A Table of Grace

Note: I'm also going to attach the bulletins for that week so you can see prayers, music, and other choices for the service.  Follow the link here.

One of the best pieces of advice amongst many I received from my worship professor, Dr. Jennifer Lord, was to make sure that when you're preaching, you're connecting to the text.  It's easy (and I'm guilty of this because I can be in my head a bit) is to extrapolate a couple steps in interpretation, and that what the sermon might be isn't exactly the text, but a riff on the text.  Sometimes Jen would say to me "so where exactly is this in the text?" and I knew what that meant.  

The solutions can be multiple: you build the scaffolds along the way, or you reorient your sermon so that it's not you, necessarily, but it's more God.

This Sunday, was a time where I'm glad I made more of an exception to the rule.  While taking the advice of many of the peers I talked to during the week and make sure to discuss divorce, I also was drawn to discussing hermeneutics.  Texts like these are built around interpretation, and I thought maybe a shift in our interpretation of the text could make a difference.

Notes:
2:38 - We always have liturgies, and we always have theologies.  I think it's our predisposition to order.  Sometimes, however, I think by not acknowledging it, it can be come more insidious than what might be intended.

3:25 - I hope this made sense, because I thought it was an interesting way of thinking - how we perceive our innermost self.  Are we only in "sin-world," and "grace" as a concept of escape of one's world?  Put another way, I think for a long time I saw sin as ontological and grace and ontic.  Now, I think grace and sin are both ontological.  But one's understanding of everything that happens takes on much different internal meaning depending on how one views what is ontological and what's ontic.  Apparently Leonoardo Boff wrote a book on some of this, and I just bought it so I'm interested in reading more.  But at least for me, there's a lot to unpack around ontological understandings of grace and sin together.  I need to brush up on my Heidegger, but I do think his thinking of Dasein can make a difference here, too.  What world are we thrown into if it's only sin-world?  This is at the core in this passage of a hermeneutical argument for me.

4:20 - Here's where an ontic argument of grace can get someone in trouble - the 'ol "fire insurance" argument.  

4:57 - This is a language change that I don't know if I explained well.  For me, sin+grace = broken.  But I didn't have the time to explore that.

5:55 - Worlds = ontological.

6:53 - Looking back, I think one of the worries here might be to interpret law as sin, which isn't my intention at all.  Paul tackles these issues over and over again, and maybe I take that for granted here.  The law is grace, too, but, at least in the moves here it allows grace to be ontic too easily.  But maybe that would have been worth a sentence or two.

7:45 - Fusion of horizons.

8:04 - If that wasn't missed as part of the conversation, I hope it helped to make the point about law and sin.  We can be reminded of our sin without the grace component really easily, especially because we live in a punitive society.

8:20 - There probably should be a little caution about causality here, but I think there's a point here to still unfold: it's not an issue just bound in the clergy, but also in the laity.  We all can shape worlds against the other.

8:40 - This, in the end, though, was the most important part of my sermon.  

11:10 - So admittedly, I think this is a place where I gleaned over.  Part of what's important to know about this particular Sunday is that it's communion, and so I need to try to bring my sermon down 5-7minutes to around 15.  I could have spent that time well digging into divorce and digging into the Genesis story.  But I kept thinking "well, if you only have the time you have, what's the one point you need to express" and for me, it was shifting hermeneutic perspectives on passages like this that often alienate people from the gospel.  The exegesis would have helped.  The other thing I need to remember is that I have potentially hundreds of sermons ahead of me at Old Stone.  What I couldn't tie up exegetically here I can progressively in the months and years ahead.  I don't think it injured the thesis, but I think it just didn't give as much as I'd like.

12:30 - I'm trying speak the words that might create a world of grace for the rest of the sermon - imagining how it works, how we live, and how others imagine it, and how we can imagine liturgically each week.

Outline:

• Growing up in the Church of Christ
  • Fundamentalist in the best sense of the word
  • I got to learn my Bible because that’s all there was
  • But, sometimes, even with that, there’s theology underneath
  • Always felt my sin first.
    • The times late at night I’d pray to God when I was younger
    • The other side, grace, was just God’s willingness to drag me out of my sorry state.
    • Sin was the state of being and grace was a function - maybe not to make me better, but at least not hell bound.
• Becoming Presbyterian
  • I had a shift in understanding - grace wasn’t just a function anymore, but it was also a way of being
  • An imperfect sinner perfectly loved meant that I was still broken, but not thrown away.
• But, it isn’t like that the past doesn’t still have some grip on me… The words of my past are still with me
  • BBT: The creation of worlds from words
    • God invites us to be co-creators
    • Our words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories create worlds.
    • We can end up residing in those worlds
      • The worlds of the churches we reside in, too. 
      • We collectively tell stories
    • Before long, the worlds of our words overtake everything.
      • That’s how passages like today begin to unfold.
        • The Pharisees inhabiting a world of law
        • Seems they’re more interested in the law than the people
      • Many of us as leaders in the church have done this, too.
        • We create worlds with our words and we forget who may also already live in those worlds
        • The world that tells someone that they are less than because of the law
        • That world can influence others - including the disciples!  They’re denying children again!
    • So let me at least say this now: if a text like this has created a world that minimized you because of divorce, I’m sorry.  If you have felt minimized because of texts like Genesis, I’m sorry.  It’s likely you had a Pharisee in your midst who wanted the law right, a disciple shooing away those at their most vulnerable.
• So much of that minimization comes from a world with only the words of sin.
  • Creating a binary system of right and wrong
  • But it minimizes the depth of humanity
    • The binary law ignores the pain of separation, and the pain we can inflict on each other.
    • The binary law ignores how vulnerable we can be to one another
  • It also obscures what Jesus is doing and what the text might tell us - providing words of grace
    • Mark
      • Women were generally considered property and marriages were ways of getting ahead
      • Midrash on divorce made it really simple for men and not for women.
      • Jesus elevates a woman - not just economic but also human, while also recognizing how painful those kinds of separations can be.
    • Genesis
      • Helper is often used in reference to God, not diminutive
      • That God made us for each other in partnership, not dominion.
• But what if sin is not the only world?  What if we enter into a world of grace?
  • It might mean tending to the broken spirit after divorce, not just the hard law.
  • It may mean we welcome the most vulnerable to Jesus and not just shoo them away, so that they may be loved.
  • After all, this is God brought low to be with us: how could we want to have anyone be away?
• There is grace for you
  • We are broken, but God came near.
  • We are forgiven.
  • We are more than the law
  • God meets us in the pain of broken life, broken hope, broken relationship sand asked we not be sternly talked to in order to stay away, but are invited to share in the holy Commonwealth.
• There is grace for others.
  • Who are those that we as disciples speak sternly against coming to Jesus?
    • What law do we want to clarify but miss the human heart?
    • What do we miss by living into the worlds of sin when Jesus offers grace to us?
  • World Communion Sunday
    • The entire worlds remembers together
    • Every tribe, nation, celebrate this meal
    • A table of grace.