Henrietta United Church
of Christ
Rev.
David Inglis August 28, 2005
Romans 12:9-21
“Spirit
Led–The Ham of God”
Whew! I counted up Paul’s list of instructions for
Christian behavior, and there are 29 “Christian commandments” in this list! If you put that list on your mirror and
looked at it first thing in the morning and said, “OK, today I’m going to
really live like a Christian and do all these things,” how many would you be
able to accomplish before you dropped into bed of exhaustion? There’s no question that really following any
of these items could reorient our lives and make us better people. But if we take on the whole list and set
about trying to accomplish them all, we’ll be overwhelmed. Today’s bulletin cover I think captures what
Paul’s list is really about. It’s not
about being led by our desire to rack up virtue points. It’s about being spirit led.
But what does that
actually mean? How do you let God’s
Spirit lift and open your spirit so you begin to naturally do all these
unnatural things that Paul lays out for us as marks of a Christian?
I recently read a
real-life example that I think will help us get the feel for it. It comes from Anne Lamott’s book Plan B,
that just came out this year. Anne
Lamott is a writer who’s been around the block of reality a few times. She was trapped in addiction for many years,
went from one man to another, and has a teenage son that she struggles to
mother alone. Some years ago, while she
was early in her addiction recovery, she stumbled into a Presbyterian church,
and found there glimpses of a love, truth and hope that gave her a flickering
light for her rocky path. Every day she
struggles to orient her life according to that light. But every day’s a struggle.
She writes about her
49th birthday. As she woke
up, she was aware she was beginning a new year of her life, a life which in her
best moments she hoped would make the world a little better place. She writes a column sharing her values, she
writes books, she writes her Senators and Congresspeople, she sometimes
demonstrates for causes she believes in.
But she woke up “pinned to the bed by centrifugal sadness and
frustration.” It was the messy state of the world that was doing it to her–especially
the war in Iraq. As the war dragged on,
more of our young military personnel were killed and wounded, more Iraqis lost
loved ones, and the government’s justification for the war rings more and more
hollow, she had been feeling her sense of hope getting sucked out of her. She just lay there feeling paralyzed. Her dog Lily came over and worriedly licked
her back to life, and she got up, and
found it in her to call her priest friend Tom.
“Tom,” she said. “I need some good news today, some hope. You
got any signs of hope for me?”
He thought for a long
minute. “Well, my cactuses are blooming. Last week they were ugly and
reptilian. Now they’re bursting with red and pink blossoms. They don’t bloom
every year, so you have to love them while they’re here.
Anne explained that
she didn’t really like cactuses, and needed a different kind of hope. “I want to know what to do when the world’s
in such a mess. Where do we even
start?”
Tom said, “Well, we start by being kind to
ourselves. We breathe, we eat. We remember that God is present wherever people
suffer. God’s here with us when we’re miserable, and God is there in Iraq. The
suffering of innocent people draws God close to them. Kids hit by U.S. bombs
are not abandoned by God.”
“Well, it sure looks
like they were,” Anne said. “It sure looks that way to their parents.”
Tom said, “It also
looked like Christ had been abandoned on the cross. It looked like a win for
the Romans.”
“But how do we help?
How do we keep from losing our minds?”
“You take care of the
suffering,” Tom told her.
“But I can’t get to
Iraq.”
“There are folks who
are miserable here.”
After they got off the
phone, Anne tried that age-old method of changing her outlook–she ate some
chocolates. After all, it was her
birthday. But it didn’t really do the
trick. So she quieted herself and
simply asked God to help her be helpful.
She just stayed with that simple prayer, “Help me to be helpful. Help me.”
It was one of those times she felt like her prayer actually made it
through the ceiling, and didn’t bounce back like an e-mail sent to the wrong
address.
Then she drove to the
supermarket. She flirted with everyone
in the store, especially the old people, and felt a little lighter. When the checker finished ringing up Anne’s
items, she looked at her receipt, her eyes got real big, and she shouted,“Hey!
You’ve won a ham!”
Anne felt blindsided
by the news. She had asked for help, not a ham. What on earth was she going to
do with ten pounds of salty pink eraser?
Ham made her bloat.
She thought about
telling the cashier to give it to the next person who came through with food
stamps. But for some reason, she
waited. If God was giving her a ham for some reason, maybe she should receive
it. She mused to herself, “Maybe it’s
the ham of God that takes away the sins of the world.”
She waited ten minutes
for the bagger to get the ham from the back of the store, and was impatient to
get home so she could figure out how to start caring for suffering people, or
maybe turn on the TV. As she wheeled
her cart through the parking lot, she had images of chucking the ham into a
field. She was so distracted that she
crashed her cart smack into a slow-moving rusty wreck of a car.
She started to
apologize, and then realized that she knew the dark-faced driver. It was an old friend that had gotten sober
when Anne had, and they each had a sons at the same time. Anne said, “Hey, how are you? Today’s my birthday.”
“Happy birthday,” she
said. She looked drained and
pinched. Then she started to cry. When
Anne drew closer to her, she pointed to her gas gauge.
“I don’t have money
for gas or food. I’ve never asked for
money from a friend since I got sober, but do you think you could help me?”
“I’ve got some money,”
Anne said.
“No, no, I just need
gas. I’ve never asked anyone for a handout.”
“It’s not a
handout. It’s my birthday
present.” Anne took all of the bills
out of her wallet and thrust them into her hand. Then she reached into her shopping cart, held up the salty pink
eraser, and said, “Hey, do you and your kids like ham?”
“Ham? We love ham. We could eat it every meal.”
Anne’s friend took the
ham and put it in the seat beside her lovingly, as if she was going to strap it
in. And then she cried some more, tears
of gratitude and relief.
Anne writes,
Later, thinking about her,
I remembered the seasonal showers in the desert, how potholes in the rocks fill
up with rain. When you look later,
there are already frogs in the water, and little shrimp reproducing, like
commas doing the macarena; and it seems, but only seems, that you went from
parched to overflow in the blink of an eye.”1
Now I’m going to read
the first half of Paul’s instructions on Christian living again, and I want you
to see if you can connect each item to something that Anne Lamott did in this
story.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in the spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers (Romans 12:9-13).
Isn’t it amazing? Paul’s list of Christian actions were the
last thing on Anne Lamott’s mind. And
yet she fulfilled each one without even thinking about it. She didn’t have to
be a saint, which she readily admits she isn’t. She didn’t have to look up what Paul said she should do. She just had to sincerely pray, “God, “help
me to be helpful. Help me,” and make
herself available to God. When she
asked to be aligned with God’s purpose, she discovered that she herself held in
her hands the “ham of God that takes away the sins of the world,” or something
like that. She herself became an
instrument of hope for a real live person.
That’s what it means
to live in the spirit. It’s not about
aspiring to achieve a high level of super spirituality. It’s about emptying yourself so that you can
be filled with something greater than yourself and used for a purpose higher
than yourself. Why don’t we take a
moment and just be in the presence of God together, and each of us in our way
pray quiet ourselves, open ourselves, empty ourselves, and pray for God’s
Spirit to use us more fully.
1.
Anne Lamott, Plan B, Riverhead Books, NY, 2005, pp. 3-11.