Note: The sermon references ‘desire paths,’ which I explained earlier in the service. They are the trails that mark frequent foot traffic. They usually represent the shortest route to a destination and often cut across or go around the designed walkways and roadways.
This week I tried to explain the concept of grace to my daughter. She’s one, so…it’s time. It started when I heard myself say to her, “You’re so tough!” This was the day after a five-hour doctor’s appointment, through which she stayed completely calm and cheerful. The next morning again, she woke up with a smile, as if the day before had been so pleasant she was hoping for another just like it. And I said to her, “you are so tough!”
But immediately what came into my mind were the many articles I have seen on Facebook about what to say and what not to say to your children. And I started to worry. “If I tell her she’s tough,” I thought, “then what about the times that she’s not feeling tough? Will she know it’s OK to be weak and vulnerable?” So I told her, “It’s OK not to be tough. It’s OK to feel weak, and to cry, and to want to give up. I love you when you’re tough and when you’re not tough.”
But then I thought, “Do I really want to leave her with the impression that it’s all the same to me whether she gives up or learns to rise to a challenge? Don’t I also have a duty to instill in her some sense of values, the idea that some choices are better than others?” So I went on, “It’s not that I don’t have preferences, or things I want to teach you. I believe in right and wrong, and I will try to show them to you, although you may not always agree with me about which is which. And sometimes I will try to convince you to be tough when you want to give up, and sometimes I’ll try to encourage you to let go when you want to keep fighting. And you’ll have to decide whether to follow my advice. But the point I’m trying to get to is this: none of it changes how I feel about you. None of it affects my love for you. I love you now and always, and that love is not based on your actions, or your accomplishments, or your failures. I love you no matter what you do and before you can do anything.”
And that’s grace. At least, that’s my understanding of grace. God’s love for us exists before and beyond and outside of anything we can or will do. It is an unearned gift. And I felt like I had articulated that well enough for one morning.
But while I was finally satisfied with my words, I realized my actions belied them. Even as I worked to assure my daughter that she is held in an unconditional love, my anxiety about getting the words right was a reminder that I still doubt that the same is true for me. I still suspect I have lots of work to do before I’ve earned or deserved the taste of raspberries and cream.
Last week Kristen Stone, a member of our church, blogged, “Thinking a lot about Ephesians 2:8-9…as it touches parenting and control issues and the need to be loved, the anxious need to be lovable.” (And just as a side note, if I see you blogging about Ephesians, expect an email from me.) I could have written similar words to Kristen’s. And knowing that I wanted to preach on the road we do not make, I was grateful to her for a scripture to use.
This week, as I tried to write a sermon on that scripture, I was less grateful. Paul writes to the Church in Ephesus: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” It’s a hard passage to preach on, I think because it exposes the link between grace and salvation – “by grace you have been saved.” And that’s a word we don’t often use here. It’s a word I don’t often use myself to describe my faith. Salvation conjures up judgment and sin, a vision of a depraved humanity which must be redeemed by blood. To be saved has come to mean repeating magic words which allow Christ, vampire-like, to enter into our hearts. That’s not what I mean when I say salvation.
But what I mean isn’t all that much easier, I think. What I mean when I say salvation is a response to that persistent, niggling feeling that things are not quite right: in creation, in human society, in my relationships, and in me. Things are not as I imagine they could be. Creation has fallen out of balance; nations are at war; my relationships are plagued by miscommunication and unintended pain; and I consistently fall short of the person I wish I were.
In the face of such feelings, Paul suggests there are two possible responses. We seek salvation in grace, or we seek it in works. We reach out for the unearned gift of love and acceptance, or we try to earn that love and acceptance by making our own road.
If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time trying to make that road. For Paul’s audience, that looks like following Jewish law. After the gospels, most of the rest of the books at the end of your bible are about circumcision and shellfish. Should the new community of Jesus followers abide by the old laws or not. Paul’s point is that whether one follows the religious law or not, that’s not where love and acceptance come from, they’re not from perfectly following the rules.
Over the last two millennia, nothing has changed. Every spiritual practice, every ethical practice can become a way of trying to earn or deserve love, a strategy for saving ourselves, the design of the road we will make to get to the heart of God. In our time, and in my own life, I think about the examples of language, food, and parenting.
As a general rule, the more energy something is getting on Facebook, the more likely it is that we are trying to use it to save ourselves, believing that if we just spend our energy to get this one thing right, we will finally be OK. For me, I cannot help but click on any article that suggests that there is something I should or should not say. Ten questions LGBT people are tired of getting from allies. Eight things you’re saying that are killing your coworkers. Six other NFL teams whose names you dare not speak. Titles like these are click-bait catnip for my well-meaning progressive heart. I read them through half-covered eyes, hoping I haven’t already offended everyone. I memorize them and put them into immediate use, believing that if I can just manage to always say the right thing, I will have proven I’m a decent human being; then I will be worthy of acceptance and love.
Ditto food. When faced with the world’s brokenness or my own brokenness, I start to think about my diet. If I would eat more vegetables and less cheese, then I would feel OK about myself. If I would spend the money for more organic produce, then I could be acceptable. If I ate cage-free eggs, or no eggs, or nothing white, or nothing cooked, or if I ate more like a caveman, or more like people from the Mediterranean, if I made the time to cook, or to sit down, or if I could just eat the exact right things, I wouldn’t feel this anxious need to be lovable.
And parenting- where, having given up on perfecting myself, I turn my hopes to the next generation. And I try to make sure that she has the right doctors, the right books, the right toys, that she will go to the right school, and have the right teachers, and make the right friends, and choose the right extracurriculars, and get into the right college, and choose the right job, and marry the right person, and parent my grandkids the right way, and then I will be alright.
But of course, try as I might, in all these areas, and many others, I can’t seem to ever do it just right. And so it seems the only option available to me is grace.
I have no idea what goes into making a road or laying a sidewalk. From what I observe as I cruise by a construction site, it’s a lot of work. The surveying, the designing, the clearing, the building, the pouring, the smoothing, the painting. It’s hard work making a road. I wonder what it’s like to do all that work only to have a desire path crop up in the middle of the lawn.
At first glance, we might assume that a desire path is the perfect example of the road we make by walking. It is, after all, literally a road made by our walking. But what I love about the desire path as a symbol of grace is that, in a certain sense, it is already there before anyone has walked it. In every space where we live and move, the desire paths already exist. They are waiting just under the grass, or the sand, or the carpet to be revealed. Like all good design, they are invisible. That’s why some designers leave their projects incomplete and watch users interact with them, allowing the rest of the design to emerge from the people who will inhabit it.
A desire path isn’t the way we make, but the way we find. It is the way we have been hoping, someday, if we’re good enough, and work hard enough, and live long enough we may complete. The path to acceptability. The path to lovability. And if not us, then maybe our children. Or theirs. It is the road we are working with all our might to make. At least, it is the road I am working with all my might to make. And the truth is that, if we turn from our working, turn from our doing, turn from our earning, it is already present to us, unfurled like a red carpet at our feet, a path laid out long ago by the one who is called Waymaker. And it just so happens to be the shortest distance between our hearts and hers.
The 20th century theologian Paul Tillich gives a beautiful definition of grace. He writes, “Sometimes….a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.’ If that happens to us, we experience grace.”
“Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.” You are accepted. You are loved. As Frederick Buechner repeats three times with different emphases, “There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do.
Does that mean that grace is an invitation to do nothing about the brokenness in ourselves and our world? No. In fact, the next verse in Ephesians says we are created for good works, “which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” The life of grace is a life of good works. A life of service, and justice, and love. A life of carefully choosing the words that we say, and the food that we eat, and the way that we parent. But not in a spirit of anxiety, believing that we need to do so to be OK.
Rather, knowing that we are accepted and loved, we work for good in a spirit of joy and hope. We work not to earn or deserve the taste of raspberries and cream, but having tasted them, we work in gratitude and enthusiasm for the beauty and sweetness of life.
Put down your anxious road-making tools. Allow yourself to move form waymaker to wayfinder. Know that, wherever you are, however long the road you’ve been building has become, you can turn from it and find, right there, a path that is made just for you and is the shortest distance between where you are standing and where you had hoped to go. There you will meet the one who invites you to accept that you are accepted. There you can release the burden of being enough or getting things right. There you will hear the voice that says, “I love you now and always, and that love is not based on your actions, or your accomplishments, or your failures. I love you no matter what you do and before you can do anything.” Amen.