GRACE
Psalm 13:1-2, 5-6; Ephesians 2:4-5, 8-10

A sermon given by Betsy Aldrich Garland, M.Div.
June 26, 2005 / 6th Sunday of Pentecost

Beneficent is a down-city church and people stop in. Often they are tourists, come to see our historic Meeting House which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Sometimes they are people down and out on their luck and looking for a bus ticket, or help with their rent, or something to eat. And occasionally they are just passing through and looking for a spiritual connection: “Is there a minister I could talk to?”, they will ask Nancy in the office. If Rick isn't here, she calls me.

A couple of months ago, a man named Tony stopped to see if someone would pray with him. While we sat in the Krom Room he told me about his drinking problem and that his wife had left him. Now he desperately missed his children, and he was too upset even to go to his job in construction. After we prayed together, he asked me if I had been “saved” and when that had happened to me. I decided quickly that he wasn't looking for my Harvard Divinity School point of view on salvation. So I simply told him that I was saved at my baptism. He nodded.

What I think Tony came looking for was an experience of “grace”. I only saw him that one time; whether he found what he needed in that fleeting moment of ministry, only God knows.

This morning the lectionary theme is “grace”: What is it? I asked friends this week, curious about what they would say, and one of them said, “Grace is my grandmother!” We name our children “Grace”, we say “grace” at meals, we sing about “grace”. We talk about being graceful, full of grace.

Now, grace is a consistent thread that is woven through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, from beginning to end. In the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, grace is expressed as “steadfast love”. The psalmist, perhaps King David, prays for deliverance from his enemies. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?”

David is tormented by his defeats, but he has not given up on Yahweh, his God. In the last verses he says: “I trusted in your steadfast love;…”

David holds fast to God’s love which steadies him, which holds fast to him, which will never let him go.

And David is rewarded. For in the next line, he prays… “My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.”

This theme continues in our New Testament, first in the Gospels. In secular Greek, a common meaning of “grace” was “pleasantness" or “attractiveness” or “thanks” or even finding approval, one person of another. It also was used about one’s relationship with God. In the Gospel of Luke, for example, “Mary found favor with God”. And “Jesus found favor with God and man”.

In Epistles, the letters, the Apostle Paul and later his disciples further develop the idea of the truth of God’s steadfast love, of God’s grace, as they write letters to little house churches across the Greek and Roman Empire.

The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, building on Paul’s understanding, defines grace as “… God’s unmerited free, spontaneous love for sinful man, revealed and made effective in Jesus Christ.”

In other words, the truth about God’s love is this: we can't earn it, we don't deserve it, and we never will lose it!

Grace is freely available to all of us, regardless of our age or gender, the color of our skins, our education or economic status. Grace doesn't depend on anything we do, or where we live and work, or the school we go to or the church we attend. Grace is there for you and me regardless of the mistakes we've made, the pain we've caused, the resentments we harbor.

And, furthermore, we all need it! Working on this sermon, I recalled a child’s poem that I associate being read to me by my mother, maybe when I was complaining about my brother, the pest:

“There is so much good in the worst of us
and so much bad in the best of us
that it ill behooves any of us
to talk about the rest of us.” (Unknown author)

Our beloved hymn “Amazing Grace”, now part of our popular culture, was written by an Englishman named John Newton in the 1700s. Singing the hymn, we might think, what a saintly human being he was. He didn't start out that way…. Here’s the rest of the story:

Newton went to sea at age 11. As a teenager, it was a book he found on board, Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, that he read which sowed the seeds of his later conversion to Christianity. But not right away: it took a storm which almost destroyed his ship that caused him to give his life to Christ. Newton later became captain of a slave ship, carrying human cargo from Africa to America, observing the misery of Africans on the middle passage -- a strange place to find a new Christian. Until Newton had an experience of grace, an awakening, a realization that trafficking in human beings was a travesty on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Newton left the sea – and the slave trade – for good, eventually studying for the ministry. He wrote hundreds of hymns, not just “Amazing Grace”, and at age 82, he said, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour.” Newton understood grace so well, the completely undeserved mercy and favor of God.

But! But my friends, there’s more – Grace is not all about us, for our own sakes. This is where I part company with those who preach that grace is an individual gift, for each of us alone, to prepare us for an afterlife.

A careful reading of Paul’s letters shows that the founder of the Christian church takes “grace” out of the realm of personal salvation and pushes us toward the salvation we find in community, the salvation of loving community. The kind of community which recognizes, in the words of the prophet Micah, that the Lord requires us “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [God].” The kind of community that remembers and practices the words of Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The kind of community that Paul calls for when he writes to the Ephesians: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before-hand to be our way of life.”

Paul makes the distinction that we are not saved because of good works, that is, we can’t earn salvation, but rather that salvation prepares us for good works, encourages the community of faith in good works.

Hold fast to these ideas:

Remember that God loves you – and all that God asks in return is that we love God and our neighbors, whom God also loves.

No matter that you and I are not perfect, that humankind has great capacity for evil. Award-winning poet Mary Oliver wrote,

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Give up trying to punish – yourself and others – and seek to bring healing.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you must believe this denominational creed or say these right words, abide by these institutional rules, or follow only one religious path to salvation – unless you find God’s grace in them, unless they are right and helpful and life-giving for you.

When Tony the drop-in asked me when I was saved, I answered, without any forethought, “at my baptism.” Why, I wonder now as I write this sermon, did I think to say that? (Ever say to yourself, where did that idea, or those tears, or that painful memory come from?)

It was a moment of grace for me. Because I realize now that that’s the moment when God’s community of love and care surrounded me and was made visible. God’s love was there all along, even before it was recognized in the sacrament of baptism. Just as it is today in William’s baptism.

Fall in love with God, and God’s grace will save you.

Fall in love with “the least of these” whom God also loves, and God’s grace will save you.

Fall in love with a broken-hearted world, and become God’s grace in the world.

Amen.