Occasionally, we may find ourselves enduring a day when we are acutely aware of grief -- a great sadness, either ours or another’s sadness.  Perhaps, up until that moment, we’ve been going along in a pattern, feeling pretty o.k., one day yielding to the next, and then in an instant we are brought up short by some unexpected event.  

For the people of Minneapolis the shock came this past Wednesday, when during the rush hour, the I35 West bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River.  You didn’t have to know anyone in Minnesota to have been touched by the horror of persons one minute routinely driving home from work, the next minute dying.  
Our very humanity calls forth from us a response of compassion, if we let it, compassion toward those who have suffered the loss of loved ones and grief for the world this side of glory, which will not get to see fulfilled the potential of the lives of those who died.

If we’re paying close attention to ourselves, the Minneapolis bridge-collapse also plucked the heart-strings of our own vulnerability.  For, no matter how “in control” our culture allows us to feel, we are most decidedly vulnerable, frail flesh.  True, all lives are made comfortable with many illusions of control.  We use the TV remote to manipulate what we watch; the protections of the law give us some measure of safety against people who might do us harm; we have command over our calendars and can schedule our days.  But these structures and protections are limited in their power, and at root, we are vulnerable -- physically, emotionally and spiritually.  Like my friend Tom, who died last Sunday after a long cancer journey, we are frail flesh.  Like anyone who has ever made a mistake, “all we like sheep have gone astray” (and, after all, who hasn’t?!).  Any one of us could have been this man in today’s gospel parable, the one who thinks he would be wise to build larger barns to manage his plenty.  Instead, he is exposed as wrong-headed: “You fool.  This very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

The 19th Century English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expresses this moment of painful vulnerability well in his poem “No Worst, There Is None.”

The beginning of the poem reads this way, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Clearly, I’m focusing today on our fragility as human beings -- our vulnerability to calamity, grief or wrong-headed decision making.  What may not be so clear is that I do not see this as a “sad” sermon.  While confronting our vulnerability may make us feel vulnerable or anxious, that is not my experience.  
Rather, my experience has been, once past the initial waves of grief, that, in facing my own limitations, I find Christ standing there with me, loving me in the moment of my naked honesty and strengthening me in my realism about my own condition.

In fact, I would suggest that we may not be able to feel the full force of God’s saving power for us unless we do get very honest about our brokenness.  
Isn’t that what we turn to today as we approach the altar rail for pardon as well as for strength?  Isn’t that what we seek in the balming oil and the laying on of hands? -- we seek God, the Holy One, intervening with a healing moment.  
We seek the grace of God’s wholeness filling the broken cracks of our lives so that we may know in our mind, body and soul the peace of God which passes all understanding.

You see the altar sheathed in white today because we celebrate, at the next service, baptism into the life of grace for the Butler twins, for Aiden and Amelia.  Aiden and Amelia are four months old.  We, friends, are a few years older.  Yet, God offers to us today the same gift that He has for Aiden and Amelia
-- the gift of renewed life for those who come to God, conscious of our vulnerability, our brokenness, our sins, and desiring to be forgiven, healed and renewed.  On Aiden and Amelia’s baptism day, let us remember our own promises to give Jesus our hearts, to walk in His ways, and re-receive God’s promise for us of resurrection life.  In the ancient words of the church, we, having shared in a death like his, will also rise with Jesus in a life like his.  Amen