I heard about this little girl who wandered into her father’s study while he was working on the computer.  She’d seen him before typing on the computer, and printing it out and reading what he’d typed.  So she crawled up onto his lap and she began to type on the computer, to press the keys arbitrarily, letters and numbers just appearing randomly.  At one point though, she hit the print button, and printed out what she had typed.  And she grabbed the piece of paper from the printer and held it up in front of her father and said, “Tell me Daddy, what does it say?  What does it say?” 

Our lives are like that sometimes, aren’t they?  Events happen that are random and confusing to us, with no discernible pattern, leading it seems in no particular direction.  Someone once told me that if you aren’t confused by life, you really don’t understand what’s going on.  And yet we want to understand, don’t we?  We want to make sense of it all.  We long to hold our lives up to someone, like this little girl held up this sheet of paper to her father, and ask, “Tell me, what does it say?  What does it all mean?” 

This is one reason, I think, why I like to watch James Bond movies.  I am so delighted that James Bond will continue with someone new playing James Bond, even though I did think that Pierce Brosnan was the best James Bond.  Those of you who have never watched a James Bond movie will have no idea what I’m talking about.  But in a James Bond movie, or there are these newer movies out that are somewhat similar, “The Bourne Ultimatum”, for example, or in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, from the opening scenes to the very end, there’s something mysterious happening here, something we don’t understand, something we can’t quite figure out, we have to work at it to figure it out.  We as the viewers are involved immediately in a mystery, we are engaged in it, we’re tangled up in it, in the same way that we are all tangled up and engaged in the mystery of our lives. 

When I think of being tangled up in the mystery of life, I think of this preacher I heard about who was wired for sound the way I am up here, only there was a cord attached to his microphone; he didn’t have a wireless microphone.  And as he preached he moved briskly around the platform, and he would point and make hand gestures.  (I’ve heard of preachers who do it this way.  I hear they’re pretty good actually.)  But this preacher would jerk the microphone cord around with him as he preached.  One Sunday, he got all tangled up in the cord, he almost had himself tied up in it, and he nearly tripped, and he was jerking himself around trying to free himself, he looked a little bit like Frankenstein up there, Herman Munster.  And a little girl in the front pew whispered to her mother, “If he gets loose, will he hurt us?” 

And so we find ourselves entangled, involved, in a James Bond movie, or in Alfred Hitchcock, or in any mystery we might watch or read, and we find ourselves entangled, involved, in this great mystery of our lives.  There are so many things that we simply do not understand.  One of the things that so boggles my mind about life is simply how quickly it all goes by, how quickly the years come and go.  I turned 48 this year, and even at 48 you look back and think, now where has the time gone.  I can’t imagine what some of you must be thinking.  I heard of a young boy who asked his grandmother how old she was, and she answered, some of you may have answered it this way too, she said, “I’m 39 and holding.”  So her grandson asked, “How old would you be if you let go?”  There is this weird feeling sometimes about how quickly time passes, how it all just goes by so fast. 

But sooner or later we discover the greatest mystery of life, the greatest mystery of them all.  It’s not how James Bond somehow manages to always get his man, or his woman; it’s not how quickly we get older, how quickly time passes.  The greatest mystery of life, I believe, is the mystery of grace.  Grace.  God’s grace.  The mystery of God’s love for us, even when we’ve done nothing to earn his love, even when we seem the least deserving of this love.  Think of it.  We’ve done nothing to earn it; we’ve done nothing to deserve it really.  And yet God loves us anyway; he showers his mercy on us anyway.  And it’s a mystery why this should be so. 

I like to think of grace in terms of this young man I heard about who returns home to his parents after he’s been away and he’s done some things, he’s lived in a way that some people would find questionable, objectionable.  And the people of his small, provincial hometown, and of his home church, know about all this.  And one of the more, I would say, judgmental members of the church approaches the mother of this young man one day and says that she’s surprised frankly that they would allow this son of theirs to return home.  They shouldn’t even really let him come back to church.  After all, their son is, in this woman’s words, “an abomination.”  But the mother of this young man, and I picture her with a sweet and gracious smile on her face, she says, “Well, he may be an abomination for all I know, but we still love him; he still is our pride and joy.” 

This is grace.  I don’t wish to offend anyone who is here today, but I wonder if we don’t all need to be reminded that, in a way, we all of us are abominations in the sight of God.  The Bible puts it this way, that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  And yet somehow, against all reason, God loves us anyway.  Despite what we may have done, despite what we may think of ourselves at times, despite what someone else may think of you, despite the labels that someone else may put on you, we still are declared to be God’s children, we still are his pride and joy. 

Or think of grace this way, as a man who stays overnight with some friends in a distant city.  They even throw an elegant dinner party for him, and the hostess brings out a beautiful, hand-crocheted, lace tablecloth she inherited from her grandmother.  To this woman, this hostess, it’s a priceless heirloom.  But in a careless moment, the guest, this man who’s visiting, overturns a glass of red wine on this beautiful tablecloth, or for us Methodists, it’s a glass of grape juice that he overturns.  He’s horrified, mortified, at what he’s done, it immediately begins to stain the tablecloth, and he makes his apologies to the hostess, but she quickly says that it’s alright, there’s no harm done, she won’t have any trouble at all getting it out.  So after the party’s over, he goes to bed as if nothing has happened, he doesn’t give it another thought.  But in the middle of the night he wakes up, he’s thirsty, and goes downstairs to get a drink of water.  And there he finds the hostess, scrubbing away furiously at that tablecloth with soap and water in the sink.  She probably started scrubbing the minute the party was over, and she may indeed scrub all night, to get the stain out, so that her guest won’t feel guilty or embarrassed.  This is grace, and it’s a mystery why God should work, why God should work, to erase the stain of sin that we have made of our lives. 

And yet this is the promise that we have.  “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is a gift from God.”  Our salvation is not our doing.  Grace is not something we do for ourselves, it’s not something we earn.  It is God.  It is God’s doing.  It is God’s desire for your life.           

Helmut Thielicke, a German theologian, wrote these words about the love of God: 

When Jesus loved a guilt-laden and troubled person and helped him, he saw in him a child of God.  He saw in him a human being whom his Father loved and grieved over because he was going wrong.  He saw him as God originally designed and meant him to be, and therefore he saw through the surface layer of grime and dirt to the real person underneath. 

One of the best stories I think I’ve ever heard is told by Lloyd John Ogilvie, who retired not long ago as the chaplain of the United States Senate.  He tells of a couple he knew that he saw at the airport.  He didn’t disturb them, he simply observed, because they were intensely engaged in something that looked kind of strange.  They seemed to be rehearsing something; they were repeatedly stretching out their arms toward the door where the passengers would soon arrive.  He found out later that the daughter of this couple had left home two years before as a result of a major conflict with her parents.  They had not heard from her during the entire two years despite their efforts to locate her.  Then one day a letter arrived, and the daughter described the sad tale of a brief romance, the birth of a child, the difficulties she was facing as a single parent in a strange city, and other alarming details of failure and brokenness.  And then she asked if she could come home. 

Well, her parents immediately sent a message back to her telling her how much they loved her, and that they wanted her to come home with her child.  They arranged for her flight home.  And now there they were at the airport getting ready to welcome their daughter home, rehearsing their expressions of unqualified love for her.  They wanted there to be no doubt in her mind of their love for her the moment she walked through the door.  She didn’t deserve that, the daughter herself would later admit, she had earned the opposite of it.  But open arms to receive her home were what she got. 

Of course, he needs no rehearsal, but I can almost picture him, God, waiting with open arms of love, stretched out wide as if he has hung on a cross, open arms to receive us, even us, abominations to him in many ways, but still his pride and joy, still his children whom he loves.