Sometimes,  church is all about being reminded of things you’ve long known to be true or being reassured of their truth in the face of tough challenges.  And then at other times,  church is about having our beliefs or assumptions turned upside down, or maybe even blown to bits.   That’s what happened to a lot of us who were at Thanksgiving Eve service at Holy Communion Wednesday evening.

In this case,  the person doing the upturning – the guy with the dynamite, so to speak – was our dear friend Walter Hermanns, Pastor Emeritus at Holy Communion.  Pastor Grimbol was scheduled to preach that evening, but his wife had to go into the hospital that morning,  and early that afternoon Walter was asked if he could step in for him – and he readily agreed.  And in fact,  despite the fact that Walter has not been feeling good (and was himself in the hospital not that long ago), he went on to deliver one of the most powerful and thought-provoking Thanksgiving sermons I have ever heard.   I hope he won’t mind me sharing a couple of its major points . . .  in what will amount to a rough paraphrase . . .

He began by talking about the terrible damage done by Hurricane Sandy,  a storm he followed closely because he’s a former New Yorker – and he still has family there.  He said that when you talk to people who have just managed to skirt disaster – who were maybe a block or two away from the worst of the flooding – or who suffered only minor damage compared to neighbors in lower-lying houses – you would repeatedly hear these familiar words: There, but for the Grace of God, go I.  On the surface, the notion sounds fine: it is an expression of thanksgiving and an acknowledgement that we have no reason for complaint because of the greater suffering of others.

But when you really think about those words,  you realize that they suggest something pretty terrible:  the notion that God shone His grace on you but not on that neighbor or coworker or complete stranger who lost everything they own or suffered the death of a loved one – or worse.  It offers up the picture of God favoring some people over other people- and it ties the concept of thanksgiving to how good we have it, or what calamity we are blessed to have escaped.  But what scripture calls us to do, in fact, is to be thankful in all things. . . because God’s grace is with us in all things and at all times.   And to see God’s grace evident only in the avoidance of trouble is to badly misunderstand what grace really is.  Grace is something always with us, sustaining us, helping us, giving life to us. . . even in the face of the whatever awfulness the world might throw across our path.

It’s complicated stuff, to be sure.   It touches on the question of how God operates in the world.  Does God determine every particular thing that happens to us?  Does God decide who lives and who dies?  Whose house is washed away and whose house is left untouched?  Some believe that the answer to those questions is an emphatic Yes.  God determines everything that happens to us.  Others see God not so much as an active force determining the course of events but still vividly, vibrantly present in the lives and hearts of His people.  And of course there are also people who believe that God created this world and then long ago left it (and us) to our own devices, to fend for ourselves.  No matter how you happen to answer such a question,  I hope you will not be careless or cavalier with a phrase like “there but for the grace of God go I.”   Those words, for whatever comfort they might seem to provide, in fact keep us from a full, rich understanding of God’s grace.  Those words essentially mean that God’s grace was there when my dad barely escaped the fire which destroyed his childhood home. . . but it was not there on that day in November of 1988 when my mom suddenly and inexplicably died.  That phrase suggests that God’s grace was there when I was hired by WGTD – or Carthage – or Holy Communion . . . but not when my brother-in-law suddenly lost his job.   And those words imply that God’s grace was there when I learned that the lump I’d found in one of my armpits proved to be nothing at all . . .  but was not there the day that Walter was diagnosed with MS.

I do not believe that for a moment.  Instead, I believe that God’s grace is always with us – both in life’s brightest and darkest moments.

And yet,  I know that I have said those words “there but for the grace of God go I” – and more than once.   As someone who has been ridiculously blessed far beyond my deserving, that well-worn phrase has been a convenient and lazy way to acknowledge the suffering of others while proclaiming gratitude for the blessings that are mine.    But thanks to Pastor Walter’s eloquent words Wednesday night,  I find myself thinking about those words very differently- and I hope I never lazily or carelessly turn to them ever again.   And I suspect that a lot of us sitting in those pews Wednesday night are feeling the same thing.  At least I sure hope so.

pictured above:  This is a painting I saw in a store window in Manhatten – not far from the building used for the exterior shots of the building on Friends where Joey/ Chandler and Monica/Rachel live.