Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

Preached by the Rev. Winton Boyd on June 10, 2007
Text: Galatians 1: 11-24

While living on a modest income in Fresno, CA, I discovered this sturdy and reliable gun cabinet that was a perfect fit for additional shelving in our kitchen. I loved it for several reasons – it was from a Goodwill type store (cheap), it was well built, with a little paint and extra shelves it would fit in our kitchen, and I liked the idea of converting a gun cabinet into something more domestic. Therefore, for a number of years it served our home well – storing cookbooks, plates, jars of flour and nuts and oatmeal and the like. I don’t think it is a true antique – but it is old enough to have a little character.

However, in the 8 years since moving to Madison, we have struggled to find a use for this beloved piece of furniture. It did not really fit in our current kitchen, so it went in our basement, where it mostly gathered dust. Last summer, we vowed to have a garage sale and clean out all unneeded furniture. I am not a pack rack, but I could not bear to give this away. I don’t think it has much value other than sentimental value. Like millions of others who have something they don’t know what to do with, I thought – “I’ll bring it to church!” I tried to find a use for it in my office, but it didn’t fit there either. For about 6 months it has been parked behind my office door.

I have tried for close to 8 years to find a reason to hang on to this piece of furniture. In fact, I began to see it as a symbol of how I, and so many of us, hold on or cling to things way beyond their usefulness. The fact that the storage unit business is booming even as house sizes are getting larger suggests that we are not alone in struggling with how to get rid of things.

So, a couple of weeks ago I said, this is it. The time has come. Maybe the best way to get rid of it is to do what preachers do, preach about it.

Lo and behold, I read the lectionary texts for today and we have this text from the apostle Paul in Galatians. Paul’s story raises the issue not of holding onto to possessions, but onto to old ways of being and old patterns of living and old beliefs.

In the relatively small world of the Middle East at the time of Jesus (Jerusalem’s population is estimated to have been about 80,000), Paul appears to have been a fairly well known and fiery Jewish antagonist. Well trained and zealous, he was widely known as a persecutor of the Jesus movement and any associated with it. Most of us may have heard about Paul’s dramatic story of conversion on the road to Damascus where he was literally blinded by the light. But word of his conversion took a while to get around – so much so that many Christians either feared him or disbelieved stories of his conversion long after he became a follower of Jesus. Many of his encounters in new cities included words like today’s passage – in which he seeks to distance himself from his past and demonstrate how God’s grace has brought him to a new place in life.

If we think about such a dramatic conversion – it is easy to imagine that both Paul and those he sought to teach would have a good deal of “unlearning” to do in order to move beyond his past. He would have to let go of strong stereotypes and instinctual reactions; he would have to be mindful of language; he would have to create new alliances with those who were formerly his enemies; he would have to ask for forgiveness and listen to the pain of those he persecuted in former days. So, while he may have had a dramatic change of heart, if he is like the rest of us, he had a long journey of “living into” the new life he had chosen.

And this is where I think his life might be most instructive for ours. We may not have dramatic conversation experiences, but we do know how difficult it is to live into new ways of thinking, acting, believing, or relating. We do know how hard it is, don’t we, to give up old patterns even when they know they don’t work or are unhelpful or are actually destructive. Certainly we have all heard of or know the life long smoker dying of lung cancer who won’t or can’t give up smoking; the diabetic who can’t or won’t give up “Death by chocolate” at Michael’s Frozen Custard. There is no need to point fingers, because we all probably have something similar in our lives.
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For Paul, this whole journey is one of “good news” and “grace.” His ability to hear God’s grace, to live out the gospel, to embrace the love shown in Christ rather than trying to kill Christians, “is not of human origin.” Paul appeals to his readers to throw themselves onto the grace and power of God.

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I recently heard the story of a journalist in San Francisco who was an avowed atheist. Sara Miles was recently interviewed on the PBS show, Religion an d Ethics: “Church was not part of my family life, and I don’t think I ever expected to find myself being a Christian or, as I used to think of it, a “religious nut.””
She is the very same woman who as a journalist covered the 1980s wars in Central America up close where people were dying, and later became an editor for the left-leaning investigative magazine “Mother Jones.” It was after that that she found herself walking into St. Gregory Church.

“I was just curious. I’m a reporter. ..I like to poke my nose in places, and I walked into this building thinking, “Huh, wonder what’s going on in there?” She found a church that offers Communion to everyone, including strangers.

“ And then a woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. And I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening to me. Got out of the church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, and came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread.”

This was 8 years ago, and she now runs a weekly drop in meal at the same church for up to 500 people each Friday. While Sara Miles life had a dramatic turn too – what she highlights, as Paul did, is grace – profound, mysterious, and even at times creepy. For Miles, grace was embodied in the strange and eclectic mix of people. “We offer food to everybody without exception. We offer food to whoever walks in the door. We’re the people that nobody wanted. You know, we’re gay people and we’re poor people and we’re people living on the streets. And we’re old ladies and cripples and whores and little children and foreigners and exactly the kind of people Jesus liked to hang out with.”

But, like Paul, she too had a good deal of “unlearning” to do – not the least of which is giving up her idea that to be a woman of faith was to be a “religious nut.” She had to learn new ways of looking at the world, of looking at herself, of seeing God when at one time she claimed there was no God.

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Where is the grace of God trying to break into our lives – and what might we need to unload, unlearn or give up to see or hear it?

Is it time to let go of old grudges or hurts that we held onto, in order to grow in our contentment in life?
Is it time to let go of unhelpful childhood notions of God, Jesus or Church in order that we might discover new ways of seeing God’s grace in the world, and more importantly, in our lives?
Are we cluttering our heads and hearts with information and busyness and activity to the extent that the Spirit has little room to breathe in a new wind?

The issue for me is not really this old cabinet. It has usefulness for someone somewhere. It is on this dolly so that it can be wheeled off to Goodwill to begin its new life. The issue is how am I moving into a new place in my life? How do I celebrate the time period that this piece conjures up in my mind and celebrate that while that time is no longer – the Spirit continues to work in marvelous and awe inspiring ways.

Meister Eckhart, an ancient Christian mystic, once said, “People must be so empty of all things and all works, whether inward or outwards, that they may become a proper home for God, wherein God may operate. The words of Paul in today’s text speak of his efforts to not only respond to God, but to create space in his life (it was three years, he says, before he returned to Jerusalem) to live into a new way of being.

His life, and maybe the “stuff” around us that clutters our lives, is an invitation for us to make a proper home for God, to open and empty ourselves with a certain expectancy. Amen