Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "Resisting God’s Grace"

Text: Luke 13:31-35

kind of touching, and sad:

Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem.

"How often," he says,

"would I have gathered your children together

as a hen gathers her brood under her wing,

and you were not willing!"

I can hear a father saying to his son,

You could have avoided so much grief and pain

if you would listen

and learn from my mistakes,

but you were not willing.

I can see a mother,

reaching out to hug her teenage daughter,

and the girl squirming away in embarrassment.

Resistant, rebellious Jerusalem . . .

knowing itself to be the child of God

yet insistent on finding its own way,

marching to its own drum,

making its own mistakes,

some of them rather impressive.

Like, killing the prophets and all that.

And, as with rebellious children . . .

you cry over them,

tears of frustration

and fear for their future

and your powerlessness to save them . . .

and at the same time you want to shake them,

and say, Stop! You’re killing yourself!

Yet it’s difficult to condemn Jerusalem outright . . .

and rightly so.

Because to look at Jerusalem is a little like

looking in a mirror.

We can all make a list, some of us probably a long one,

of the times and ways in which

we have rebelled against God.

That’s nothing new to any of us!

But what’s interesting in this scene

is the specifics about what is being resisted.

It’s perhaps natural for most of us

to resist God’s judgment.

To run and hide, like Adam and Eve in the garden,

when God is approaching

and we know or suspect we’ve done wrong.

We are fragile,

and we don’t want to hear bad news about ourselves.

Most of us are quite skilled at condemning ourselves,

and we don’t want to hear more of it from God.

Now one could argue that that’s

an incomplete understanding of what it means

to be judged by God.

Nevertheless, it’s understandable that

most of us are going to display

a certain amount of resistance

to God’s judgment of us.

But what we seem to have in this gospel text

is Jesus lamenting that Jerusalem

prefers even to resist God’s grace.

Jerusalem does not want to be

gathered in, sheltered, and protected by God.

And that seems rather astonishing . . .

until, once again, I realize that

we can find the same thing

by looking in the mirror.

And all too clearly,

I can hear God lamenting over each of us:

How often would I have gathered you to myself

in a huge embrace,

but you pushed me away.

How often would I have

sheltered you under my wing,

but you insist on fighting your own battles.

Why is it so very hard for us, like Jerusalem,

to accept God’s goodness to us?

You’d think we would welcome it!

But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I have some suspicions about why that is . . .

At some time or another,

each of these has been true for me.

See if any of them fit you.

One difficulty, I think,

is that we tend to suspect an ulterior motive.

And let’s face it,

we humans often do act that way

toward one another.

I do something nice for you today,

because I know, in a couple of weeks,

there’s something I’m going to need from you.

We even sometimes do this with God:

okay, I’m going to pray more this week

so you’ll forgive that really awful thing

I did last week.

I’ll even increase my pledge,

if you’ll never again ask me to teach Sunday school.

That sort of thing!

So we suspect that perhaps God is plotting in the same way

in relation to us.

If I let God do something good for me now,

then the next time God needs

a missionary to South America,

or a youth group sponsor,

or a contribution to disaster relief,

well, I’ll be expected to take part.

Payback time.

We suspect, sometimes,

that God is gracious to us only

because God is being sneaky and wants something from us.

And so we resist.

At other times, our resistance may be

more of an overt rebellion.

Much like the way we probably felt toward our parents

in our teenage years.

We may say to God:

I’ll do it myself; I don’t need your help!

Or,

I’m tired of having to do things your way;

I want to do things my way!

We may feel the need to make our own way,

to prove ourselves, to find ourselves.

And God’s offer of grace, of guidance,

of shelter or protection

seems like something that will limit us,

close off options, hem us in.

Whereas we want to experience

the whole wide range of everything.

So we resist.

Now … what’s tricky about this is that

a phase of this kind of resistance

is probably necessary for our maturing in the faith,

just like it’s necessary developmentally

for us to go through all that adolescent stuff.

It’s only a problem if we get stuck there:

If we fear dependence so much that we

continue to refuse all the good

that God has to offer us.

If we remain rebellious,

we remain spiritual adolescents.

There is, however, another cause of resistance,

and it’s probably the most difficult to get at.

It’s not even easy to admit.

But many of us resist God’s grace

because we fear, deep down inside,

that we don’t deserve it.

That God can be, and should be,

good to everyone else . . .

but we ourselves are beyond hope.

I can remember the first time I discovered

that I was not the only person in the world

who felt this way!

It was when I was in San Angelo, in fact;

at a Presbyterian Women gathering

at this wonderful lake lodge that First Pres. owned …

What we were discussing was forgiveness,

and as we talking around our table,

we discovered that every one of us

found it easier to forgive other people

than to forgive ourselves.

And, that we could more easily believe

that God could forgive everyone else –

even murderers and all that –

more easily than we could believe

that God would forgive each of us, personally.

We resist the grace of God

because we feel unworthy to receive it.

Everyone else, yes, you bet! God loves them.

But not me.

And what’s so subtle about that

is that a healthy sense of guilt is good for us.

If we have sinned,

we need to own up to it;

we do need to seek forgiveness

and try to make the situation right again.

None of us like to be around people who,

in their own mind,

have never done anything wrong!

But the problem here is not so much guilt

as it is shame.

The two are similar . . .

Maybe the easiest way to describe the difference is this:

Guilt is the feeling that "I did something wrong."

Shame is the feeling "I am something wrong."

And most of us have at least

a small dose of that –

some of us, a large one.

Shame causes us to resist God’s grace

because God couldn’t possibly want to be good

to someone as unworthy as we are.

We need to be healed of our shame.

But we also need to remember that

the whole point of grace is that

no one deserves it.

It is a gift offered to us all.

Let me say that again:

It is a gift . . . offered to us all.

That’s important to hold in mind during Lent,

because at least traditionally,

during this time we try to look at

the less-than-wonderful things about ourselves.

And if we resist the grace of God,

that journey may be too painful to make.

Somehow we have to tear down the walls

that keep us from God,

and God from us.

After all, we’re the ones that built them!

I’m reminded of the story I’m sure you’ve all heard,

about a couple who has been married for a few years,

and one day they are getting in the car to go some place . . .

He drives, ‘cause that’s just how they do it . . .

And as they are getting ready to pull out of the drive,

she turns to him and says,

"Remember how it used to be when we were dating?

Even in the car, we couldn’t stand to be separated

and we always sat cuddled up against each other. Remember?"

He turned to look at her, and he grinned.

"I haven’t moved."

Friends . . . God hasn’t moved,

God isn’t resisting us.

God wants to gather us in, embrace us,

shelter us, love us . . .

When will we be willing?

Amen.

© 2004 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)