Sermon Central
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In His Book Mortal Lessons, Dr. Richard Selzer, ...
Contributed by Sermon Central on Jun 18, 2007 (message contributor)
In his book Mortal Lessons, Dr. Richard Selzer, writes, “I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be like this from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
“Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.”
She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says, “it is kind of cute.”
“All at one I know who he is. I understand and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”
I think God is the same way. He wants us to know that his love still works. We know the gospel is grace, we know God loves, inside we know that. That is one of the things that attracted us to God. Yet, even after we accept that, we reject it by working to get God to continue loving us. We work so hard, try to live up to a standard that God doesn’t have for us, something we have made up in our heads. And God is trying to say, I think you are beautiful, crooked mouth and all.
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