I was in 6th or 7th grade, and for reasons that are still mysterious to me, my Mom and Dad dragged me to an evening I will never forget. It was at the home of a former drug addict and dealer, and I thought I was going to be bored. Then this little guy, named Anthony, with scars, tattoos and a scruffy beard stood up. He told about how he was bullied as a kid, and decided he wasn’t going to take it from anybody. Anyone who picked a fight with him he was going to take down…hard. In the days before three strikes and you’re out, this guy was in and out of prison for all sorts of violence. Recalling those days in prison, he looked at us with these really hard, scary eyes, and I knew he could still take any five of us out. They were eyes that revealed a soul that had seen darkness and known suffering. When Anthony talked about the night when his life collided with Jesus, talked about the way God opened his eyes, something dramatic happened to his face and his body. Anthony smiled and the hard eyes twinkled. The hard edge of Anthony driven to speak, got a spring in its step, and a hint of something bubbly. Anthony looked back on the rest of his life, and he talked about how God had prepared him on the streets, worked through kind people among all the hard ones, taught him skills, developed his strengths—even the visible scars and invisible wounds he suffered—all seemed to have prepared him not just for that moment of collision with Jesus, but for the life he lived for Christ now. Have you ever looked back on your life and wondered where was God? Have you ever looked back on your life and realized that somehow God was working in your life in ways you had never imagined? How do we recognize the hand of God on our lives as we look back? And on this Mother’s Day, how do we process remembering our moms? In our passage for today, Paul has some suggestions for knowing how our story has met God’s story.
First, let us unflinchingly acknowledge our mistakes and hard times. In our society, lots of us learn to knock ourselves down for our mistakes, to beat ourselves up for the hard times. In the middle of our guilt, sometimes people even say to us things like, “You must have done something really bad, that God wants to punish you.” Really? Not helpful! Paul does not white-wash his life—he says, “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.” We each have places where our life has been hard—the loss of someone we loved, the brutality we may have experienced, the costly mistakes we have made. They are what they are, and we have experienced them. Feeling sorry for ourselves or wishing we had made different choices won’t help us. We cannot turn back time and change them, but we do get to decide how we will move forward with those experiences.
Second, recognize the better person God was crafting all the time. Paul talks about how hard core he was for God—studying and working harder than many of his generation—and how passionate he was for all the traditions. Some of you have heard of C.S. Lewis, the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, among many others. Did you know he was an atheist before He knew Christ? Oh not just a dabbler—he was all in that there was no God. Lewis talks about it in his book, Surprised by Joy: “Lewis tells of his school teacher, Kirkpatrick. Nicknamed ‘The Great Knock,’ he was a furious debater and logician who taught Lewis how to build a case and make strong arguments. Kirkpatrick was an atheist, and he intended to strengthen Lewis in his own unbelief. But years later, when Lewis became a Christian, it turned out that ‘The Great Knock’ had trained [Lewis] well to become one of the greatest defenders of the Christian faith in the 20th century.”[1]Turns out that God works through our experiences to shape and mold us into the fuller, better person we will be in Christ. When we look back at those mistakes, wounds and hard times, how was God at work in them—to make us more compassionate, more thoughtful, more grace-filled servants of God?
Third, receive our purpose from God. The heart of wisdom recognizes that as we look back at our story, it was really never just about ourselves—God has been shaping us for a purpose. Because we were hurt, we can have greater compassion as others tell of their hurts. Because we have made mistakes, we know what it is to fail—so we do not have to sit in judgment of others for their failures. Because we have endured hard times, we can walk with others in their hard times with special effectiveness. Henri Nouwen had a great expression for this approach: he called it “wounded healing.” Our growing up, training, gifts, mistakes, hurts and hard times—they can all be turned to good. Even our demons and curses can become angels and blessings.
The Christian word for this is “redeeming” or “redemption.” Most of us think “redemption” is what you do with a coupon, but all through God’s story, “redemption” is something much more powerful. For fear of Pharaoh in Egypt, Moses’ mother puts him in a basket, and so he finds his way to Pharaoh’s daughter, and receives the training of a prince—just the person God needs to bring His people out of Egypt. The arrogant tattletale, Joseph, is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, and years later saves the whole region—including his brothers!—from famine. Joseph would later say, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”(Genesis 50:20) Ruth’s husband and father-in-law die, and Ruth joins her mother-in-law in poverty. Through Ruth’s kindness and steadfast love, God pours out blessings, not just on her and her mother-in-law, but on us as well. She’s one of the mothers in the line of Jesus. Of course, Jesus is the best example, right? As if being born in a stable was not humiliating enough for the Son of God, Jesus ends up being executed in one of the most degrading, painful ways humanity has ever figured out how to kill another person—crucifixion. Instead of taking it away or pretending it didn’t happen, God uses the steadfast love and humiliation of Christ, redeems those experiences, by raising Jesus from the dead. More than anything, God wants our lives, our stories, to collide with Jesus’ story, not to take away the pain and suffering of mistakes and hard times, but to redeem them, to make beauty from the pain, and bring grace from the ashes. Mysterious. Amazing. Grace.
That’s what Anthony taught me that night. When Anthony’s story met Christ’s story, suddenly everything that had come before looked completely different. Timothy Keller writes, “The Good News gives us a pair of spectacles through which we can review our own lives and see God preparing us and shaping us, even through our own failures and sins, to become vessels of His grace in the world.” Now as I look back on my Mom’s part in my story, I can look unflinchingly not only at her part, but mine. Now I can see how those experiences have made me who I am, but do not define me—Jesus’ love and sacrifice defines me, and Hispurpose shows me the way forward. Has your story met Jesus’ story yet? When you look back, can you see where Christ put His arm around you and carried you through? When we look back, can we see not just the pain, but the strengths God was developing in us? It’s no accident that we are together in this room today! We have cause for great humility today. It’s not our strength and hard work that brought us through but God loving, God guiding, always God. It’s not only our kindness or wisdom that has led us together, but all our darkest failures and disappointments, by grace turned to gold in Jesus Christ. And it gives us great hope and purpose! Yes, because we are here for more than ourselves, we realize that where our story meets Jesus’ story, that’s where the people around us find hope in grace. Happy Mother’s Day!
[1]Keller, Galatians for You (2013), p. 29.