Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Between her sophomore and junior years of college, as part of her study, June Sprigg took up residence at Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire. The three months she spent there changed her life. She came to know the few remaining elderly Shaker women - all that was left of the once-thriving pietistic sect, and they were a powerful inspiration to her. She tells a beautiful story about Sister Bertha and the transforming power of forgiveness.

Sprigg was an amateur musician, and the Shaker ladies had permitted her to play their piano and their small organ, but when she asked to play the grand organ they refused her. She went to her room and there, in privacy (she thought) she threw a toddler-sized tantrum, sobbing and pounding her fists into her pillow. ("And," she says, "I added a few curse words that toddlers don't know.") Then, to her horror, she realized that Sister Bertha, concerned, had followed her to her room and had witnessed everything. "But there was still a glint in Sister Bertha's eye, and I thought God help anyone who really does hurt someone she loves. I made my blubbering excuses, about how sometimes I just lost it, but in the light of such forgiving love nothing mattered. The main point was everything was all right. The thing I had dreaded most - that I would be discovered as the spoiled, self-centered person I was -- had happened, and it was still all right. Bertha had seen the worst side of me, and she loved me just the same….God was in heaven, all was right with the world."

That's the gospel: God has seen the worst side of me, and he still loves me. That is the only truly transforming message I know. We talk glibly about rehabilitating criminals, as if we actually know how to do it. Why, we don't even know how to rehabilitate ourselves! The promise of our faith is not rehabilitation but transformation. And human transformation begins with, and cannot proceed without, an assurance that God loves us just as we are. Without that "good news" we live pitiful lives hiding from God in the garden, trying to cover our nakedness.
Paul frightens me, in Ephesians, when he calls Christians to be "imitators of God." In other places he challenges the believers in one church, to imitate the piety and devotion of those in another church. That seems a tad insensitive. He even has the audacity to advise his readers to imitate him. I think I'm o.k. even when he tells us to imitate Christ - I take it to mean the earthly Jesus. But when he says Christians should imitate God - I'm really uneasy. Karl Barth warned us that, "There is an infinite qualitative difference between man and God." After all, God is perfect. God is all knowing, all loving, all powerful. We can't be any of these things. And trying to be so will lead to self-righteousness. Until you read further, in this passage from Ephesians (which Craig read so well for us this morning) and understand that Paul is not asking us to imitate God in his glory but in his forgiveness and in his grace. ("Grace" is unearned, unmerited and unconditional love.) And that may be possible for us to do, at least in part.

Paul is saying, "Let love come full circle." Let us not be like the ungrateful servant, who having been granted great forgiveness, would extend not even a little to someone else. That breaks the circle.

As God's beloved child, I return my Father's love by imitating it in regard to his other children, my brothers and sisters. But, wait! God's love is different! (It isn't "what comes naturally.") And, shocking to realize, I am to imitate God's kind of love and not my own. God's kind of love is prevenient, it "comes before." It comes before any merit on my part. It is there before I feel even the tiniest awakening of love for God. It is there when I am utterly unable to love anything or anyone. It does for me when I am unable to do for myself. God's love goes out and finds the one who needs help, and doesn't wait for that one to come to it. It is proactive love. It is initiating love. That kind of love is what we are to imitate. We are to love those who don't deserve it, as Sister Bertha loved that petulant collage girl. We are to love those who don't return our love. We are to find the lost and love them. We are to be proactive in love. We are to initiate love. For that is exactly the way God loved us and saved us in Jesus Christ. And it is that kind of love that transforms people and transforms the world.

Paul's letters usually begin with a heavy theological discussion and end with practical advice. First "talking the talk," the then "walking the walk," as it were. But one follows the other. If we don't understand how God extends himself in love toward us, we will never understand how God expects us to extend ourselves in love toward others. In Chapter 5 of Ephesians Paul is well into the practical part of his letter, talking about how the followers of Jesus should live. He has just advised believers as to how they should behave within the fellowship, "…be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you." And, then, in regard to how Christians should act in the outside world, among those who are not Christians, he says, "Be careful how you live." (Peterson translates it, "Watch your step!")

Paul has told us to imitate God in love and grace, and now he gives us a list of attributes that characterize people who know they have been born again in that love and grace: they are thankful (important to think about this week), they keep good company, they live life in the light (open, honest and unashamed), they show wisdom, they make good use of their time. He also gives us a list of attributes that characterize the unredeemed: bitterness, filthiness, drunkenness, silly talk, wrath, slander, malice, impurity, covetousness. And here's what happens: he who has been made new in Christ, understanding that his "clean slate" has come as a free gift from God and was not earned or deserved in any way -- he will reach out to the unredeemed, and love them, and will do so without the slightest hint of self-righteousness. That is what Paul means when he says, "Be imitators of God." Love as God loves, extravagantly, recklessly, even dangerously.

Will Rogers was granted an audience with the Pope, and it was customary in those days for anyone who was to stand before the Holy Father to buy, from the Vatican at some expense, special garments made for the occasion. So Rogers bought his, and put them on, along with the others who were sharing the audience, and they went in. Afterwards, the reporters asked him how he liked the Pope, and he said he liked him just fine. Then they asked him how he felt about wearing those special clothes. He said he thought it was o.k., if that's what they wanted to do, but he did think it would be cheaper just to blindfold the Pope. Of course the point of the tradition was not what the Pope would see, but how pilgrims would present themselves.

We present ourselves to God dressed in deeds of love, for we know love to be God's very substance. It would be cheaper, and easier, of course, just to blindfold God - if such a thing were possible -- and live as we please. Since that is not possible, and God sees all -- and since we know by the Biblical witness that God, even after seeing the worst of us, poured out his love upon us, not once asking if we deserved it -- we have no choice but to love each other in the same uncalculating, reckless way. This is the way we flatter God: by imitating him in his love and grace.