June 23, 2019 - Proper 7C

Lectionary Readings

O Lord, forgive the sins of the preacher, for they are many; that people will hear only of your love and grace in these words. Amen.

            We’ve finally arrived at summer. I realize that school has been out for weeks and that the first sunburns of the season have already healed up, but it’s finally liturgical summer. This year, Easter was fairly late, so that pushed back the dates of Pentecost and Trinity Sundays, and so we have now finally, in late June, arrived at what is sometimes called “Ordinary Time” or “the Season after Pentecost.”

            This season is not called “Ordinary” because it is plain, simple, or regular, but rather it’s related to ordinal numbers – we are counting Sundays after Pentecost. The liturgical color for this season is green, representing the growth of the Church in the Spirit and our own growth in God’s grace. We’ve just come through some of the holiest time in the Church year – we’ve celebrated the Resurrection on Easter, Jesus’ Ascension as the Lord of all Creation, the receiving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, and last Sunday we marveled at the mystery and glory of the Holy Trinity. In light of all these things, the question in Ordinary season is “what does this all mean in our lives and in our world?”

            During the preceding holy days, the Church often uses words and phrases that are theologically rich, but can leave us wondering “so what does that actually look like?” At Easter, we talk about the Resurrection as the inauguration of the New Creation. Sounds lovely, but we look around and still see a whole bunch of sin, death, and decay and so we wonder if the New Creation is any more real than Alice’s visit to Wonderland. At the Ascension, we speak of the Lordship of Christ over all of Creation, but in most of our lives money, reputation, and politics seem to dictate more than faith. At Pentecost, we proclaim that the Holy Spirit moves through each of us, and I’ll speak for myself here, but I know that I’m still a fearful and egocentric hypocrite more than I am a paragon of Spirit-filled grace and virtue. On Trinity Sunday, we focus on what it means to partake of the mystery of God, which is something we’d all like to do, but most of our days are filled with the daily grind, not moments of transcendence when we are aware of the Triune God.

            Figuring out what all of this means really is the work of this season after Pentecost. What I want to suggest to you is this – by the grace of God, each of us and all of us together really are being transformed in Christ. All of the things that we say in the Creed are really true; and by true I don’t necessarily mean that they are factual, though they may well be, but rather that they are truly descriptive of what is most true about life.

I mentioned last Sunday that Ellie and I are reading through The Chronicles of Narnia series and there’s a passage in book six where the main characters have found their way into a cave deep in the recesses of the earth. This Underworld is ruled by a witch who has convinced everyone that there is no such thing as the Overland, as they call it – there is no sky, there are no trees, there is no sun, no “up there,” no Aslan the lion to save them. Through sorcery and argumentation, she begins to convince the main characters that these things are nothing but dreams and that her false truths are all that is real. They begin to believe her and hence, they begin to give up on the idea of ever trying to escape because, where would they even escape to?

There is one character though who, with the last bit of his willpower, but even more than willpower, it’s his memory of Narnia that gives him the strength to retort back to the witch – “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one… I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia… We’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

This hidden reality of our faith is analogous to that of the search for the sky in the Underworld, and being the apologist that he was, I’m sure that’s how CS Lewis meant it. In today’s reading from Galatians, St. Paul writes “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ… And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Clothed with Christ, we are heirs of God’s promise of abundant grace.

We are the recipients of God’s saving, loving, and amazing grace. Grace means that no matter who you are, what you’ve done, what mistakes you’ve made, what things you’ve left undone, what things you’ve accomplished – none of those matter when it comes to God’s love for you. It’s not that what you do doesn’t matter, it’s that nothing that you do, or don’t do, earns you anything when it comes to being worthy of dignity or love. This is why St. Paul says that “we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.”

Now, I’m going to say some radical stuff here - You don’t have to follow the rules in order to inherit the Kingdom of God. You don’t have to come to Church to be saved. You don’t have to put any money in the offering plate to be an important member of this congregation. You don’t have to pay attention to the sermon to have an experience of God. You don’t have to do anything.

In the New Testament, there is an issue of grammar in Greek, which influences how we understand faith. It’s how you translate a case called the “genitive.” You can translate a phrase as “faith in Christ” or “faith of Christ.” It’s a question of whether or not it is our faith in Christ that saves us or the faithfulness of Christ that saves us. If you choose to interpret it as our faith in Christ, well, then you are subject to that disciplinarian. You have to worry about if your faith is strong enough. You have to worry about whether or not that person over there has faith in Christ or not. You have to make sure that rules are followed, that Creeds are recited, and that rituals are kept.

But the faith of Christ is far different. The faith of Christ is all about grace because it puts our trust in Christ instead of in ourselves. The faith of Christ means that we are free. It means that we don’t have to earn our way to heaven and therefore we can’t lose our way there. Grace means that we are children – and as we know, children do not earn their births, they are graciously given them. Sure, they participate in their birth, they can grow and have agency in the sort of life that they live. But they never have to earn their right to be born. Because we belong to Christ, we are heirs of the promise of grace. The person who receives an inheritance didn’t do anything to earn it, they are given it, and we are the recipients of God’s grace.
The purpose and goal of the proclamation of the Gospel is not to get people to accept Jesus, but rather to get people trust that Jesus has accepted them. Grace is the proclamation that you are accepted by nothing less the Lord of all Creation who knows you, loves you, and desires abundant life for you. 

This message of grace though is often muted or ignored. Grace is incredibly offensive to our sensibilities. It is repulsive to our notion of independence. Grace is scandalous because it is indiscriminate, it is unconditional, it is lavish. Consider what happened in the Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus casts out demons from a possessed man and the people’s reaction is much like our own. Luke records that they were afraid, that they were seized with great fear, that they told Jesus to leave.

All the things that our faith proclaims – Creation by a loving God, God coming to us in Jesus, Jesus defeating Sin and Death by his Cross and Resurrection, the gifting the Holy Spirit to us – these things are all pure grace. We did not earn our creation, redemption, or belovedness. But we so often live in the darkness of the Underworld. Grace is too blind a light for us, and so we turn away. Grace is unsettling because if it is true for us, then it is true for them – for those people who don’t deserve it. And there’s the rub. They, whoever “they” are for you, don’t deserve it, and yet, they have it. So we put rules around grace – we say things like “You have to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior,” or we say “You have to attend church,” or “You have to be an upstanding citizen,” or “You have to care about the same social issues that we do in order to be a good Christian.” We end up putting so many walls around grace that it ends up in a cave of our own doubts that there could ever really be something as beautiful as grace.

Sometimes we’re afraid of what grace might mean for us. In the passage from Luke, we see that Jesus is willing to go anywhere to bring the message of grace to us. The man who is healed lived among the tombs, an unclean place devoid of life. But Jesus goes to that place to set him free. Jesus will do the same for us – he will come into the cold and lifeless places of our lives and our world to bring the message of God’s saving grace. But maybe we’d rather not have Jesus destroy these boundaries between what is clean and unclean. We’d rather believe that people in jail deserve to be there, that people in poverty are there because they are lazy or didn’t pay attention in school, that people who don’t agree with us are too dense to know any better.

It’s really intriguing that Luke tells us that the people in the village were afraid of what happened after they saw this man clothed and in his right mind. It wasn’t the exorcism or demon-possessed pigs that scared them, but it was a man that they had written off as being undeserving and out of his mind being restored to their community that terrified them. Now that this man had received the grace of God, they had to deal with the fact that they had ostracized and rejected them. You know the phrase “good fences make good neighbors.” Well, Jesus is in the fence-destroying business and usually, we’d rather him not do that. So we tell him to get lost.

Maybe we’re not quite so blunt about it – but we tell Jesus that he has no business in our politics, or economy, or relationships, or calendars. We keep faith at an arms distance because we intuitively know what happens if Jesus gets in too close – he breaks our chains and unshackles us. But those shackles had been our excuses and we’d rather have them in place.

So this gracious freedom in Christ that St. Paul tells us about is either made conditional by adding rules or it is rejected altogether as just wishful thinking. It’s a reaction we see by those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and it’s a reaction we see in ourselves. Grace is absolutely unsettling. Our intentional worship in this season after Pentecost is intended to help us to see the shining brightness of God’s grace amidst the darkness of our doubts and fears. What barriers are there to your trusting in God’s grace? What might you do differently if your shackles were loosened? The grace of God, day-by-day, transforms us in the light of Christ. You don’t have to earn it or worry about whether or not anyone else deserves it. Instead, you get to enjoy it.