With Outstretched Hands

With Outstretched Hands--September 20, 2016

"I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, 'Here I am, here I am,' to a nation that did not call on my name. I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices...." [Isaiah 65:1-2]

There are indeed times in this life, in this world, when you cannot go back again. 

If you should find yourself traveling by car in, say, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Northwest, you may well find that the mountain pass is closed for the winter, and you cannot drive in a new direction or cross back if you have come too far under the wrong weather conditions.  That is not a moral failing--neither of you, nor of the mountain road--it is just the nature of the terrain.  It literally goes with the territory.

Sometimes it is not about geography but about the passing of time: you cannot go back to your old high school and find your old friends.  Yes, you may well be able to go back to the building itself (although, even in that case, school buildings have been known to be razed and rebuilt, so even the bricks and mortar that were your bricks and mortar may be gone), but the people there will not be the people you knew when you were a student there.  Even if you go to some artificial re-gathering of your classmates at a reunion, you aren't really with the people who were your classmates. Those people are gone--they have become new people in all the years in between.  Your old eighteen-year-old friends are residents of a past to which you cannot go back, even if you can stand in the same old spots where you once walked to chemistry or algebra class.  Again, that is not a moral deficiency on your part--it is the way linear time works.  You can go forward, but you cannot go back again.

If you end up not liking the person who occupies the Oval Office, or the state governor's mansion, or your local city council, pretty much you have to wait it out until the next election--you don't get to have do-over on Wednesday, November 9th when you realize you have made a horrible mistake in your choice and wake up to realize you've been had.  You can decide to vote differently in the next election, but you don't get to undo the one you have already lived through. Whether there are or are not, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous line, "second acts in American lives," it is certainly true that you don't get to go back and have an Act One all over again.  Sometimes the road really is closed for the winter.  Sometimes the years really have scattered the old and familiar.

We Christians need to be honest about this.  If we are to have any word of real, solid, meaningful hope for the world (ourselves included), we are going to have to deal with the reality that none of us can travel back in time or drive a car through a closed mountain pass. We are going to have to deal with the reality that some areas of our lives will not allow for "do overs."  If you quit your job in a rage and a huff, and go stomping out of your office after smashing a window and keying your boss' car on your way through the parking lot, there is no going back the next day and expecting that you can pretend it didn't happen and go on collecting your usual paychecks.  If you move back to a place you have lived before after years of being away, you don't have the right to be upset if the people don't remember you or you don't have all the same "good old days" with the friends you used to have.  You are not the same "you" any longer, and they are not the same "them" anymore.

So when Christians say--and we have good reason to say this, mind you--that we believe that grace starts over with us, we need to be honest.  We are decidedly not saying that Christians are given the power to quit their jobs and then come back the next day with impunity when we have thought better of it. We are not saying that we can dodge the consequences of our choices once we realize that we made mistakes.  And we are not saying that everybody else around us is required to give us infinite second chances just because we keep messing up.  Eventually other people get tired of our repeated jabs, slights, and nicks, and they back off to keep from being hurt again.  Our actions--and our inactions--have consequences.  Our words--and our silences--can wound. So, for example, people convicted of embezzlement don't get to be the financial managers again.  And people who have hurt children don't get to be in positions to do it again.  The Gospel's promise of new beginnings is not a blank check for abusers and cheats to go on abusing and cheating all over again.  And on a scale that is perhaps closer to home, the promise of new beginnings doesn't mean that we can require people to "just get over" a broken trust, a betrayed relationship, or a last straw.  Abusers and schemers will want to use, to co-opt, the language of "starting over" and insist it is "the Christian thing to do" to just ignore those past choices, but that is not the Christian hope.  There are times when we do not go back again because we cannot, sometimes in big ways, and sometimes in little ones.

Now, having said all that, here is what the Good News does say: even when every other presence in your life has walked away and turned their back, the living God is still holding out open arms.  Even when every other bridge has been burned and you are still holding the lighter and the can of gasoline, Jesus is walking on water to get to you.  Even when you are turned away--dead set, 180-degrees in the opposite direction--from God, God is still ready for the new beginning to happen.  You cannot exhaust the possibilities for starting over with God. 

In a sense, that is what the cross is all about.  We have already done the worst we could to God--we crucified the Creator of the universe.  Forget about the small scrapes and nicks of day-to-day unkindnesses or slights--we literally up and killed the Source of Life.  That would have been the point at which we should have been done, washed up, past the point of no return, done-for.  But with the resurrection, grace started over--it started Jesus' life over, but kept the scars as proof of all that God endured for our sake.  And if even the risen Jesus keeps showing up in the presence of his disciples, there is the proof for us that there is never a point in this life at which God puts down those open arms.  We have already done the worst we could to God--and God did not walk away.

There is our hope.  We will still have to live with the outcomes of our choices in our families, our work-lives, our friendships, and our nation--those consequences are unavoidable, because that is what life in this world is.  But even when the worst has been done, the living God stands with open arms saying, "Here I am."  Even if we weren't calling for God or looking for God first.  When we Christians are honest about the consequences of  our choices for every other area of our lives, we get a clearer picture of the amazing news of God's grace. For even when every other bridge has been burned, ours is the God who says, "Leap out into my arms, and I will catch you."

What are the places in our lives where we are being dared to take the leap into the ever-present arms of Jesus?

Lord God, hold out your hands to us.  Pull us to you.