Cats and Grace

This sermon preached at WindWorks Adventist Fellowship in Lacey, WA, February 26, 2011.


A group rents our church on Wednesday evenings. Someone in the group called to report a problem.

When someone in their group got out of his car back behind the trash inclosure he heard noises coming from some boxes. When he investigated, he discovered four boxes of cats. They had moved the boxes onto the porch out of the rain, but now what?

He didn't know how many cats there were. There were at least eight. Some kittens. Some adults.

I didn't know whether to laugh or groan. I knew what was going to happen next. My wife was going to ask who was on the phone. What did they want? When I explained the situation to her, she was going to ride to the rescue.

I told Randy, we'd take care of the situation and hung up the phone.

Sure enough, Karin asked, “Who was that?” Then, “What did he want?”

We recruited our daughter, Bonnie, who lives with us and has a pickup truck with a canopy, and is as soft-hearted toward animals as her mother. Then we headed off to the church with several animal crates in the back of the truck.

It was a sorry sight on the front porch of the church. Three cardboard boxes, soggy from rain, and one cat carrier. I pulled on gloves and began extracting the cats from the boxes and handing them off to Karin and Bonnie who transferred them to the crates in the back of the truck.

12 cats total. 2 adults, 9 kittens, 1 adolescent. All of them were emaciated. One kitten was dead.

In my humble opinion, the most logical thing to do would have been to keep them over night, then deliver them to the Pierce County Animal Shelter as soon as it opened in the morning. Of course, we did not do the logical thing.

We took them home. Set them up in a warm, dry space with food. Next day, the women took them to the vet to have them checked. They bought medicine and began the slow process of nursing all eleven remaining cats back to health.

Then, when they were fully recovered, when they were happy, healthy, cute and scampering around, Karin and Bonnie found homes for them—quality homes that met the women's high standards.

Those cats had no claim on us. They were not born at our place. They did not belong to friends of ours. They were not physically attractive, at least not when we first pulled them out of their soggy cardboard prisons.

Getting involved with these critters was guaranteed take a lot of time and money. Vet care and medicine are not cheap. These cats were going to be inconvenient. In addition to feeding them several times a day, we had to put ointment in their eyes twice a day.

There is only one word for what happened to these cats: grace.



In the book of Ephesians, Paul writes,
“For by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” Ephesians 2:8

Once when the Apostle Peter was making a speech to entire leadership of the early Christian church, he declared,
“We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ we are saved, just as the Gentiles are.” Acts 15:11

Paul and Peter both begin their letters with this prayer: “Grace and peace to you from God and Jesus Christ. The Apostle John also blesses his readers with the prayer, “Grace and peace to you.”

Grace: what is it?

Grace is what happens when any animal manages to hook up with my wife or my daughter. Grace is warm, dry shelter and food for cats dying of starvation in cold, wet cardboard boxes.
Grace is a new life, a pampered life for a huge dog that has been thrown out of three homes already.
Grace is my daughter Bonnie buying two horses from an auction where they were headed to the dog food factory.

When it comes to people, grace is a label for God's affectionate regard for us. It is the flow of forgiveness that dissolves our guilt. It is the bright future God promises to people whose actions have set them up for a catastrophic end. Grace is God's activity to make us—all of us, in fact, all people—part of his family, part of his community for all eternity.

Let me be clear: I'm not merely defining a word. I'm painting a portrait of a person. I'm detailing some heavenly legal procedure, I'm picturing a heavenly lover.

If I asked you to tell me the first thought that runs through your mind when I say, “Mt. Rainier,” my guess is that many of you would respond with descriptions of the grand views you have of the massive stratovolcano east of here. Some of you might talk about climbing the mountain. Others might call up pictures on your Droid or your iPhone and show us pictures of wild in the meadows around Paradise. Or pictures of Nerada Falls or mountain goats. A few might even have pictures of a long slog up to Camp Muir.

If someone asked about the etymology of the word Rainier we would probably roll our eyes. We don't know who Colonel Rainier was and we don't much care. We don't give much attention to old debates over whether the mountain should be called Rainier or Tacoma. For most of us, “Mt. Rainier” is not merely a word. Rather it is the massive and magnificent reality that towers 14,000 feet high over western Washington.

When it comes to defining grace, it's somewhat the same. We could go back and analyze the linguistic history of the word in various Greek dialects. But I'll leave that to others. I'm inviting you to explore with me the grand, almost fantastical, reality the word brings to mind.

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might be rich.” 2 Cor. 8:9

For by grace you are saved . . . Ephesians 2:8

What is this thing called grace?

Amazingly there is a story in the Bible about an old cat that got dumped on a porch. Well, sort of.

John 5.

Jesus was out walking on a Sabbath afternoon. He went by a place called the Pool of Bethesda. According to legend, an angel occasionally stirred the waters of the pool. When this happened, the first person into the water would be healed of whatever disease he had. Because of this belief, sick people with all kinds of incurable miseries congregated around the pool.

Years before Jesus' time, a rich philanthropist had paid for the construction of five porches around the pool to provide some shade from the desert sun.

Jesus walked through all this misery and singled out a man who had been an invalid for 38 years. We don't know how many of those 38 years he had spent hanging out there beside the pool. But he had probably been there a long time.

Jesus walked up to him and asked, “Do you want to get well?”

The man protested, “Sir, I have no one to help me. When the angel stirs the water, I try to get myself into the water, but before I can make it someone else always gets there before me. I'm doing the best I can to get well, but I just can't do it.”

In response, Jesus said, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk!”

The man did what Jesus said. This guy who hadn't walked in 38 years, rolled over onto his stomach, pushed himself to his knees, then stood up!

Excitedly, he rolled up his mat, stuck it under his arm and rushed out onto the street. My guess is he was wondering if it was a dream. Was he really walking? Was it going to last? He was so astonished he didn't even think to ask the guy who healed him what his name was.

Out in the street, people challenged him, “Hey bud, what are you doing? Don't you realize it's Sabbath? How come you're carrying your bed?”

Ordinarily, as a Jew he would have never even thought of carrying a sleeping mat down the street on Sabbath, but here he was. When the people challenged him, he answered, “The man who healed me, told me to pick up my mat and carry it. So I am.”

“Who healed you?” they demanded.

“I don't know,” he said. John, the writer, says the man had no idea who healed him.

This story is a perfect illustration of grace. Grace is what we call God's habit of stepping into people's lives to bring them help and healing. God does this without making any demands or insisting on pre- conditions. God just shows up and blesses us. Does good things for us.

The man in this story did not go looking for Jesus. Jesus came and found him. The man did not ask for healing. In fact, he had no idea that healing was even an option. Jesus brought up the idea of healing. And notice: when Jesus asked the man if he wanted to be healed, Jesus did not wait for the man to declare his faith or to confidently articulate his goal. The man's response was pretty anemic. “I don't have anyone to put me in the water. So I guess I'll just hang here and keep waiting. Forever.”

Jesus answered, “Get up and get out of here.” So the man did.

And here is the kicker. The man was a scoundrel. How do we know? Some days later, Jesus found the man again. (Notice the pattern here, Jesus finds the man, the man does not find Jesus.) What did Jesus say to the man? “Stop sinning or something worse is going to happen to you.”

If I tell someone, “Quit acting like a jerk!” the clear implication is that they are, in fact, acting like a jerk. When Jesus tells this guy, “Quit sinning,” it's obvious the guy was misbehaving. Jesus has poured grace into his life. Jesus has healed him, liberated him from the prison of the porches. What does the man do with the new life that Jesus has graciously given? Apparently he invested his blessings in sin.

Receiving a windfall does not necessarily change us. Most people who win the lottery, within a few years are bankrupt. Why? Because they do with the new money what they did with the old. They spend it.

But grace is not merely a windfall. It is the outpouring of the affection of God. Grace comes with the heart of God attached. Jesus did not withhold grace from this man because he did not deserve it.

There was one string attached to Jesus' gift: the string of hope. Jesus hoped the guy would take the new life he was given and do something good with it. Jesus was hoping that healing the man's paralysis would open up a future of health, and happiness and holiness.

When Jesus told the man, “Quit sinning or something worse may happen to you,” Jesus was revealing his hope, his anticipation. It's a hope that Jesus (and God the Father) cannot turn off. All grace comes with hope.

Those cats in soggy cardboard boxes on the church's porch . . . They were hopeless. Helpless, Miserable. Desperate. There was nothing they could do to save themselves. Without intervention they would have all died.

Then Karin and Bonnie arrived and changed everything. That's grace.

All of the cats were infested with fleas. On the adult cats, the women applied chemical flea control. But the kittens were too young, so the women had to wash each kitten and pull off the fleas by hand. Some of the kittens they washed three times.

All of the cats were sick. They had eye infections and upper respiratory infections. So twice a day, we had to pick up each squirming kitten and apply ointment in its eyes. We had to use a syringe and squirt antibiotics down each throat twice a day. The women did it freely. That's grace.

And there was a string attached. Maybe I should say, there was a steel cable attached. And that was Karin's and Bonnie's fierce hope these cats would improve, that they would gain weight, would rally against the malnutrition, would beat back the infections in their eyes and lungs. Karin and Bonnie wanted these kittens to thrive.

God's grace is not a commodity that he dumps on the world. God's grace is the outpouring of his heart toward us. It is full of his hope, his expectation that we will thrive, that we will invest his forgiveness and help in new habits, leaving behind unproductive and harmful patterns of life.

Jesus was thrilled to see Jake walking around Jerusalem. But he wasn't satisfied to leave it at that. When Jesus observed Jake wasting his new life in foolishness, he sought him out and challenged him: “Quit sinning or something worse is going to happen to you!”

Being paralyzed is not a picnic, being sick is not a trivial matter. But there are worse things. There is a darkness worse than sickness, worse than poverty, worse than getting fired. I am not making light of those difficulties, but something worse could happen to us. And we set up that worse thing by rejecting God's wisdom for our lives.

The cats we rescued did respond to grace. It was touch and go for a few days for some of the littlest kittens, but they all rallied. They turned into comical bundles of life, full of energy and playfulness. Eventually they moved on to good homes.

One of the last kittens to be placed was picked up at six o'clock on Christmas morning by a dad carrying out a carefully constructed plan for surprising his six-year old girl. The kitten who had been an unsupportable burden for whoever dumped the boxes had been transformed into a heart-warming gift by the power of grace.

This is God's intention for us as well. Others may see us as worthless, as too much trouble to bother with, as more trouble than we are worth. God comes and says to us, “You are precious. You are a treasure. I want you to live. Not merely survive, but live.”

God will give us what we need.

Have you screwed up big time? Damaged other people? God offers forgiveness.

Have you been damaged by others? Traumatized by parents, spouses, siblings, teachers, preachers, bullies, strangers? God offers justice, the promise of a final judgment in which nothing will be hidden.

Have you been undervalued? Have others convinced you that you are nobody special, that the world would be better if you used less oxygen? God declares emphatically that he loves you, treasures you. God loves you so much, he would rather die than live without you.

God offers grace.

Have you already surrendered yourself to the gracious affection of God? God offers you grace, too—grace to be passed along to other cats who need it.

Of course, grace comes with strings attached, the steel string of divine hope and expectation. Jesus wants you to live, to thrive. He wants you to be happy, healthy, holy. He wants to make you his gift to someone. There is someone, somewhere—at your place of work, in your neighborhood, at your school—there is someone God needs to touch. And he is hoping you will be the one to pass his touch along.

So I join the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Peter and the Apostle John in praying for you: Grace and peace. The warm affection of heaven. God likes you. He has great plans for you.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace.