grace — Andy James

Responding to Grace

June 12, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 7:36-8:3
preached on June 12, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

We don’t know her story, but everyone there certainly did. The woman who showed up at the Pharisee’s house almost certainly had a history. People knew her story well enough for the gospel writer to describe her as “a sinner,” making her something of an unwanted presence in the home of one of the staunch religious officials of the day. But that day she set aside her past, her shame, her fear to take a chance on a new path. Even someone with a history like hers could hear about this teacher Jesus, and when she did, she put everything on the line to be thankful for his words, his actions, his presence. When she heard that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she gathered up all the courage she could muster, bought a jar of alabaster ointment, and joined the guests of honor at dinner. Upon her arrival, she bathed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Once his feet were clean, she kissed them and anointed them with her ointment, showing incredible honor to this teacher even from her position of low estate.

This woman’s actions stood in sharp contrast to those of Jesus’ host. Just as we don’t know the woman’s whole story, we also don’t know why this Pharisee invited Jesus over for dinner in the first place. Didn’t the Pharisees realize that they would not look very good when they got involved with Jesus? When the Pharisee saw what was going on between his guest of honor and the uninvited guest, he got a little frustrated. Luke tells us that the Pharisee started saying something to himself, noting that if Jesus were really everything he said he was, he would know this woman’s whole story and would want nothing whatsoever to do with her.

Somehow Jesus got wind of all this. Maybe he was able to read the Pharisee’s mind and know things the Pharisee assumed he could not. Maybe the Pharisee had mumbled it under his breath just loud enough for Jesus to hear. Maybe the Pharisee was just showing his disgust at the situation in his body language or on his face. However Jesus figured out what his host felt, he immediately confronted him about it. First, Jesus asked his host who would be more grateful, a debtor who had had a five hundred denarii debt canceled or a debtor who had had a fifty denarii debt canceled. Once the Pharisee agreed that the one with the greater original debt would be more grateful when it was canceled, Jesus pointed out the strange situation that had greeted him upon his arrival at the Pharisee’s house. While Pharisee had offered basic hospitality to his guest, Jesus pointed out that the woman—an unwanted guest—had offered far more than the host himself. The host had left Jesus with dirty feet and treated him with little or no special honor. The woman, however, even with her dubious reputation, had shown Jesus great honor, washing his feet, honoring him with her care and concern, and even anointing his feet with ointment.

He closed his rebuke of his Pharisee host by indicating that her sin—the thing that had made her so unsuitable to the the Pharisee in the first place—had been forgiven, and that her gratitude for this had been the source of the great love that she had shown to Jesus along the way. Finally, Jesus addressed the woman directly and affirmed and confirmed what she seemed to already know in offering her extravagant gifts to him—her sins were forgiven, her faith had made things different for her, and she could finally go in peace.

The other guests responded with outrage. “Who is this who even forgives sins?” they asked. This is not how any reputable teacher was to behave! Inviting people to drop their nets and follow, interpreting the law and the prophets, even healing the sick and dealing kindly with a stranger—all that was expected of a teacher, but forgiveness of sins was something for God alone! They may have started out on the fence with this Jesus, figuring that he just didn’t know the woman’s history when he didn’t stop her from caring for his feet, giving him a little grace about showing his frustration with his less-than-perfect host, even accepting his words that showed deeper gratitude for the woman’s generosity than the Pharisee’s invitation to dine, but once Jesus began intervening to forgive sins as only God could, he had gone too far.

In this story as in so much of life, the thing that really matters is how we respond. The woman, the Pharisee, the other guests—all these characters in the story responded to the events before them in very different ways. Those responses were certainly informed by their experiences and the particular way of life that they had enjoyed, but their responses spoke even more to how they understood the grace of God at work in their lives and their world. Ultimately, the question that matters from this story for them—and for us—is, how do we respond to the grace of God revealed in our lives?

The Pharisee was pretty stingy in his response to God’s grace. He had everything that he needed, knew the way of God present in the law, and enjoyed wealth and status in the community enough to entertain Jesus in his home. And yet his response did not match the extravagance of grace that he himself enjoyed as one guest—the woman—was made to feel inferior and unwelcome and Jesus was left with dirty feet and nothing more than a meal.

The rest of the guests were a little less skeptical in their response to the grace shown here, at least at first. They certainly knew the woman who invited herself to this meal, yet they did not insist that she be sent away. They seemed to understand why Jesus would speak to their host the way he did because he had been a little less than welcoming of all of them. And yet, when Jesus offered the full extravagance of grace to the woman by forgiving her sins, they turned on him, afraid of the depth and breadth of grace that he offered, uncertain that anyone could grant such broad strokes of forgiveness and hope.

In stark contrast to the Pharisee and the other guests, the woman’s response to the grace shown here began long before she ever even saw any evidence of it. She came to wash and anoint Jesus’ feet not in hopes that her sins would be forgiven but because she had already received something from Jesus. She already knew that God was up to something new in his words and actions, and she wanted to respond. Her gracious and generous actions were not an attempt to buy her way into Jesus’ favor but rather an offering of thanks for the message that he had brought, coming long before he uttered any words of forgiveness in her hearing. She knew from everything that she had heard that Jesus’ message was one of generous hope for people like her, and so she had no choice but to respond with the same kind of generosity.

She was not alone in her generosity. Jesus had the things that he needed for his life and ministry because of the gifts of people like this woman. Luke recognizes a number of them, many themselves women, at the conclusion of our reading this morning. They too had encountered the wonder of God in Jesus, and they knew that they had to respond with the same kind of generous grace out of their lives to make a way for others to experience these things for themselves.

If we see in this story that the response is all that really matters, how then do we respond to God’s grace?

Are we like the Pharisee, meting out grace in stingy, small doses to those who deserve it, insisting that sin sticks indelibly to people who act badly even when they experience the fullness of God’s grace, only making room at the table for those who deserve it, showing no more care and concern than the basics of what is required to look good enough along the way?

Are we like the other guests at the meal with Jesus, excited to experience the grace for ourselves but pulling back out of fear when that grace starts to change how our world is ordered and organized?

Or are we like the woman, very well aware of where and how we fall short of God’s intentions, yet ready and willing to respond with extravagant gifts because we have experienced the extravagance of God’s grace?

May God open us to respond to all the gifts of God’s love, mercy, peace, and grace with the abundant hope and generous love of this woman and all who followed Jesus so that the world might know the depth and breadth of God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Filled with Grace

March 6, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 and Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
preached on March 6, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

James B. Janknegt, 2 Sons

One of the most amazing things about the Bible is the way the same stories manage to slip into our lives over and over again. Somehow this great collection of writings manages to carry some sort of meaning in every generation. When things in the world are changing, these ancient stories still speak to our present realities. When the situations in our lives shift for one reason or another, these same stories take on new meaning for us. And when we need comfort amid turmoil in our lives, these stories give us hope for God’s presence through it all.

We need look no further than our reading from Luke this morning for a perfect example of all these things. The parable of the prodigal son told by Jesus in Luke 15 manages to use the same words to speak volumes of meaning into radically different times and places. Every time I turn to this text, I am reminded of something different about who God is. Each time I hear these words, I get a glimpse of the many different ways God loves us. And each time I hear this story, I find myself entering into the parable from a different perspective—some days it is as the younger son, some days as the older, some days as some other minor character around the edges of it all, some days even the father.

Wherever we enter this incredible story, though, from whichever viewpoint seems clearest to us in this particular moment, we gain a glimpse of the grace of God streaming into our world in all time. Grace permeates every moment of this parable. Even the setting for its telling is a moment for grace—Jesus had stirred up trouble with the Pharisees and scribes because of the company he kept, because he welcomed tax collectors and sinners and ate with them, so he wanted to help them understand why he responded to their gracelessness with compassion.

The story, like the setting of its telling, is filled with moments of gracelessness. It opens with the younger son showing no grace whatsoever as he asks to receive his inheritance while his father is still alive. It is as if the son told his father that he was as good as dead to him, that he was worth nothing more to him than the value of the things that he owned. The father had the opportunity to respond with the same lack of grace that was shown him, but he chose to give his son what he asked for.

Andrei Rabodzeenko, Prodigal son

As the son wandered the surrounding lands and squandered his inheritance, he experienced a similar lack of grace like what he offered to his father from those he encountered. The people of his new homeland saw no reason to show this stranger in their midst any sort of grace. They treated him solely as a hired hand, leaving him to fend for himself in the midst of a severe famine, not even suggesting that he ought to take some of the food that he was feeding to the pigs to sustain himself. The son showed so little grace to himself along the way, too. He counted himself so worthless that he would not even be treated as a son by his father, that his father’s grace toward him had long run out, that he was so deeply undeserving of any care other than as a hired hand.

Amid all the gracelessness of this story, the younger son’s return home was filled with great grace. His father’s grace upon his return was so abundant and so much at the ready that he seemed to be on the lookout for his son’s return each and every day, and so he ran to greet him when he saw him from far away. This greeting was not one of stern rebuke but rather warm welcome. Before the son could even finish his carefully rehearsed speech begging for mercy, his father called for a robe, ring, and sandals, then he made plans for a great feast and celebration to welcome the lost son home.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son

Amid all the grace shown in this story, the older brother was not particularly excited about his father’s generous welcome to his deadbeat younger brother—it seems that the deep grace of the father had not been passed down to either one of his sons! But the father would not let his older son’s gracelessness undo the grace that defined his life and he was so willing to share. When the older son protested that he had remained at home, working faithfully and diligently while his brother had “devoured [the] property with prostitutes,” and had enjoyed none of these gifts that had suddenly been showered upon him, the father reminded him that the kind of grace shared with his brother was also shared with him, too, but that this moment was worthy of celebration, for “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” No matter how much the older son might try to derail it, no matter how badly the circumstances were set with gracelessness, even no matter how difficult it might be for the younger son to accept it, the father insisted in his words and actions that grace would shine through.

In the end, Jesus’ parable is about grace—grace that gives more than we think we can receive, grace that opens us to a radically different way of relating to God and one another, grace that fills even the most graceless places of our world with God’s mercy, compassion, peace, and life—and this parable helps us to see how that grace can take hold in our lives and our world. When it does, we can do what Paul suggests in our first reading, from now on to “regard no one from a human point of view,” to embrace the new creation that comes to us in Christ, to make our lives marks of reconciliation and grace each and every day.

I suspect none of this made much sense to Jesus’ disciples as he told this parable as he made his way to Jerusalem. They probably grumbled about the kind of people who showed up when Jesus welcomed tax collectors and sinners. The disciples may even have found themselves more in line with the devoted older son, complaining about all the people who managed to join the crowd along the way when they had been with Jesus from the beginning. And while they may have appreciated his pointed criticism of the Pharisees and the scribes, we know that in the end they weren’t quite ready to put their own lives on the line to join him in this message. But as time went on, as the light of the resurrection shone upon them, it all finally began to make sense, for the resurrection of Jesus showed them that his death brought a new meaning of grace to everyone. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus ultimately made it clear that his parables about God’s generosity and grace were not just pipe dreams. No—the grace that the father embodied in this parable was the very same grace that was possible and real for everyone because of the reconciliation made possible in Christ.

As hard as it was for the disciples, living such grace is not easy for us, either. It is so much easier to choose to exclude those people who look or act or live differently than we do, to join the Pharisees and scribes in their grumbling about who gets welcomed in and who gets fed, to be so tightly bound by our rules that we end up like the older son and miss the joy that comes when transformation takes root and hold in our world. As hard as it is to show this grace to others, it can just as difficult to show this grace to ourselves. It is all too easy to end up like these brothers, so stuck in assumptions that we do not merit the generosity of God’s grace because of the depth of our wrongdoing or so mired in the despair of legalism as we focus on our own understanding of doing what is right that we miss the opportunity to share the joyous celebration offered when others come to know God’s grace in new ways. Our humanity makes it all too easy to exclude others and even ourselves from the abundance of this grace, but Jesus’ parable and Paul’s words remind us that this is no longer the way we are to live. We are called to set aside the gracelessness that comes to us so naturally and embrace the abundant grace of God in our lives as we become a part of God’s new creation.

So as we journey through these Lenten days, as we walk with Jesus on the way to the cross, may God show us how to welcome this grace more deeply in our own lives, may God help us to set aside our fears of those who might join us in benefiting from this incredible gift, and may God fill us with grace anew as we see others from this new point of view of mercy, peace, hope, and grace, as together we wait, watch, and work for the new creation to be revealed in our midst by the power of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Returning to Grace

March 15, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Ephesians 2:1-10
preached on March 15, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

On Ash Wednesday, the calls come loud and clear: “Return to the Lord your God.” Find your center again. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Do not forget who you are. “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.” God brings you back to where you have been and makes a new way. This season of Lent is an important time for this kind of restoration of what we have known, for remembering who and whose we are, for returning to our roots in God’s grace.

And there are few texts that get us closer to our roots of grace than this morning’s readings from John and Ephesians. The familiar words of John 3:16 are so well known that they can be recited by people who have no church or faith background at all. And the perhaps less familiar but equally insightful words from our reading in Ephesians approach our roots in a slightly different way while keeping the focus on the depth and breadth of God’s love and grace as revealed in Jesus Christ.

As I’ve considered this return to grace over the past week, our text from Ephesians really stands out. In these ten verses, we hear wonderful reminders of so much that is fit for this Lenten season: the depth of our sinfulness, the reality of evil and the powers of disobedience that keep us mired in the ways of this world, the mercy of God that steps into the messiness of our lives and our world to bring us transformation, the grace of God in Jesus Christ that saves us, and the challenge of this gift to be more and more like the beloved creations of God that we are.

Paul starts out here by declaring the state of things before God got involved. The life we thought we had was a false life—the things of this world that seemed to make us live actually were proof that we were dead. Even more than this, the world was and still is filled with powers and rulers and spirits that place their own existence and preservation above the well-being of all, and we once lived among them, following our own whims and desires and ignoring the intentions of God.

But this is not the end of the story. Paul quickly turns to connect our sinful condition to God’s action to change it. Even before we could do anything about all this, God got involved. Even before we knew the depths of our brokenness, God stepped in to raise us up. “Even when were dead through our trespasses,” God gave us new life in Christ.

This is a radical claim. God’s care for humankind is greater than our propensity to sin. God’s love for us comes before any action of our own. God’s mercy is from everlasting to everlasting, from the beginning of time until the end. God’s grace extends beyond our human attempts to place limits on it. In the end, our sin is not the story—God’s grace is.

If we were tempted to miss this point or if we got confused in any way, Paul will not let us forget this. Three times he makes it clear that God’s grace is at the center of our salvation. If we missed it the first time, he doesn’t want us to miss it the second or third! Our salvation, our understanding of God’s mercy, our new life in Christ—all this comes into being because of God’s grace. All this is summed up beautifully just one verse that ought to be as memorable as John 3:16:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

This stands at the center of everything for us as Christians. The life we share in Christ comes to us not through our own actions of good works, not through our historic relationships to one church or another, and not even through our own acceptance of this amazing gift. Instead, here Paul reminds us that grace comes first and last and everywhere in between in our lives of faith. God’s grace comes to us before we can even begin to know about it. God’s grace is present at every turn of our lives, and especially when we think we can do it all on our own. God’s grace accompanies us as we return to dust. And God’s grace extends through all time to bring us to new life in the age to come.

Even more than this, God’s grace makes us more alive that we could ever imagine. In it, we are raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places, gifted with “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us.” As one commentator puts it, “Christ does more than bring us out of death to life; Christ makes us royalty.” (Jeff Paschal, “Homiletical Perspective on Ephesians 2:1-10,” Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 2, p. 113)

God’s grace is an incredible gift that helps us to see ourselves and others in new ways. We need not worry about what is in store for us—God has bigger plans for us than we could ever imagine. We need not worry if we have enough faith to be saved—God’s grace is enough for us all. We need not worry if we have accepted this in the right way at the right time—God’s love and power are not dependent upon our acceptance, permission, and support to be effective and real. And we need not worry if we have done enough to seal God’s grace in our lives—God has already done that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Freed from our worries and wonderings, we are freed to respond in joy and hope to this gracious and amazing gift. The very good works that we would think bring us salvation are not so much required of us as welcomed of us. Paul makes this abundantly clear:

For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

The good works that emerge from us because of God’s grace are the reason why we are created, not the source of our salvation, and this allows us to live so much more freely, to deeply and truly embody God’s grace in our lives and our world, not because we have to but because we want to, not because we are forced to but because it is part of who we are.

If we truly welcome this amazing gift of grace into our midst, why would we live any other way? Grace inspires us to be the people God created us to be, to be beacons of light and hope in our broken and fearful world. Grace invites us to join in Christ’s ministry of love and justice to all, as it open our eyes to the poor, the friendless, the oppressed, the hurting, the outcast, and the hopeless, to bear this mercy and grace and love to them, too. And grace helps us to embody now the incredible, immeasurable gifts of God, the new reality for our world that all things will be transformed by God’s mercy and the amazing grace that stands at the center of everything.

So as we recenter our lives in the gift of God’s grace this Lent, may we know God’s amazing grace all the more, and may we be the people God is creating us to be, people made for good works of transformation and new life, in this world and the next, so that we might always keep returning to grace. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Warning and A Promise

October 12, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Exodus 32:1-14
preached on October 12, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The people were frustrated, and Aaron didn’t know what to do. His brother Moses had left him in charge while he went up on the mountain to sort things out with God, but Moses was taking longer than anyone thought, and people were starting to think that he—and God—had forgotten about them.

They had put a lot of trust in Moses and his God, after all. They had uprooted themselves from their homes in Egypt to follow this man who had come back to rescue them after a vision from his God in a burning bush. Things in Egypt may not have been perfect, but at least the situation there was known and understood. It was no wonder they thought that he had abandoned them!

So Aaron tried to make the best of things out in the wilderness and looked for a way to calm them all down as they waited for Moses to return. He remembered what his brother had done before he went up on the mountain in gathering the riches of the people to create the ark of the covenant, so he called the people again to bring him their gold jewelry to create another symbol of what had rescued them from Egypt, figuring that this would calm them down a bit. He then melted all their gold down and made it into a golden calf, which he placed before the people as a reminder of all that they had been through.

“These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” he proclaimed. This gold, taken from the ears of your wives, sons, and daughters, made your departure possible. This golden calf, created by human hands, saved you from the tyranny of the Pharaoh. The riches of this world can have all the glory for where we are and where we are going.

To bring his master plan of calming everyone down to a close, he declared that the next day would “be a festival to the Lord,” and so they set aside their grumbling and complaining and replaced it with burnt offerings, sacrifices of well-being, fine food and drink, and general revelry and happiness, seemingly directed at God.

We can be frustrated and feel abandoned too, and we too struggle with what to do. There are many people with deep faith who still find themselves distant from their understanding of God for one reason or another. In these moments, our impatience so easily shows, too: we try to move the Holy Spirit along; we get Jesus to hurry up and come back; we wonder why God’s ways are so complex and take so long to become clear to us.

While we don’t often craft golden calfs to be the objects of our worship and adoration amidst our frustration about God’s delay, there are still plenty of times when we misunderstand the source of our gifts and give glory to ourselves or other people rather than to God. In these kinds of moments, we too are guilty of the kind of idolatry that we can so clearly identify in this story from Exodus, even if we aren’t taking our gold rings and turning them into objects of worship. We still have a “human tendency to idolatry and tyranny,” as our Book of Order puts it, a desire to place our human ways above God’s ways, a feeling that we can make it on our own without God’s help, a certainty that we have all the answers figured out for ourselves.

This idolatry has much less to do with any particular images of God and everything to do with all the things that we try to substitute for God in our world when God seems distant or we are frustrated. This idolatry is not about any fancy gold items in our midst that might be intended to enhance worship but rather about the ways in which we, like the Israelites, think that we can save ourselves. And like the Israelites, our idolatry is not resolved simply by setting aside a graven image but by reordering our lives so that we honor and glorify God for all the gifts that God has given us.

Now when God saw what was going on down in the wilderness while Moses was up on the mountain, God was not at all pleased. If the frustration of the Israelites in this moment ranked at an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, God’s anger and frustration toward them was at 11! When God saw their perverse actions, their disobedience, their idolatry, and their glorification of other gods, God was ready to destroy them, and so God turned to Moses and instructed him to immediately go back down the mountain. The divine tirade ended with a commitment to a different way with them:

I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are.
Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them;
and of you I will make a great nation.

Even after all that God had done to bring them out of Egypt and into the wilderness, God was ready to leave the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and start from scratch with Moses.

Moses, on the other hand, had other feelings about all this. After hearing this divine temper tantrum, Moses pleaded with God to rethink this planned abandonment of the people of Israel. Moses didn’t seem to have mercy at the center of his mindset here—I suspect he was as frustrated as anyone with their behavior! Moses instead appealed to God’s sense of honor and God’s memory of the generations who had come before. What would people say about this God who had brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt only to get angry at them and abandon them in the wilderness? How would anyone else, even Moses, ever trust this God’s promises to anyone else if God gave up on the promises that God had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

In response to Moses, God “changed [God’s] mind about the disaster that [God] planned to bring on [the] people,” giving them a reprieve from the destruction they might have faced, demonstrating a moment of openness to human intercession, defending God’s own sense of honor in the world, and showing a bit of grace and mercy to a people who had seen so much already.

This strange and unexpected demonstration of God’s anger and grace here gives us a deeper vision of who God is and how God relates with God’s people in all times and places. Here we see God both angry and gracious, demonstrating an incredible mix of emotions in God’s interactions with God’s people. Here we get a glimpse of how deeply God is hurt when God’s people go astray, because only deep love could stand behind such deep hurt. And here we see God responding to human pleas to take a different approach, giving us confidence and hope that God will hear our prayers and respond with similar grace.

So this story gives us both a warning about the dangers of idolatry in our world and a promise of God’s steadfast love and faithful grace. We are rightfully warned about God’s jealous nature even as we are reminded of the depth of God’s grace. We are reminded that we are called to place our trust in nothing other than God as we are reminded of how trustworthy God truly is. And even amidst our missteps we are given hope that God will hear our prayers to give us a reprieve and show us the way to new life. This story calls us to renewed faithfulness in moments when we are frustrated and feel distant from God’s presence, to a way of life that acknowledges the sovereignty of God in all of life and living when we are tempted to make gods of other things in our life and living, to respond to the idolatry and tyranny we see in the world with actions that “work for the transformation of society by seeking justice and living in obedience to the Word of God.” And this story calls us to deeper confidence in God’s promises, to renewed trust in the mercy and compassion of God, to a new understanding of how God’s grace takes shape and form amidst our missteps along the way.

So may we hear both the warning and the promise of God in this story—a warning against disobedience and idolatry that deny the sovereignty and goodness of our God in our world and a promise of deep grace that responds to our intercessions and shows us a new and different way every day—so that we might give all glory to God as all things are made new. Thanks be to God! Amen.

By Grace, Through Faith

March 18, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Ephesians 2:1-10 for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
preached on March 18, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Today is a day of beloved things. We just read a favorite scripture that talks about salvation by grace through faith, easily my favorite theological concept. We just sang one of the most-beloved hymns of our faith that speaks so beautifully of grace. And as part of the response to the word today, we will soon share in one of of the beloved moments of our life together as we ordain and install new ruling elders and deacons.

Toward that end, to go along with our scripture reading today, I want to share an extended reading from a favorite theology book, Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie. Shirley was one of my theology professors in seminary, and I don’t know of anyone who can talk about the meaning and importance of salvation by grace through faith better than he can. Thankfully, his words are easy to understand, written with people like you in mind, and though he does not speak directly of today’s text, its major point is also his major point, so I hope that his words illuminate the point of our scripture today better than I ever could.

Suppose we begin to understand what justification by grace means. “How can we have this assurance of God’s love that frees us from ourselves and for God, other people, and true self-fulfillment?” The church answers this question by speaking of justification [– salvation, making things right with God –] through faith.

…It is often said that instead of the idea that our good works make us acceptable to God, Protestantism teaches that all we have to do is have faith in order to win God’s approval and acceptance. This is a serious distortion, because it only substitutes another requirement that we must fulfill in order to earn salvation. In the last analysis it makes us just as insecure as does justification by other means. Instead of anxiously examining my life to discover whether it is good enough, now I must anxiously examine my faith to see whether it is sure and strong enough to earn God’s love. Justification by faith in this sense is only another means of self-justification and self-salvation.

According to scripture, neither our good works nor our faith justifies us – God alone does it by God’s free grace in Christ. It is not confidence in the goodness of our life or in the strength of our faith,but confidence in God that gives us the assurance that we are right with God. Robert McAfee Brown puts it this way: “The gospel does not say, ‘Trust God and he will love you;’ the gospel says, ‘God already loves you, so trust him.’ Faith is not a ‘work’ that saves us; it is our acknowledgement that we are saved.”

This does not mean that faith is unimportant. Although it is not the cause of God’s loving us, it is the indispensable means by which we accept and live from God’s love. Faith does not make us right with God, but no one is made right with God without faith.…

Our faith does not force or enable God to love us, but it is our way of acknowledging, receiving, enjoying – and returning – the love that God had for us long before we ever thought of loving God. We are not made right with God by our faith, but we are made right with God through our faith. Our faith does not change God from being against us into being for us, but it does change us from being closed to being open to receive the love God has always had for us.

What is this faith we have been talking about? …Very simply, faith is trust. It is not intellectual acceptance of biblical or theological doctrines, not even the doctrines of Christ or justification. It is confidence in God. Faith is not believing in the Bible; it is not, in Calvin’s words, “assent to the gospel history.” It is not believing in a book, but believing in the God we come to know in the book. Christian faith is not confidence in faith that saves, not a “saving faith,” but confidence in the God who saves. The faith we have been talking about, in other words, is a kind of personal relationship – a total commitment of ourselves to the living God whose trustworthiness has been proved by God’s powerful and loving action for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. John Calvin puts it this way: Faith is “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

How can we have such faith? How can we be so sure of God’s love that we are freed from the unnecessary, self-defeating attempt to justify ourselves? How can we trust God so completely that we do not have to trust our own goodness or faith? …Faith, trust, or assurance in God is a gift. We can no more simply decide to trust God than we can by sheer willpower decide to trust another human being. The faith that trusts in the love of God is itself the work of God’s love, “revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

[Even though] we cannot give ourselves faith… there are some things we can do to put ourselves in situations in which the gift of faith is promised and received….

[First,] if we want a faith that trusts in the love of God that frees us from the necessity of trying to justify and save ourselves, we can admit honestly that none of us has such faith, at least not always. Even those who do not have intellectual doubts about the truth of biblical and Christian doctrines do not have so much confidence in God’s love that they are free from the fearful or proud compulsion to build themselves up in one way or another before God and other people, and in their own self-estimation. None us has [the kind of relaxed, anxiety-free trust in God that marks the faith that Jesus himself described in the gospel according to Matthew.] If we want real faith, therefore, we must paradoxically admit that we do not have it, and pray every new day that we may receive it. “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

[Second,] faith, trust in God’s love, becomes possible when we put ourselves in a situation in which we can hear about and experience God’s love over and over again. Such a situation is first of all the church, the community of God’s people. Just as a child, spouse, or friend needs to hear over and over again that he or she is loved, so we Christians need to hear over and over again the unbelievably good news that God loves, forgives, and accepts us despite everything that we have been and done – or not been and done. Trust in God becomes possible as we hear constantly anew how trustworthy God is. That happens in the church as [we are told and tell] over and over again, Sunday after Sunday, the story of God’s steadfast love for a sinful world and sinful human beings, each one of us included.

But hearing is not enough.… It is not enough simply to hear the words that God loves us; we need to experience God’s love. It is above all in the church that this happens. It happens when people are baptized… – when [we] see a visible demonstration of the assurance that God knows each one of us by name and has “adopted” us to be God’s dearly beloved children. It happens when it is not the good and worthy but precisely the needy, guilty sinners who are invited to the Lord’s Table to receive nourishment for the new life [we] cannot give [ourselves]. It happens when we experience God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love as we experience the forgiveness, acceptance, and love of other people in the life of the Christian community. The church is by definition the community of those who live by God’s forgiveness for guilty people, God’s acceptance of those who in themselves are unacceptable, God’s love for those who know they cannot earn the right to be loved. It is the place where people can risk putting aside all their defenses and masks, knowing that they will be accepted just as they are, with all their faults, whatever they have done, however unacceptable they are by the moral and social standards of the world.

[Now we may not always see these things here, yet the church] is still the body of Christ. God promises to make God’s justifying [and saving] grace real and effective in this all-too-human community of sinners who need it just as much as anyone else. We can recognize, experience, and trust God’s love everywhere when we first find it here.

Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, p. 322-325

My friends, this is my hope and my prayer, that this church can and will be the kind of community that shows God’s love and grace and so embodies this kind of faith, not faith to save anyone or anything, because God has already done that! – but the faith that inspires us and others to be a more complete part of the new life that God is bringing into being in our world.

May we know God’s amazing, saving grace through the faith that God alone can give us and embody it in our life together so that others might see God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love in us and so see it in God, now and always. Amen.