God is On My TV Again! Sermon by Rev. Tom Schade

from Psalm 91

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress;
my God, in whom I trust.’


Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your dwelling-place,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.

For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.

Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name.
When they call to me, I will answer them;
I will be with them in trouble,
I will rescue them and honour them.
With long life I will satisfy them,
and show them my salvation.

God’s On My TV, Again!
Rev. Tom Schade
September 30, 2007

Grace Anadarko is a detective for the Oklahoma City Police force. Not really, she is a fictional character, the protogonist of a TV drama on TNT called “Sav-ing Grace.” She is played by Holly Hunter and Grace Anadarko is a wild woman. She drives an old Porsche, she drinks way too much, she is having an affair with her partner, who is a married man. Not surprisingly, she has other one-night stands with cute guys she meets in pool rooms, and a co-worker who is grieving the death of his pet cat, and she has apparently slept with most of the other male characters in the show at one time or another. She takes no criticism and gets into shouting arguments and fights with people who are try-ing to help her. She is so infuriating that you can hardly watch her.
And let us say that if you think that this is the kind of girl you can take home to meet your mother, your mama twenr’t much like my mama.

One night, driving home in her old-beatup Porsche and probably over the legal blood alcohol limit, Grace hits a pedestrian and kills him. Kneeling over the body on the side of the road, Grace cries out, “Oh God, Please Help Me Now!.”

And with that anguished cry from the terrified and broken heart of a helpless sinner, Earl shows up and asks, what can he do to help? Earl is an angel; Earl looks like a middle-aged cowboy and chews tobacco, but he is an angel. He unfurls his wings on command, and can take Grace into his arms and deliver a jolt of spiritual ecstasy that is completely convincing to her. He is the real deal, a last-chance angel, sent by his boss, who is God, to answer the pleas for help from those who are the straight path to hell and are desperate enough to seek help.

God is On My TV Again. God, angels, Satan, and the souls of the dead or ghosts, are all over my TV and in the movies and in popular literature. There seems to be an endless market for speculative literature and drama about who God is, and what God is like, and how does God affect what is going on here on Earth, and how God use angels to work His will, and what is the path that the soul follows when it leaves the body and enters the life beyond the horizon of what we can see and know. And evil, satanic evil is also on my TV?

All of this writing and thinking is speculative and playful. So all kinds of ideas and theories can be offered and thought about. And it is a rich vein of material.

Everybody has seen “It’s Wonderful Life” the Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed movie, in which an angel appears to show a desperate man the real meaning of his life and save him from despair and suicide.

One of my favorites in this genre was a great movie by Albert Brooks called Defending Your Life, in which the souls of the departed undergo a trial, where they have to defend their life in at a hearing, where they have their entire life of a kind of heavenly video. If you can show the judges enough moments of your life when you acted courageously and selflessly, well then you get to move on, otherwise, it’s back to Earth for another round of learning.

And just on Monday night, the Monday Night at the Church group watched a film with Jon Voigt, called “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” The film is an elaboration on It’s A Wonderful Life, in that it speculates that the five people who will meet in heaven will reveal to you the whole truth about your life, and all the people who shaped your life and whose life you shaped for good and ill. You learn some of the awful consequences of some your actions, and you learn why some of the people who hurt you acted in the way that they did, and somehow this process of learning the whole truth of your life brings you to a greater compassion, self-acceptance, forgiveness and redemption. You are saved.

So not only is God on my TV, again, but there is a theme to these movies and TV shows about God. What we specifically want to think about it is how is God going to evaluate each of our messy and imperfect lives.

Most of the popular literary and dramatic theological speculation is about what academic theologians call “Soteriology” or theories of salvation.

And I think that there is two reasons for this: one is that it is personal – what is going to happen to me? Who doesn’t think about that?

And the other reason is that of all the teachings of the Christian tradition, this is the one that has been hardest to understand and explain. The church has said from the time of the apostles on that “Jesus died for our sins, and through his death, we have been saved.” That is quite a statement, and so people ask: Well, how does that work? He died on the cross two thousand years ago, and so I am saved from the sin that I committed just last week. His death didn’t seem to stop me from sinning. Will I not be punished for that sin? Explain it to me. What does that mean for what I think, what I do, how I live my life?”

I think that the Christian tradition has never been able to be completely convincing on this subject, and that is why there are liberal churches like ours, and why so many of the mainline Protestant churches are trying to desperately re-formulate the doctrine, and why so many people have voted with feet to leave the Christian tradition behind and become unchurched, or “spiritual without being religious.”

And because the Christian tradition has trouble really answering the question of how God evaluates our lives, popular literature and drama have taken up the challenge of trying to sort it out. Nothing new here. People have been working on this for a long time: I mean, after all, what was Dante doing when he wrote the Divine Comedy? He was trying to explain the process of salvation, what God wants of Us, of what we are to do to meet Gods approval, and how God was going to deal with our souls to bring us into salvation. How is God going to deal with our many shortcomings, imperfections, mistakes and sins.

These are not unimportant questions. In fact, I think that these questions are even more pressing than ever today for many people. Here’s why. We live now in a very permissive culture. There is a lot less hard and fast rules and a lot less social sanctions for all kinds of behavior. It is assumed that young adults are going to drink and party through their late teen years and early twenties. There is some concern about high schoolers, but for college age kids, it is assumed. It is assumed that young adults are going to be sexually active before marriage. Crime and violence, likewise, are behaviors that we expect from the young; we don’t approve, but assume in some sort of way. We count on a “live and learn” process to bring people to maturity.

I am not trying to start up a new morality crusade when I say this. What I want us to recognize is that many, many people they reach a point in their life when they are carrying around a lot of memories and baggage from their earlier ex-periences. They remember nights when they drank too much and made fools of themselves; they remember sexual encounters which were ill-considered, or disrespectful, or regrettable in some way. They remember making big mis-takes, some which were costly and people got hurt. They remember reckless actions which resulted in accidents and suffering. They remember outbursts of anger and violence in which they hurt others. Consequently, they feel guilty and even ashamed of themselves.

It stands to reason that a culture which allows people the freedom to make their own mistakes will produce a lot of people who are trying to live with their misakes, and to draw a line under them, and move on from them.

Conventionally, theologians would call these mistakes and missteps “sins”, but we resist that language today. Frankly, it seems simple-minded, as though the whole system of salvation is a simple matter of rules, and breaking the rules, and being punished for breaking the rules. Think about it for a minute. If a parent took their 5 year old child to a kindegarten or dayschool, and the teacher explained that their philosophy was that they told the kids the rules, and if the kids break one of the rules, then they are going to get smited, unless they beg for forgiveness, and then even, they might still get smitten.

Surely, if we can expect a kindegarten teacher to be more sophisticated in dealing with children’s behaviorial issues, we ought to expect God to be at least that sophisticated and nuanced in dealing with us.

So, how does Earl, the last chance angel work with this wild child of God, Grace Anadarko? Well, its kind of hard to tell. Earl doesn’t seem to do much of anything except challenge Grace. He says that he would like it if she just went a day or two without lying all the time. But he is not smiting her. But somehow, he is leading her through a process by which she will see the truth of her life, and the fact that it is, to use Kathleen Norris’s words – a road not wide enough to sustain her life; it is sufficient only as a way leading to death.”

Occasionally, when she doubts him or gives him a hard time, he shows her a bit of religious and spiritual ecstasy.

And one more thing, Earl does not seem to be too involved with the good vs evil struggle on Earth. He is also, it turns out to be, also the last chance angel for some of the gangbangers, drug dealers and criminals that Grace and the OKC police are up against.

And it is also true, as it is universally across popular culture whenever God shows up on your TV, that Earl and God are not interested in where people go to Church, or even go to church at all, or what they believe about religion.

Earl is patient and Earl, the last chance angel of the Lord, seems to be content to just be around while Grace loosens all the knots that have bound her to the self-destructive life that she is living. Earl lets her work this stuff out.

In popular culture, salvation is mostly a process of healing, it is a therapeutic process. In contrast, it often appears that more churchly understandings of sin and salvation are more judicial. The sinner has broken the rules, is convicted and sentenced to die, and then at the last moment, the highest judge might ex-tend mercy.

No, popular culture imagines a much more personal process, a process in which Grace confronts all the particular traumas of her life, and learns to put down the baggage that she has been carrying, and moves toward a healed life.

God on my TV works his grace in a much more particular, personal and indi-vidual way, letting each person work through all their experiences and letting them see their lives whole.

It is a remarkable understanding of grace, and one that I think reflects what we know is the truth about human beings and how we/they grow and change. And whatever is true is of God. It is all quite remarkable. It means that the process of overcoming our sins and shortcomings is as personal as each life and as unique as a fingerprint. That each of us in on our own spiritual journey, and that the great powers of benevolence at the heart of creation is at work in our most individual experiences. Amazing.

But why shouldn’t grace be amazing?