Sermon Illustrations on Acceptance
Background
Does God Accept Us as We Are?
Romans 6 shines a bright spotlight on the dangerous half-truth, currently fashionable, that ‘God accepts us as we are.’ Will ‘God’s acceptance’ do as a complete grounding of Christian ethics? Emphatically not. Grace reaches where humans are, and accepts them as they are, because anything less would result in nobody’s being saved. Justification is by grace alone, through faith alone.
But grace is always transformative. God accepts us where we are, but God does not intend to leave us where we are…”The radical inclusivity of the gospel must be matched by the radical exclusivity of Christian holiness.”
Does God Really Like Me?
I don’t know what I did wrong. But he had that “calmer than calm” look that hid a rage inside. I picked up the phone and saw her name. Not now. I can’t handle her right now. I scanned the room, looking for someone I knew. I just wanted to disappear. I didn’t have the energy for small talk. So I got more appetizers. “How dare you!” he screamed. Then he let loose about everything that’s wrong with me. If I said anything, she would just blow up again. So I let it go.
We’ve all experienced situations like these. We’ve felt disconnected and judged, overwhelmed by friends and underwhelmed by our relatives. We know how it feels when someone doesn’t want us around. And we know how it feels when someone is sucking up all our energy. We’ve been yelled at. And we’ve yelled back. We’ve been ignored. We’ve done the ignoring.
We’ve felt people were just putting up with us. And we’ve just put up with others too. Whether we know it or not, all these experiences color our experience of God. If you’ve been ignored, scolded, or shamed, then you’ve probably wondered—consciously or unconsciously—if God is ignoring, scolding, or shaming you. Or, more painfully, maybe you think God is just putting up with you. We’re told that God loves us. But the real question is, Does God really like me?
Taken from Does God Really Like Me?: Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us by Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw Copyright (c) 2020 by Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Most Private is Often What Resonates the Strongest
The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts:
I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence, most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared and expressed, speak most deeply to others.
The Origin of Acceptance
The word “acceptance” has an interesting origin. It comes from the Latin ad capere, which means to “take to oneself.” What does that mean? It’s a paradoxical truth, but in order for us to accept others, we must first accept ourselves. Self-acceptance leads to acceptance of others.
The opposite is also true. As hard as it is in the moment when we experience the scorn and judgment of another, it usually has more to do with their own lack of self-acceptance than with anything we have done ourselves. In order to accept others, we must “take to oneself,” that is, to accept the person God has created in us. There is a tension in this to be sure. We are all “works in progress,” and we all have “sharp edges” in need of being smoothed out. Yet, once we accept ourselves as we truly are, we may actually be more capable of growing in our faith.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Stories
Betting on Jesus
We didn’t have a lot of rules [at the food pantry at St. Gregory, an Episcopal congregation in San Francisco]. You could be a drunk or junkie, but you couldn’t volunteer if you were high. You couldn’t steal food, call people names, or get in fights. Otherwise anyone was welcome to jump in and start working. We were making a bet that what Jesus suggested was true: when you begin to expand your ideas of who the right people are, when you break down boundaries to share food with strangers, God shows up.
Sara Miles, Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead, Jossey-Bass, 2010.
Free to Love and Be Loved
Here’s a testimony from Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel:
Harper grew up as a child of a single mother. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Philadelphia where the child was in an excellent school, to a small community near Cape May where she was the only African-American child in her school.
She was teased, bullied, betrayed by friends and internalized a deep sense of shame and unworthiness that haunted her.
So twenty years later, she is struggling, and she decides to ask for healing prayer. She doesn’t know precisely what she needs to be healed from, she just knows something isn’t right.
The group gathered there joined hands with Lisa and prayed for God to reveal what he wanted for her. The leader raised her head and asked the group if they heard anything. A few people said they felt deep pain and knew God wanted to heal it. Then the leader shared that while in prayer she saw a word, written on paper and fixed to Harper’s forehead. The word was “unwanted.”
And that was it. Harper broke down as she realized, that was the core of her identity. That she was unwanted. Unloved.
The woman leading the group then said, “God wants to remove that label…and replace it with a new name.” They started praying again, asking Jesus to reveal the label to Harper, and she saw clearly (with her eyes closed) Jesus removing the old label and placing a new one over her head that read “Wanted.”
Harper wrote, “I wept again and giggled…it was the first time in twenty years that love had broken through. It might have been the first time ever. With my new name, my armor came down and I was free to love and be loved.”
Scott Bowerman, Source Material from Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel, pp. 79-80. New York: Waterbrook, 2016.
Moving the Fence
In the Second World War, a group of soldiers were fighting in the rural countryside of France. During an intense battle, one of the American soldiers was killed. His comrades did not want to leave his body on the battlefield and decided to give him a Christian burial.
They remembered a church a few miles behind the front lines whose grounds included a small cemetery surrounded by a white fence. After receiving permission to take their friend’s body to the cemetery, they set out for the church, arriving just before sunset.
A priest, his bent-over back and frail body betraying his many years, responded to their knocking. His face, deeply wrinkled and tan, was the home of two fierce eyes that flashed with wisdom and passion.
“Our friend was killed in battle,” they blurted out, “and we wanted to give him a church burial.” Apparently the priest understood what they were asking, although he spoke in very broken English. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we can bury only those of the same faith here.”
Weary after many months of war, the soldiers simply turned to walk away. “But,” the old priest called after them, “you can bury him outside the fence.” Cynical and exhausted, the soldiers dug a grave and buried their friend just outside the white fence.
They finished after nightfall. The next morning, the entire unit was ordered to move on, and the group raced back to the little church for one final goodbye to their friend. When they arrived, they couldn’t find the grave site, tired and confused, they knocked on the door of the church.
They asked the old priest if he knew where they had buried their friend. “It was dark last night and we were exhausted. We must have been disoriented.” A smile flashed across the old priest’s face. “After you left last night, I could not sleep, so I went outside early this morning and I moved the fence.”
Mike Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People, Zondervan, 2015.
Rejection and Acceptance
In his book The Logic of the Spirit, James Loder talks about a woman with whom he had been in a therapeutic relationship for years. This woman’s underlying issue seemed to be a complete sense of rejection by her mother. She had never experienced her mother’s unconditional love.
This woman described an experience where she went back to the day she was born. The delivery room was cold. She saw her mother laying there looking at her with contempt. And suddenly, a warm light filled the room. Jesus picked her up moments after her birth and looked at her adoringly. Jesus kissed her and swung her around in delight. Jesus had replaced her mother at her birth. She saw his eyes looking at her as if she were his only child. Rejection had been replaced by sheer joy.
After this transforming experience, the hurt of being rejected by her mother did not magically go away, but it was no longer debilitating for her. The rejection had been redeemed. And she was able to live out of a place of knowing that even though her mother had failed her, her mother Jesus had given her new birth.
Scott Bowerman, Source material from James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit. Jossey- Bass, 1988.
Wanted by God
Lisa Sharon Harper shares a powerful testimony in her book, The Very Good Gospel.
Her story is that she grew up the child of a single mother after her parents divorced. After the divorce she and her mother moved from Philadelphia to a small community near Cape May where she was the only African-American child in her school.
She was teased, bullied, betrayed by friends, and internalized a deep sense of shame and unworthiness that haunted her, shadowing her life.
Twenty years later, still struggling with the wounds inflicted in her childhood, she felt led to ask for healing prayer.
The prayer session, she was seated in a group, while the leader took both of her hands and asked Jesus to speak, revealing what he wanted to heal. When the leader asked if anyone had heard anything, some of the members said they felt “deep pain” and knew that Jesus wanted to heal it. The leader said that she had seen a word, written on paper and stuck to her forehead. It said “unwanted.”
Harper wept, realizing that the lie that she was unwanted and unloved was the core of her identity.
The leader told Harper that, “God wants to remove that label from your forehead and replace it with a new name.” They began praying again, asking for Harper to see the label and for Jesus to replace it. Though her eyes were closed, Harper saw Jesus remove the old label and place a new one on her head: “Wanted.”
She wept and began to giggle. She writes, “it was the first time in twenty years that love had broken through. It might have been the first time ever. With my new name, my armor came down and I was free to love and be loved.”
Scott Bowerman, summarizing Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel, pp. 79-80. New York: Waterbrook, 2016.
When Words Fail
Ronald Rohlheiser tells a true story of a Jewish boy named Mordechai who could not be coaxed into going to school. When he turned six years old, his mother forced him to go, but the process was miserable for both mother and son. The boy cried, kicking and screaming the entire way. Once he had been dropped off, the mother began her return home, only to find Mordechai already there, having run home immediately after getting dropped off.
Each day, the mother would drag the boy to school, and each day he would fight her tooth and nail, then run back home as soon as he could. At this point, the parents resorted to the usual carrots and sticks, bribes, and threats that most parents resort to when no other meaningful path presented itself.
Finally, they decided to visit their rabbi, hoping he might have some deeper wisdom to offer. To their relief, the rabbi was happy to help, telling the parents that if the boy wouldn’t respond to their words, to “bring him to me.”
The parents brought the boy to the rabbi’s study. The rabbi didn’t say a word. Instead, he simply picked the boy up and held him in his arms, close to his heart. He did this for a long period of time, until finally, he set the boy down. This connection was all the boy needed to have the courage to go to school. And go to school he did, Mordechai would grow up to become a great rabbi and scholar. Ultimately, when words fail, a silent embrace may be all that is needed.
Stuart Strachan Jr., Source material from Ronald Rolheiser, Our One Great Act of Fidelity: Waiting for Christ in the Eucharist
Analogies
The Bar and the Church
The neighborhood bar is possible the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to give his church. It’s an imitation, dispensing liquor instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but it is a permissive, accepting, and inclusive fellowship. It is unshockable. It is democratic. You can tell people secrets and they don’t usually tell others or even want to.
The bar flourishes not because most people are alcoholics, but because God has put into the human heart the desire to know and be known, to love and be loved, and so many seek a counterfeit at the price of a few beers.
With all my heart I believe that Christ wants his church to be unshockable, democratic, permissive- a fellowship where people can come in and say, “I’m sunk!” “I’m beat!” “I’ve had it!” Alcoholics Anonymous has this quality. Our churches often miss it.
Keith Miller and Bruce Larson, Edge of Adventure, Fleming H Revell Co, 1991.
Welcoming, Hospitality, Parable of the Great Banquet
A man named Jim Haynes died last year at 87 years old, in Paris where he’d lived for decades. Jim Haynes was known as the “man who invited the world over for dinner.” Why? Because for more than 40 years, on Sunday nights he held informal dinners at his home where anyone was invited. People would squeeze into his apartment, shoulder to shoulder, strangers striking up conversations, balancing their dinners on paper plates and reaching over each other to press the plastic spout on a communal box of wine.
Absolutely anyone was invited – all you had to do was call or email and Jim Haynes would add your name to the guest list. No questions asked. At these parties, “there would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities – locals, immigrants, travelers – milled around the small, open-plan (home). A pot of hearty food bubbled on the (stove) and servings would be dished out on to a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle.”
At the dinners’ peak, Jim would welcome up to 120 guests, filling up his home and spilling out into the back garden. An estimated 150,000 people came to his dinners over the years he hosted them. “‘The door was always open,’ said Amanda Morrow, an Australian journalist who stayed with Jim for a year-and-a-half. ‘It was a revolving door of guests…Jim never said ‘no’ to anyone.”
Scott Bowerman, Source Material from Vicky Baker, “Jim Haynes: A man who invited the world over for dinner,” BBC News, Jan. 24 2021.
When Grace Strikes
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.’ If that happens to us, we experience grace.
Paul Tillich quoted in Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel, p.28-29.
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