What is your heart’s desire? Really? Give a moment to think about it. I’ll keep talking, but you don’t have to pay attention. Spend the time identifying your heart’s desire. And don’t settle for an answer like, “Being happy.” You have to decide what would make you happy. I’ll shut up for a moment to let you think.
Our wishes were no doubt wide-ranging, but I bet many of them had something in common. I bet many of your heart’s desires sought a blessing for someone else. You may have a loved one suffering from addiction or depression, and you wish for their escape from hopelessness. You may hope for a new relationship , or an improved relationship. Those are both ways of hoping to be a blessing to another. You may long for greater understanding and reconciliation among the people’s of the world. Now don’t feel bad if the heart’s desire you came up with is closer to home, something like being free from pain. One of the greatest hardships of pain is that we don’t feel able to engage with others as we want to. We want blessings for others, and we want to be a blessing to others.
That heart’s desire has been granted. Truly. This is no gimmick. It’s right in today’s Gospel. “From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.” The Word, meaning the Divine purpose, the source of all coherence in life, became human to affirm our blessedness, to imbue us with grace upon grace. Not just a little but of grace, but grace upon grace. Endless grace. Endless favor. Endless blessedness. We have all received this grace upon grace. There is no dividing line between the worthy and the unworthy, between the righteous and the unrighteous. “We have all received grace upon grace.”
Why doesn’t this feel more real? While I was working on this sermon no less, someone came in to my office, and I barked rudely at them. I didn’t sound like I was a carrier of grace upon grace. So what’s up? Am I just not trying hard enough?
In a book-study group this Advent, we pondered a sentence that read, “being a blessing to others does not depend upon us, but upon prior mercies from the Lord.” It didn’t sit well with our Protestant work ethics. We thought surely effort is the key to everything. Then one member of the group remembered a recurring experience she has that made the author’s words newly true. She is a Eucharistic Visitor: One of the people who comes up at the end of the services to take Communion to shut-ins. She confessed that this ministry scares the dickens out of her, because she is very insecure about praying spontaneously in response to spoken needs. In her insecurity, she is moved to pray with her whole heart for God’s help before she enters a house. And invariable she receives this great gift: She feels God working through her and in her. She didn’t say this, but I will: Christmas happens in her. God’s faithfulness is newly real in this time and place. The doorway to that experience was not effort; it was prayer. Prayer: the prying open of our hearts to newly receive the Christ child.
Prayer serves us better than effort. For most of us, this is not the first time we have come across this wisdom. I went home from that final book-study session thinking that my spiritual progress is a bit like my golf game: I have to keep learning the same thing over and over and over again. So I have a visual aid for us to help us all remember that prayer will serve us better than effort. Here is a golf club: the key to your spiritual life. I owe this illustration to Dean Reinmuth of the Golf Channel. He illustrated what happens when the average golfer tries to put too much effort into swinging the golf club. See, the glub just waggles erratically with no rhythm. Consider this an image of the average Christian as well as the average golfer. He points out that the golf club is actually designed with weight at the end, so it swings much better with less effort. All you need to do is let the club be, let it be what it was meant to be. Like this: See, it swings effortlessly.
Today, we are all invited to come forward for anointing and laying on of hands for healing. You may wonder whether you should come forward if you can’t identify a specific ailment for which you seek healing. I urge you to come forward. There is one kind of healing we all need. We need help to simply be, to experience fully who God has made us to be, to experience fully that we are each a blessing. The oil we use is blessed by the Bishop to evoke the prayers of all the saints. A fellow parishioner is present praying as a sign of that communion. Come. Come and receive help in being the blessing God has made you to be. Come seeking to know ever more fully that you are a blessing.