Grace

Gospel reading: John 3.1-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Arrowheads were often found at the summer camp I attended as a child. Some of the counselors were fairly expert in the field, accumulating large and varied collections over the years. I suppose some folks could make informed guesses as to age, tribe, purposes associated with their finds.

But my interests almost always tend toward the particular. What fascinated me was not some general development in the tools of tribal warfare or hunting. It was that a particular set of hands chose this piece of flint one afternoon in the history of the world and set to knocking of its edges until the made thing satisfied its maker.

Equally compelling was the story of how the thing was lost. Did a lost arrow's shaft rot away in the woods, or did the head tumble out of a pocket before it ever got the chance to be thrown by a bow?

My mind makes the very same leap to this day when I read of Jacob taking the stone he had used for a pillow the night before and tipping it up to mark the place God had come to him in a dream. I imagine stumbling onto such a stone and seeing some evidence of human intention. Then wondering who tipped this up and why.

We get the who and why in the book of Genesis when this crafty deceiver named Jacob dreams a dream of breathtaking beauty as he waits nervously to meet the brother he lied to years ago. He tipped up that stone and poured oil on it, saying, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." (Gen. 28.17)

He was marking the spot where grace happened.

I think all the strange stories and songs and lists and letters that make up what we call the Bible are such stones. They can be confusing and contradictory even. But when we see them as markers of grace, as little monuments to the experience of God in our world we can find that grace for ourselves in real time.

On Sunday we read the most famous verse in the Bible: John 3.16. But we read the story it came to us within as well. We read of Nicodemus's coming to Jesus at night and of the strange conversation they had about being born from above and whether that meant reentering a mother's womb. That story made it all the way to us. It was a stone tipped up that we might say, "Look here. Grace again."

The great thing about arrowheads is that finding one isn't satisfying. It's intoxicating to the enthusiast. Finding one means that there might be more along this river or at the edge of that wood. Maybe that's the way the stories and the sacraments of our faith are meant to work on us. They don't pin God down by telling us that grace happens only here, in this place, in this wine, in this book, among people like these. They put our sacred imagination to work.

They are hints. Maybe even hints of hints that draw us on and draw our imaginations in. Tipped up stones marking yet another arrival of grace.