A Fourth Church Sermon by John Wilkinson

April 2, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Gift of Grace

John Wilkinson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Ephesians 2:1–10

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

In a remarkable book called Amazing Grace, author Jonathan Kozol tells the story of children growing up in the South Bronx, one of the poorest communities in the nation, echoing Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, which reported in stark ways about the lives of children growing up in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. The stories are hard—filled with drugs and violence and HIV-AIDS. But they are tender as well. And they are heroic.

One day Gregory Groover, pastor of the Bright Temple A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, recounted the work of the church to the author, telling the stories of feeding the hungry, of ministering to prostitutes, of tending to families who have lost loved ones to gun violence. At the close of the conversation the minister asked the writer if he knew the hymn “Amazing Grace.” “I tell him that I do.” (p. 79–82)

Theologian Robert McAfee Brown once wrote that “grace is the most important word in the Protestant vocabulary.” He added that “it is also the most abused.” (The Spirit of Protestantism, p. 53) And here it is for us—“for by grace you have been saved by faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” For by grace you have been saved.

For those of us gathered in this post-modern, secular, sophisticated world, the questions asked by the Apostle Paul in the first century after Jesus’ ministry seem so distant. Yet they are as distant as this morning’s news, as this day’s encounters with the world around us and the lives within us. How does reconciliation happen? How does redemption happen? How are we freed to live the lives God fully intends us to live, and how do those lives make a difference?

The specificities might differ over two millennia, but the broader framework remains hauntingly similar: how we deal with unknown and uncertain futures, how we live beyond the not-always-friendly confines of our decisions, our allegiances, our behaviors into true freedom, into true community, into true life.

Precisely where we turn has changed, but the fact that we turn to everything but that to which we must turn hasn’t changed. In 70 A.D. we fretted about turning to superstition, to astrology to save us. In the Reformation era we fretted about turning to indulgences, to institutionalized religious practices to save us. In this era, the indulgences and superstitions have taken on different forms. But not all that different. Left to our own devices we believe that our own devices can save us. “Works righteousness,” it used to be called. I am not sure what we call it now, but it fits in very well with palm pilots and emails and lifestyles that trick us into believing that we are the center of the universe and that our security, our salvation, is guaranteed through the hours that we work and the accomplishments we make and the things we acquire.

We think somehow that we can bypass the essential dynamic, the rhythm of grace, laid out so clearly for us by the Apostle: by grace you have been saved. It is rhythmic, dynamic, never captured, always elusive.

Someone once said to me, “The trouble with you Presbyterians—which, by the way, won’t get you very far on “Who Wants to Marry a Presbyterian”—“the trouble with you Presbyterians is that you are so preoccupied with sin and guilt.” Despite my protests, there is truth to that. Our tradition has embraced not-too-feel-good articulations like total depravity and original sin and predestination and double predestination. And we have lingered, hovered at those things in our practice and our thinking. And people have been hurt, because the journey has stopped there and not led to its final, hopeful destination.

So now, we hover and linger with a different dynamic, an overcompensation suggesting that we are not occupied with sin enough, that we are somehow good enough to make it, whatever “making it” might mean.

Theologian Shirley Guthrie describes the dynamic well: “Put aside all the ways you so desperately and futilely try to use to convince God, yourself and other people that you are deserving of their admiration, love and respect. It won’t work. You can’t bring it off—not even by the negative way of trying to prove that you are deserving of admiration, love and respect because you are so humble and selfless, or because you so earnestly beat your breast and confess that you are a no-good sinner.” (Christian Doctrine, p. 317)

But neither dynamic—focusing too much or not enough—would seem to be gospel. Because onto this scene bursts these few remarkable words—by grace you have been saved—and the words that echo from 2000 years ago whisper amazingly into our psyches and souls and society, delivering us from the incarceration of who we are to the liberation of who God destines us to be.

Can it be? Can it be true? Can grace, God’s unconditional love, God’s unwavering and unquestioning acceptance of me despite and in spite of who I am, can grace be true? Can grace be real? “Grace is insidious,” wrote the Roman Catholic theologian Peguy. “When you think it will come from the right it comes from the left. When you think it will come from the left it comes from the right. It is God’s grace, not ours, and it comes to us on God’s terms. It may come to us as a gift, but we can never claim it as a right. All we can do is accept it.” (Brown, p. 58)

We don’t do well with gifts. We don’t receive very well. We immediately leap to the arenas of obligation, of trying to figure out how we will repay a gift, even of going one better. Yet all we can do is accept it, receive it gratefully.

Paul Tillich said that the most challenging notion of grace is that we really don’t want to believe it.

This week I read a sobering account of a heresy trial in the Church of Scotland in the 1800s. A minister named John McLeod Campbell in the village of Row was charged with, essentially, not being Presbyterian enough, of being too liberal in his preaching about salvation and atonement. Labeled a heretic, Campbell confessed to the challenges of preaching “the conception of free grace, the apprehension of a love of God to us which is irrespective of what we are?” That is to say, Campbell might agree with his accusers, that his preaching was not Presbyterian enough, not, however, because he relied too much on grace, but that he couldn’t rely enough on it. (See B.A. Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World, p. 71–98).

Grace is a mystery, and yet everything we do seeks to control that mystery, to define it in human terms, to seek, somehow, in our own behavior proof of grace’s presence and by so doing to make grace our own accomplishment. Grace is unpredictable, it is disruptive, it is risky and even dangerous. That is a problem for us. We seek predictability, we avoid risk, we steer clear of danger. We are in control. We can save ourselves. And yet, by grace we are saved—and it is the gift of God.

We have heard remarkable stories over the past several Sunday mornings, miracles, they are called, healings. A tax collector, an outcast, welcomed by Jesus. A man whose daughter is dying, the daughter herself, a woman whose medical condition, a flow of blood, makes her a religious outcast, a man whose friends lower him through the roof. All of these followers, journeyers, fall beyond the pale of the religious establishment. They are outcasts, unclean, unwelcome, excluded.

And so the story is not simply about words—by grace you have been saved—although those words would be enough. The story is about the story. No credentialing, no pre-certification, no works are needed. In a wonderful song called “Graceland,” Paul Simon sings “I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending, or maybe there’s no obligation now.” He is right—no obligation, except the obligation to receive the gift, to place who we are at that locus of mercy, to take our place at the table, because there is a place for us.

Robert McAfee Brown writes of that table: “in light of the central surprise of the incarnation, where God is revealed in things mean and lowly, it is no longer surprising that things mean and lowly, such as bread and wine, should speak of grace, should call to mind the death and resurrection of the Son of God.” (p. 59)

Back in the last millennium when I was a seminary student, we celebrated communion at our weekly chapel services. On most days, we passed a big loaf of bread around and were invited to tear off a piece. Being Presbyterians, God’s frozen people, we would break off the tiniest piece possible, literally crumbs on some days. At one point a professor, as he presided at the Lord’s Table, insisted that we should break off huge pieces of bread to represent how much grace we really needed.

Do that today. As you receive the bread from the child of grace sitting next to you, imagine a never-ending supply of bread, the best bread imaginable, and the grace that makes that bread so sustaining. And as you serve the cup to the child of grace sitting next to you, imagine that cup overflowing, like a river. And as you excuse yourself from the table of grace this day, as you depart from this place, as grace takes root in your soul and blossoms forth like flowers springing forth from the cold earth, remember that grace is not for individuals and institutions. Grace is for the world, and our task is to let grace overflow and run wild in the streets, the streets of the city, that on the wings of grace the world might be healed and transformed.

“Do you know the hymn ’Amazing Grace?’” the minister asked. The writer replied that he did. “Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come. ’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.” “When we sing those words,” the minister said, “the deepest feelings stir. Then I see tears in the eyes of the youngest and the oldest, the eyes of the sixteen-year-old prostitute and the sixty-year-old great-grandmother.” Our family, our congregation. This is the community into which we have been baptized, the choir with whom we have been invited to sing, whereby we are received and revealed and redeemed.

This is not a carefully calibrated theological construct—it is a story, a story of those who were dead to sin and are now alive in Christ Jesus, because God’s love is unconditional. It is the story, the true story, of grace that brings us safe thus far and leads us home, grace that is not cheap, but rather grace that is costly, costly enough to go to the cross for us. It is the story of a gift. It is the story of a table where the bread is good and the cup overflowing and where there is room, room for all the world, room even for us, even for you, even for me. Thanks be to God. Amen.