O God, in your abundant grace you sent your Son to be the light of the world: Grant that we may come and see the difference that Christ makes in each of us as we seek to become your beloved community; and as we gather in intentional worship, may we ever be reminded of your transformative love which is the foundation of our faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
This is the final sermon in a five-week Lenten series about our new identity statement at St. Luke’s. We’ve been clear to call this an identity statement and not a mission statement. One theologian said that it is not that the Church has a mission, rather God’s mission has a Church. What our mission is changes based on how the Holy Spirit moves through our lives and community. But our identity being rooted in Christ is constant.
Our hope for this identity statement is that it unites us, making our church community stronger. We also hope that it becomes a tool by which you can grow to understand your own faith more deeply. By giving you this language about who we are in Christ at St. Luke’s, it is our hope that you claim this identity for yourself. And then, with that identity in place, you can use this statement to invite people to St. Luke’s.
It can be difficult to know how to describe a church to someone. Often, churches aren’t clear on their identity and so we reduce our description of a congregation to something like “The people are so nice, and the music is wonderful, and they do good in the community.” There’s nothing wrong with any of those things – but they are generic and apply to nearly every single church. With this identity statement, as you talk to people about St. Luke’s, you can say “St. Luke’s is a church where you can come and see the difference Christ makes through abundant grace, intentional worship, and beloved community.” And you don’t have to memorize that, you can adapt it to make it your own.
We’ve ordered some wooden tokens with the Cross that we’re using in our identity statement on one side and the phrase “Come and See” and our website on the other. The idea to make these tokens came from our desire to give people who attend Evensong, many of whom are not members of this church, something tangible to take with them to connect them to the experience they’ve had in this church. Feel free to take one and keep it in your pocket to remind you of St. Luke’s and the difference Christ makes throughout your week. And give them to others as a way of inviting them to come and see.
What animates this identity and gives it life is the final phrase in our identity statement: abundant grace. The simple definition of grace is that it is God’s unearned gift of mercy and love towards us. Grace though is so much more than a definition. Grace is what gives us hope, grace is what stirs our souls to serve, grace is what makes us sing God’s praise. By putting “grace” into our identity statement, we want it to be clear that St. Luke’s is not a meritocracy, that none of us are here because we’ve earned our way in. The doors of St. Luke’s are flung open wide to receive all who are weary and carrying a heavy burden, that they might find the peace of God in this place.
Perhaps you’ve heard, there was a time when St. Luke’s was stereotyped as being the church for the wealthy elites of Salisbury. I’ve heard people talk about how this church used to have more of a club mentality than it was welcoming of people who didn’t fit in. But, thanks be to God, I’m glad to say that’s in the past. It takes a long time for perceptions to change, but I have observed this church to a place of grace – where rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, conservative and liberal, young and old are all welcome. No matter who you are, what you’ve done, how much faith or doubt you come with, you are welcome here. And it’s not because the good people of St. Luke’s are any more welcoming or hospitable than anyone else, but rather it is because our identity is rooted in the grace of God which has no boundaries and excludes no one from God’s loving embrace.
When it comes to grace, the passage we heard from Isaiah expresses it so well – “Thus says the Lord who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters.” Grace is always unearned, and is, therefore, unexpected. Israel did not expect the Red Sea to turn into dry ground. The disciples did not expect the crucified Jesus to rise again. When we are at rock bottom, at a dead end, we do not expect everything to work out. But grace is that God makes a way out of no way. Grace does not depend on our actions, and so grace can and does show up in the most unexpected of places. It shows up when divisions are healed in Apartheid South Africa. It shows up when an alcoholic earns their one-year sober chip. It shows up when the families of those slain at Mother Emmanuel Church forgive the murderer. Grace is being out of options and being thrown a lifeline from the most unexpected of places.
Isaiah records the words of God, writing “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.” God does new things. Grace is surprising and creative. Grace takes the grumbles of “We’ve never done it that way” and transforms them into the shout of “I’ve never seen anything so wonderful.”
Grace is the great equalizer as well – as every single one of us desperately needs grace. As St. Paul writes, we were all dead in Sin until Christ liberated us from the effects of that separation from God. Today’s Collect makes that clear – God alone can bring into order our unruly wills and affections. There is no exception to this – none of us are self-sufficient and all of us need forgiveness and salvation. And that is exactly what our God of grace gives us.
This saving grace becomes who we are. As St. Paul wrote in the part of Philippians we hear this morning, “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” What gives us our worth isn’t our looks, our wallet, our title, our degrees, our accomplishments. Paul had a résumé to envy, and he says that he counts that all as “rubbish,” which is an overly polite translation. The word that Paul actually used is a curse word for animal excrement. And yet, that’s the stuff what we waste so much time and energy chasing. How much time do you spend worrying about money, or what people think of you, or what some politician said? It’s all rubbish.
Instead, grace invites us to live the abundant life that God intends for us. Grace, instead of fear and competition, reminds us that we already have everything that we need, that we are always loved, always worthy of dignity. When you’re not chasing the rubbish, you can enjoy the fruits of God’s salvation.
In our identity statement, there is a description word attached to “grace” and it is “abundant,” which might be one of the most important theological words there is. So much of Sin comes from us believing the lie of scarcity. We falsely believe there is a limited amount of fame, or prestige, or love, or resources. With an eye towards the limitless grace of God, we can become a part of the flow of God’s grace instead of seeing it as our job to be the stewards of God’s grace. God’s grace is not ours to give out. The Church gets into trouble when it takes it as its mission to decide and pronounce who is included in the embrace of and God and who is not. God’s grace is abundant, and that abundance is what transforms our fears into trust, our sorrows into joy, our deaths into Resurrection.
Abundance is one of the themes that we see in the encounter between Jesus, Judas, and Mary in the Gospel text from John. The setting is six days before Passover, so Jesus is in his final week and Mary recognizes that. She anoints his body with the perfumes that would be used on a dead body. Judas complains that it was a waste to use so much costly perfume on Jesus, who was clearly, not yet, a corpse. The value of a pound of nard was about a year’s worth of wages. Imagine going to someone’s house for dinner and watching them take a bottle of wine that costs $25,000 and pouring it into a pan to make a reduction. It’s wasteful, it’s extravagant, and it doesn’t make sense. And that’s exactly the point.
Mary knows and trusts in the abundance of God, so there’s no such thing as wasting love, because there is always more. Judas hasn’t attuned himself to this amazing grace and so he can only see it from his perspective of scarcity. In Isaiah, God asks of the new thing if we can perceive it. Mary could, but Judas could not. Can you?
Now, at the core of grace is the proclamation that God does all the work, and so even if we do not perceive the abundant grace of God in our lives, it doesn’t mean that grace isn’t present. But when we attune ourselves with God’s grace, we work with the grain of Creation instead of against it. Grace is always something given to us, but when we receive it becomes saving grace.
You’ll notice that at the end of the Isaiah passage, God says that this gracious action is “so that they might declare my praise.” What grace summons from us is praise. Again, we do not praise in order to get more grace or become deserving of grace, rather praise is the natural response to grace. Faith is not about what we have to do, it’s about what we get to do; and praise is one of those things.
Praise is about having our lives resonate with God’s love. When we praise God, we are put in a posture of humility by remembering that God is God and we are not. Praise helps us to have thankful hearts as we flourish in God’s abundance. This is what Mary does to Jesus – she is praising him with the best she has as a response to the abundant grace that Jesus has shown her. An important detail in the story that is crucial for us to see is that she has a pound of nard to anoint a corpse with, but why? It’d be as if you had a casket just laying around in your living room. You’ll remember that Mary’s brother, Lazarus, had died, but Jesus brought him back to life. Mary had experienced this graciousness of God and she responds with the most abundance she can muster. This is what God’s grace does for us, it summons the very best in us because it reminds us of the very best of God towards us. And so praise becomes the faithful response to God’s grace.
One of the things that I profoundly appreciate about our Anglican tradition and St. Luke’s is that we are a Eucharistically-oriented community. And the Eucharist is an expression of this sort of praise – it is a sacred meal given to us by Jesus in which we receive his saving grace and respond with our thanksgiving. And the Eucharist really is at the heart of our identity statement. It’s a happy coincidence that the Canterbury Cross is a rounded cross, which reminds me of the Communion host.
In the Eucharist, we come and see the presence of God in the breaking of the bread. The Eucharist is all about the difference that Christ makes, as it is a meal of Christ’s sacrifice and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. The Eucharist is at the heart of our intentional worship. It is a vision and expression of beloved community. It is where we encounter the abundant grace of God; indeed, it is where all of our identity is found. Therefore, let us keep the feast.
