Acts 2:42 The Winnowing Grace of Community Bound to Christ

I started seminary very soon out of my undergrad degree, which meant that I hadn’t had any time to build up much of an income or savings. So I started seminary without a lot of resources. I was lucky enough to get into the PhD program in theology right after seminary, but unlike other grad school programs, this admission came with no stipend. I took on a parish part time, which helped, but made it really difficult to focus on school or on the parish. I managed the best I could, but I ended up falling behind on paying for tuition and for residence. I was gutted. I wondered if I had imagined my calling into the church, into ministry, into an academic pathway. Was it all just wishful thinking for someone who deeply desired to pursue the truth; was it all just self deception, this pursuit of God. If I’m honest, I felt angry, abandoned, lost, even. I waited for God’s grace. I experienced nothing. No answer. No response. Just nothing. I filled that hollowed out gap in my soul with alcohol on free offer from various social events I attended. 

Work wasn’t getting done. My PhD supervisor sat me down for a conversation. I should state at the outset that my PhD supervisor was also an Anglican priest. I said to him: I don’t think I belong here. I don’t think I ever did. I think I was lost, in need of explanation for a world I see as corrupt and hideous with people being happy only if they can distract themselves with the mundane affairs of possessing more, ticking the boxes of marriage, children, ladder climbing corporate jobs. So I thought maybe this God thing could blow away these BS illusions of control and meaning. But now, because I didn’t follow this path of chasing money and real estate wealth, I can’t even pay for a place to live or a meal plan for food. I don’t see God at work in any of this. Maybe God is just a placebo we use to prevent us from falling into despair about a world that has always seemed about to tip into the abyss of human hubris. 

My advisor actually smiled at me and laughed a little. He responded, “wow do you ever remind me of myself at your age. And then he told me a parable that I’m sure you all have heard before. A man falls overboard into the ocean and is drowning. He prays to God to save him from drowning. Three different vessels come by - a raft, a tugboat and a cargo ship. But the man turns each one away, saying, “I’m waiting on God to save me.” The man drowns, gets to heaven and when asked how he died replies: “I was waiting on you to save me but you left me there, drowning, with nothing.” God replies, “I sent you a raft, a tugboat and a cargo ship, what more did you want?” 

I experienced a flush of grace that hit me with the intensity of my original conversion and suddenly God’s light of simultaneous judgment and mercy shone all around me. I spent my entire life assuming I could discover and build on the truth alone, on my own, apart from the mass of ignorant, pedestrian individuals who cannot see the truth. If only I had enough knowledge, enough understanding of how the world worked and how to convince people, I could help to deliver justice. I didn’t need anyone else or only needed those enlightened enough to think like me. And so I never thought that I would need help. In fact, if I’m honest, I felt ashamed, like a failure, to admit that I couldn’t make it on my own - to follow my professor's boat analogy, to swim from my fall, to the safety of shore. Admit that I needed help, be open enough to receive it? By no means! I should accomplish this myself, in accordance with my own standards and capacities.

Oh the hubris. So it is that I was drowning in debt, allowing the help that was right there, to pass me by. When this finally clicked for me, I felt as if God had shaved me clean with the sting of newly exposed skin, soaking up his grace, his breath, his Spirit, to enable new growth, thicker and denser understanding of who he is. Please help me God, I begged, do not let me go. And the next day with my pride under God’s foot, I asked a friend for some help financially. That friend suggested I start a gofundme campaign amongst students at Wycliffe and folks in the Diocese of Toronto. I felt like a child, incompetent and needy, unsteady, unsure of myself, unbalanced. But over the course of two weeks, I raised the $13 000 I needed to pay off my debts and pay for the next year. 

I felt so ashamed to have to beg. And then my friend quoted this passage from Acts we had this morning to me: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

I broke down in tears. The cascade of grace toppled me to the ground: my professor’s parable, my own blindness to the pride and judgment I had raging in me my whole life grounded in fear, mitigated first by idealism that I thought could play out in intellectual, legal, moral, and political ways if I just understood all the rules of getting there, met with a shallow intellectual embrace of the idea of God, shattered by the reality of grace in calling out my own hubris, blindness, pride, and my turn to alcohol and a way of soothing my failure to achieve my ideals. Oh God, I believe, but help my unbelief. Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me and this world. My child, God answered, my ways are not your ways; my timing is not your timing. Those who labour by themselves, in accordance with their own presumption to have it right, they labour in vain. 

It was this event, this futility of my own intellectual and emotional construction of things, my presumption that I could go it alone, the demand that I recognize that grace is received only as I submit myself both to receiving and to giving together with “all who believed, who were together, who submitted themselves in mind, body, spirit, and goods, to bear one another up, so that through that mutual submission to one another, that mutual sharing with those I once presumed were lesser than, worse than, more immoral or unethical than, intellectually wrong, not just like me,” it was only in giving myself over to God revealed in Christ’s own self giving not to his own desire and will, but to his Father’s, that I finally grasped the depth, power and love of God.

God’s judgement of my hubris was excruciating, humbling, and derailing; it also allowed me to depart from the thieves and bandits who tried to convince me that power, control, coercion, force, political and physical might were the tickets to truth. The tugboat of Christ, though slow and plodding in our lives, is nonetheless the only one who has already changed our reality: from drowning in sin and death, from the despair of our own incapacity to make things right, just and good, to the hope and joy that God is with us even as we are struggling to stay afloat, to figure it out, to find our way, our meaning, our reason for continuing on. AMEN