I often wonder what goes through people’s minds when they hear certain words which we use in church. Words like “incarnation,” “redemption,” and “grace.” I have a hunch that a lot of people confuse incarnation with reincarnation, which is something totally different; and redemption is something one used to do with “green stamps.” As for “grace,” well, that is, indeed, a strange word. Some years ago a minister by the name of R. Lofton Hudson wrote of an experience he had during a conversation with a friend who attended church only occasionally, and who was chatting rather casually about how little he knew about religion. Dr. Hudson asked him, “Tell me, what do you think of when I say the word grace’?” The friend’s immediate reply was, “Why, Grace is a blue-eyed blonde!” That gave the minister an idea for the title of a book, and me the idea for the title of this sermon. The man’s half-whimsical reply points to a real problem. The problem is that we folks in the church sometimes have our own technical jargon which is simply not understandable to most folks outside of the church and many folks inside of it. A lot of us fit into the situation described in an old limerick:
Three Methodist birds in a wood,
Sang hymns whenever they could.
What the words were about
They could never make out,
But they felt it was doing them good.
There is a hymn in the hymnbook of many churches titled “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” which contains language that I feel is bound to cause confusion. It starts out great:
“Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing Thy grace; Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.” So far, so good. But then comes the second verse which begins:
Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
I must confess that I haven’t a clue what goes through most folks minds when they sing that verse, and I am not sure that I even want to know! What on earth is an “Ebenezer,” and why would we want to raise one in church? Fortunately, we clergy have things like “The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible” which we can turn to when we are puzzled by such strange language and so I looked it up. “Ebenezer” means, literally, “stone of help,” and refers to a monument which the Israelites erected in the Promised Land after a successful battle against the Philistines.
My point is that many times we use strange language in the church, odd words which one doesn’t often hear anyplace else, words which need some explanation as to their meaning. “Grace” is just one such word. Outside of church, one doesn’t hear the word very much. Oh, sometimes it is used in a newspaper review to describe the free-flowing movement of a ballet dancer. Sometimes it is used to indicate a considerate or thoughtful attitude of one person toward another. We speak of someone being “gracious” or “graceful.” Ernest Hemingway once defined “courage” as “grace under pressure.” But usually, outside of church, we don’t hear the word very much.
In church, we may hear it a lot. One of the favorite benedictions of the church is to say, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The old catechism defined a “sacrament” as “An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” And, in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel, the author says that in Jesus Christ “the Word became flesh,” and “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:16-17) The word literally mean, “we have received grace heaped on top of grace.” What on earth does the writer mean? What is “grace”?
Some churches seem to give the impression that “grace” is something which God has given to the church, and which the church, in turn, ladles out to deserving parishioners who say the right prayers or do the right good deeds. Sometimes, as a child, I pictured grace as something which the clergyman would dip his brush into and daub on your forehead if you were properly penitent, or like a huge cauldron of soup which would be ladled out into our little bowls if we approached the church properly, sort of like Oliver Twist in the musical “Oliver,” asking with bowl in hand if he can have “some more.” I thought of grace as a substance. There was only so much of it to go around, and you were lucky if you happened to get some of it splashed on you, unlucky if you didn’t. That was a childish view of grace, and like St. Paul, “when I became an adult, I put away childish things.” I began to study the Bible and discovered that grace is not a substance at all. Grace is not a thing, but is rather a theological code word used to describe the completely undeserved and unlimited love of God. One of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner, has a knack for translating theological terms into everyday language, and in his little book, Wishful Thinking, he describes “grace” in this way:
Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and wonderful things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. I love you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.
There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift, too. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp.33-34)
That reminds me of the famous words of theologian Paul Tillich, when he said that the Gospel can be summed up in this way: “You are accepted. Now all you have to do is to accept the fact that you are accepted.”
I maintain that the Bible from first to last is a book full of “grace.” Because of the coming of Christ, the Word made flesh, we have received grace heaped on top of grace; but there is a heap of grace in what we call the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible as well. Throughout the earliest pages of the Bible we find a God who is filled with suffering, patient, love. Yes, there are some pages in the Bible which seem to portray a different sort of God, for it took a long time for God’s children to come to realize the full extent of God’s love, but it present in the Bible from the very first. When Adam and Eve disobey, God recants on His threat of death, and instead makes them clothes to hide their nakedness. That is an act of pure grace. God didn’t have to do that. And note carefully, when the sinful pair are ejected from the Garden of Eden, God goes with them! When Cain is found guilty of murdering his brother Abel, a mark is placed on his forehead, not to brand him as a murderer, as many people think, but to protect him from being murdered in return! Thus God strikes the first blow against capital punishment! When the great flood comes upon the earth, God gathers a remnant for beginning again and makes a new covenant with the people. Abraham is given the promise that he would be the forebear of a great people, for no reason at all. Over and over again the refrain is heard in the Hebrew Bible: God chose this people to be God’s people. Why? Because they were better than, or more numerous than, their neighbors? No, not at all. Simply out of sheer grace.
In Deuteronomy 7 we hear God’s words: “...You are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” (Deut. 7:6-8) In other words, God chose this people because God chose this people. There didn’t have to be a reason for it. God had to start somewhere. When the people became proud, and thought themselves God’s pets rather than God’s people, the prophets were sent to warn them: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” (Amos 3:2) As Jesus put it, “....From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” (Luke 12:48)
Throughout the entire Bible, then, the concept of God’s grace appears. In Hebrew, the word is chesed, which may be translated as “mercy, loving, kindness, divine favor, loyal love.” Christians believe that the final culmination of God’s favor came when “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” but in the entire Bible, from first to last, God’s grace is proclaimed. It is no accident, I think, that the last verse of the Bible contains the words, “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints.” (Rev. 22:21) God’s grace is pure, unmerited, divine favor. It is like the shining of the sun. Does the sun shine because the flowers deserve it? No. It shines because it is in the nature of the sun to shine. Just the same way the nature of God is love.
Let me give you an example from the Holy Land, the land of the Bible, itself. In Matthew 5:45, Jesus says that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Most of us, looking at those words, may say, “Isn’t that the way it is! We plan a picnic and it is sure to rain on our parade! Bad things happen to good people.” Ogden Nash even wrote a poem about these words,
The rain falls on the just and unjust,
But the unjust have the just’s umbrellas!
But to understand Jesus’ words that way is to miss the point. In the land of the Bible, rain is blessing and sun is curse. In the Holy Land, located as it is on the edge of a desert, rain is needed in order to make crops grow. In the Bible, rain, rivers of water, and water in general, all symbolize God’s grace. Just as no one can do anything to “deserve” rain showers, so we cannot deserve God’s grace. And what Jesus is saying is not that bad things happen to good people, but precisely the opposite: good things happen to bad people! God sends rain on the just and on the unjust. God’s grace is freely offered to all; whether or not they accept it is another matter, but it is there for the receiving. All of this may help Christians understand better the sacrament of Christian Baptism, but it is part and parcel of a Biblical way of looking at life. Life is shot through and through with God’s grace. “Grace,” therefore, is a Biblical code word for God’s unconditional love and forgiveness.
I must confess that, down through the centuries, many Christians have had different ideas about God’s grace. Many have thought of our relationship to God in terms of a law court. This confusion arises because the word “forgiveness” has a couple of different meanings. In a legal context the idea is that one person has put himself in debt to another, to an injured party, or to society as a whole. Something is owed, and if restitution is not made, punishment is inflicted. In this context, grace means merely generosity on the part of the injured party, whereby the injured party does not demand that the debt be paid. In the history of Christian theology, God’s forgiveness of sinners has often been pictured in just such a legal context. Humanity, through sin, owes a debt to God. We all deserve punishment. As the moral ruler of the universe, God cannot simply waive the punishment. That would bring about disrespect for God’s laws. God cannot simply forgive the debt, and let bygones be bygones. Somebody has to pay it. Therefore, complicated doctrines of the “atonement” were worked out to show that God has not broken the moral order of things by showing forgiveness to humanity. The debt had to be paid, the punishment had to be inflicted, so Jesus, on our behalf, paid the debt and incurred the punishment for us. As the old gospel song put it, “Jesus paid it all.” Many people believe that this is the one and only Biblical notion of forgiveness. Thus it may come as a surprise to learn that this concept is of relatively recent origin, and was propounded by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. There are some Biblical passages which can be adduced which seem to support this view of the atonement, but our relationship to God cannot be described by simply quoting a few Bible passages out of context. We must see the whole sweep of the Biblical revelation. The problem with this popular picture of God as the Judge in a cosmic Court of Law is that it seems totally foreign to the teaching of Jesus. Jesus pictured God not as Judge, but as loving Parent, and that changes things. Sin is therefore not the breaking of God’s laws. It is rather the breaking of God’s heart.
The 19th century Danish theologian and mystic Soren Kierkegaard noted that most of the world’s religions seem to have this concept of a righteous and holy God who simply will not have any dealings with human beings who are not pure. Thus religion becomes the method by which folks scramble about trying this technique and that to purify themselves. This focuses religion on the self, rather than on God. Kierkegaard said that if we were to ask the average Christian to name the antonym of “sin” the answer would probably be “virtue.” If this were true, then we are off on a lifetime of keeping books with God. This sin goes into the debt column, and that virtue goes into the credit column. At the end of the day (or the life) one simply tallies up the score to see if there has been a net profit of virtue. Or perhaps one might even commit a virtue first, in order to “get one up” on God. I believe that this notion of grace completely misses the message of the Gospel which tells us that our problem with God is not restitution, but reconciliation. What we need is “atonement.” which can best be summed up by dividing the word into: “atonement.” We need “at-one-ment” with God.
Therefore, the image of a Law Court must give way to the image of a Family. “Grace” is a personal, relational matter. To go back to our illustration of an injured party in a dispute: If the injured party insists that the friendship cannot be restored until the guilty party has paid the debt, then it becomes almost impossible for a relationship to be restored. A criminal can properly speak of having paid his debt to society when he has finished his prison term, but in the delicacy of interpersonal relationships, at what point can the guilty party claim that the debt has been paid in full? How many mink coats does an unfaithful husband owe his wife before he can be said to have paid his debt to her for his infidelity? How many candlelight dinners must an unfaithful wife give to her husband before it can be said that she has paid her debt to him for her infidelity? Can you see how, in the area of interpersonal relationships, the image of a law court simply misses the point? The problem in interpersonal relationships is not paying a debt, but restoring a relationship which has become broken.
A youngster broke an expensive vase. The boy’s clumsiness produced an overwhelming sense of guilt. His father came over and put his arm around the boy and said, “It doesn’t matter.” But his mother made a much more realistic (and theological) response when she went over to him, took him in her arms, and said, “It does matter...but it’s all right. I still love you, anyway.” There is pain and hurt on both sides, but the relationship is restored. In a legal context, forgiveness may be costly to the person making restitution. In a relational context, forgiveness is likely to be costly to both parties. The injured party who forgives must bear the hurt, pain, anger, and resentment which comes from the injury received. The guilty party must bear the pain of knowing that one has injured someone who loves them, and recognizes that he or she doesn’t have a “leg to stand on,” as we say...and yet is loved, anyway. That is grace. In the Bible, grace is set in the context of a personal relationship which God seeks to have with humanity, and which God will go to any lengths to maintain. As St. Paul put it, “...in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” (II Corinthians 5:19)
God, according to Jesus, is not Judge, but Divine Parent. One day He told the story of a boy who ran away from home and wasted his life in sinful living. When he finally came to his senses and returned home, he was not forced to become one of the hired servants in order to work his way back into his father’s good graces. Instead, according to Jesus, the boy was completely restored and forgiven immediately. When the elder brother wanted nothing to do with the younger brother who had wasted his life and his father’s money, he had the law on his side. But the father went to the elder brother and tried to tell him that the whole thing was not a matter of legal but personal family relationships. “...we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” (Luke 15:32)
In Matthew 20 Jesus tells of a landowner who came along and put one man to work at 9:00, another at noon, another at 3:00 P.M. and another at 5:00 P.M. When it came time to settle up with them, all received the same wage! That doesn’t seem fair. The union would never stand for that! But, of course, Jesus was making a point. God isn’t fair, God is merciful. A great king was having his portrait painted. He said to the artist, “I hope you can do my face justice.” “Sire,” said the plucky artist, “What your face needs is not justice, but mercy!” So do we all...and that is what I believe Jesus’ story is all about. And that is what He said that God is all about.
Right here a lot of folks become uneasy, and say, “It’s too easy! Surely, God does not forgive the unrepentant.” But here, too, I think we have missed the meaning of grace. We tend to think of repentance as a “good work” which we must perform in order to get God to love and accept us. Therefore, we continually wonder, “Have I repented enough?” But we have it the wrong way around. The original meaning of “repent” means “to turn around.” Rather than preceding forgiveness, I believe that repentance follows it! Repentance is what we do after we have found forgiveness; it is the direction our feet take when we come to the realization that God loves us and will never let us go. Forgiveness is “before-giveness.” To return to the story of the “lost boy” (the “Prodigal”) in Luke 15. Was he forgiven only when he returned back home? Surely not! If somebody had known the father’s heart, he could have gone to the lost boy in the far country and said to him, even in the pigpen: “Have I got good news for you! Your father loves you, and is even now awaiting your return home with joy. So get up and get out of the pigpen and go home! There’s a party awaiting you there!”
That message sure beats the one I see on billboards from time to time as I drive along the highway; put up, I am sure, by well-meaning evangelical Christians. My favorite billboard is one which is on top of a motel along one of Michigan’s major highways. It says, “Prepare to meet thy God!” I am never sure what I am supposed to do when I see that sign. Perhaps I should stop and inquire as to whether God is registered at that motel. But do you see the implication behind the words? The implication is that meeting God is a real drag, and nobody would wish to do it except as a last resort, to avoid the flames of hell. It seems to me that is precisely the opposite of what Jesus taught. Jesus said that meeting God would not be something to be dreaded, but something to be eagerly looked forward to, for God is a loving, divine Parent who is waiting to receive us with outstretched arms, and to invite us into a party!
We have heard a lot in recent years about “body language,” and “non-verbal communication.” It is a fact that sometimes what we say is not as important as the way in which we say it. The most important non-verbal body-language is the look on people’s faces. Have you ever noticed that some very polite faces seem to mask indifference or downright hostility? Other very frank and open faces invite us to be ourselves and we feel attracted to them.
In his book, “The Vital Balance,” Psychiatrist Karl Menninger discusses at one point the negative personality who always says “no” at first to everything. He calls people who have such negative personalities troubled patients, who are proud of being “no” people. He says, “They have made no unsound loans. They have made no unwise investments. They have wasted no money. They have sponsored no extravagances. They have never voted for a liberal cause.’ They have never endorsed any harebrained scheme.’ “But,” says he, “they can become increasingly overcautious and rigid, chronically unhappy individuals, bitter, insecure, and often suicidal.” He contrasts such persons with those whose attitude toward life is “yes” rather than “no,” and tells a charming story about President Thomas Jefferson and a group of companions who were riding horseback cross-country, and who were obliged to ford a swollen stream one day. A wayfarer waited until several of the party had crossed and then hailed President Jefferson and asked to be ferried across. The President took him up on the back of his horse and later set him down on the opposite bank. “Tell me,” asked one of the men, “why did you select the President to ask this favor of?” The man answered, “I did not know he was the President. All I know is that on some faces is written the answer No,’ and on some the answer is Yes.’ His was a Yes’ face.”
That’s the message that Jesus lived to teach and died to show: that God has a “Yes” face. As St. Paul put it: “As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been Yes and No.’ For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No’; but in him it is always Yes.’ For in him every one of God’s promises is a Yes.’” (II Corinthians 1:18-20)
THANKS BE TO GOD FOR THIS AMAZING GRACE! AMEN!