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.
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.
