Thoughts on "You Are Accepted"

I mentioned last week that a classmate in Education for Ministry had read a section of the materials aloud, a portion of a sermon by the theologian Paul Tillich entitled "You Are Accepted". He wrote this in 1946, on his 60th birthday, and in the margin wrote the words "to myself!":

"Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaninglessness and empty life. It strikes us when we feel our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we have loved, or from which we were estranged... It strikes us when, year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted."

I sat riveted listening to this. Tillich may have meant those words for himself. But what he is saying here about grace and salvation touched me more than a half-century later and captures what I have experienced to be true. It is enough in that moment when grace strikes to sit still and know that we've been tagged as the object of God's desire.