every possibility.

Luther lived in a time, indeed. He shaped an era of religious transition. We are in such a time right now. The church, he said, had to change. Was Luther medieval? Yes. Was he modern? Almost. On one hand, he reacts against the religious culture of his day, but he winds up with the church on his hands. People are calling themselves Lutheran, and he has to improvise right quick, so Luther responds to the church of his day, which, like ours, was full of slogans: Expect a miracle. Something good is going to happen to you. Make Jesus your choice, and he will give you a Rolls Royce. I made that one up. See how easy it is? But none of that saves you, Luther says, apart from grace alone. Faith, Luther discovers, is not merely expecting a miracle. It is believing in God when there are no miracles. Faith is not simply believing something good is going to happen to you. It is clinging to grace when nothing good is happening to you. When the real question is, "Does the Spirit of your Father speak through you?" If so, then you are free to live out grace in a myriad of ways.

To say that we are free, free to live by grace alone, free to improvise, does not mean we fail to prepare or study or reflect or struggle. It means we can never prepare enough, and sometimes life thrusts us into situations for which we could never have prepared, even if we knew in advance it was going to happen. They will come, those moments, in some dark night or early morning when you are all alone and called to respond to situations you hoped would never come. We roam this world playing the odds, don't we? We are ever-hoping that the plane won't drop from the sky (I am saying that prayer now. I have to go home this afternoon.); that the truck ahead won't jack-knife; that the tumor will be benign and the tornado won't touch down on our street. But we know that sooner or later the phone will ring in the wee hours and there will not be time to think too long about faith and hope and love -- only the time to act and cling to grace wherever it can be found -- only time to improvise. And somewhere, in the deepest darkness you hear the words: "Fear not. The Spirit of God is around here somewhere."

Jesus improvised, didn't he? There was a blind man in his path, begging for sight, so Jesus makes a paste of dust and spit (one of the grossest passages in the New Testament by our Twenty-first Century sentiments) and by grace heals him. But he did it on the Sabbath, and the religious crowd was scandalized. Improvising grace sometimes seems a bit irreligious. Another time the people are hungry, so he borrows five loaves and two fishes from this little kid and says the blessing, and everybody, saints and sinners alike, experience tangibly the grace of God.

He says God even improvises from time to time, like when the King gives a banquet and the proper guests don't show and so they substitute, improvise, another more available kind of crowd -- the people with tobacco stains on their fingers and whiskey on their breath; the kids in wheelchairs and the folks with no teeth; and the ex-cons with crosses tattooed on their backs. "Come on in," he says, "there's all this food and all this grace, and we'll not let it go to waste."

Then there is Lazarus. "He's dead, you know. If you had been here, Lord," says a grief-stricken sister, "my brother would not have died." (Some day I am going to preach a series of sermons on uppity women in the New Testament. They are all there. Jesus' mama is one of them. That's another whole story. Can I come back and do that again and alienate all the women here? No, they are wonderful.) A truly divine contingency would never let this happen to any of us, especially not to your friend, our brother, Lazarus. But Jesus improvises and a previously dead as a doornail Lazarus, comes forth from the tomb.

To improvise grace is to take a chance to risk everything on faith. You gamble with only moments to spare that something will be right and it won't hurt more than it helps. Does that mean the Gospel is absolutely relative? No, it means that life, even Christian life, is absolutely unpredictable. The wisdom to know when to stand on unshakable convictions and when to grab for all the ambiguity you can get, is what the Holy Spirit is about. It is also to know moments of abject terror, for to speak as if the Father speaks through you is to take a chance that it may not be the Father speaking at all. But we don't just learn to live by grace alone, sometimes we must act when we are alone with grace.

Some folks did that laying their lives on the Gospel line. The memory runs like a litany of grace, improvised and imparted. Eight hundred years ago, almost, Francis of Assisi hears this very text we read today, accepts it, and improvises, lives it, literally. He renounces property, begins begging for support. Being Dean of a new divinity school, I know what Francis was all about now. I go around with a begging bowl most of the time. He rebuilds crumbling churches, cares for lepers, lives with the poor, and offers renewing grace to the opulence of medieval Christianity. In the last century, Rosa Parks, worn out from a day's labor at a department store, parks herself in the wrong place on a segregated city bus. She improvises and liberating grace for the racism of Montgomery, Alabama and the American nation, explodes.

Sometimes, like these folks, we find ourselves alone with nothing but God's grace between oblivion and us. That's when, perhaps, we learn to improvise the most. So here we sit -- last week of Lent -- brand new century -- earthen vessels everyone -- through whom God sometimes shows forth grace for lack of a more suitable constituency. Sooner or later every one of us will have to improvise, hoping against hope that when the time comes we will open our mouths and our lives, and the Spirit will speak and act through us of grace and goodness to male and female, slave and free, Palestinian and Israeli, liberal and fundamentalist.

We all sit here today hoping for grace to happen upon us. It has happened before: to Francis of Assisi, roaming the countryside singing to the world; to Martin Luther, contending for the faith, waiting on reformation; to Rosa Parks, sitting in the white folks section, waiting on freedom; unto a stone-cold Galilean, waiting in a borrowed tomb, waiting on the Spirit to improvise God's grace.

May we pray:

For the times your presence seized us and the times when we had to wait on it, we give you thanks, oh God. On the way to Golgotha we go looking with Jesus for your grace, through Christ our Lord we do pray. And now go in peace, and as you are going, know this: by the grace of God you were brought into this world; by the mercy of God you have been sustained to this very moment, and by the love of God, fully revealed in Jesus the Christ, you are being redeemed, now and forevermore. Amen.

Copyright 2001 The Rev. Dr. Bill J. Leonard

(Return to Top)