June 1, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

Grace In Motion

Martha Langford
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46
Matthew 7:21–29
Romans 1:16–17, 22b–28

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.”

Matthew 7:24 (NRSV)

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. . . . Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Cost of Discipleship

Almighty and gracious God, give us this moment of our week to be still and know
that you indeed are God. Grace us with the presence of your most Holy Spirit
to open our hearts to your word; and may the words of my mouth
and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,
for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

These days, Protestant preachers don’t often climb up into the pulpit and talk about sin. That’s what Marsha Witten found while researching her book, All Is Forgiven. Marsha notes that we prefer to think of God as a friend, as someone who loves us. We do not like to think of God as a sovereign Lord who judges and rules over us, someone of whom we might be afraid. She writes that Christian literature and the voices from our pulpits tend to “stress God’s therapeutic role, to downplay the notion of sin, and to highlight the accessibility of forgiveness” (p. 15).

We are not alone in these tendencies, and it’s not a modern phenomena. In the second century, Marcion taught that the God of Hebrew Scripture was not the Father of Christ. The Old Testament God, he said, was judgmental and wrathful, while he found the God of the gospel to be purely loving and merciful. He even produced an edited “canon” of texts from which he removed all Hebrew Scripture and all references to the “Jewishness” of Jesus in the Gospels and the Epistles.

Get rid of the judgment; downplay the notion of sin; discount its consequences. Not coincidentally, Marcion was branded a heretic and excommunicated from the church in Rome.

You see, sin is at the heart of the gospel message—as is judgment and mercy and redemptive grace.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we hear that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Martin Luther claims that these words are the “very center and kernel of the Epistle and of all Scripture.” It’s an egalitarian word, for it tells us that we are all alike. Our station in life will not save us. Contriving a list of deadly sins—from which our own are noticeably absent—will not save us. The power to cast out the demonic, the power of prophetic speech, the power of dynamic works will not save us—so says Jesus.

Jesus ends his Sermon on the Mount with this warning, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.” He then literally tells the crowd that on the day of judgment there will be those whom he will not claim, people whom Jesus describes as “ones working without knowledge of or obedience to the law.” To these Jesus will command, “Go away from me.”

Our sins—our disobedience of God—separate us from our sovereign Lord as if with an impenetrable gulf. And the gospel word, from our loving and merciful God, is first a word of sin and judgment. The good news is that it is also the story of the God who loves us in freedom and who will not let us go. It’s the story of the God who redeems us from our sin and restores us to newness of life.

Paul is not ashamed of that gospel, claiming it to be “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.”

That gospel witnesses to God seeking the lost, God choosing a covenant people to bring salvation to all of humanity. And when that people fail in their covenant promises, it witnesses to God sending the prophets, who call the people back. It’s the witness that tells us how, at that appropriate place and time in first-century Palestine, God entered into human history through the birth of a Jew called Jesus of Nazareth, whom we know as God’s own Son. God became one of us to redeem our human sinfulness; God crossed that impenetrable barrier.

The two-dollar seminary word for this is justification.

God didn’t do this because we are basically good folk who ought to be saved. This is not “I’m OK; you’re OK.” God didn’t do this because God knew we would amount to something. God did this without human cause; it was a free gift that we call grace.

Frederick Buechner writes, “A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. . . . Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.” He asks, “Have you ever tried to love somebody?”

He continues, “A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. . . . Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too” (Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, pp. 33–34).

Paul assures us that faith in Jesus Christ is the way we reach out to accept that gift. Faith is all that is required.

I’ve often wondered what a saving faith might look like.

Paul’s teaching of justification by faith alone through grace alone has aided people to shake off the authority of law. First the Gentile converts, for whom Paul established that one did not need to become a Jew to become a Christian. Then early Gnostic Christians, who separated the life of the body from the life of the spirit and who found in Paul a license for “anything goes.” Certainly the sixteenth-century reformers found in Paul liberation from a church hierarchy that dispensed grace like a commodity, like winter wheat.

Yet in this, our postmodern age, we have shaken off so much of the authority of moral law that we can sit comfortably in our pews and hear the words of our Savior, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father.”

No, we don’t talk much about sin anymore because—truth be told—we don’t want to convict ourselves. We sit here in relative moral comfort, perhaps failing to comprehend the words of Paul, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

I would tell you that our collective imagination of what a saving faith might look like has atrophied with disuse.

But Jesus, this Jesus of scripture, tells us that the life of faith is lived in conformity with his teachings, and he supplies us with an image. As we become hearers and doers of his word, we become “like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.”

Søren Kierkegaard writes, “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we [do] we are obliged to act accordingly. . . . Dreadful it is,” he says, “to fall into the hands of the living God” (Daily Dig, www.pcusa.org/stewardship/quotables.htm).

The good news is that those hands are ones that will not let us go. Those hands belong to the one who seeks the lost. Those hands belong to the one who through a gospel word of judgment calls us to repentance and through the gospel word of grace leads us to new life.

From the movie Love Story, we have a famous quote, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” This is a most modern sentiment, one that accepts no responsibility, expresses no remorse, makes no plans to amend its ways.

The gospel brings to us a different kind of “love story,” the steadfast love of a sovereign God. In the circle of that love, we are freed to bare our souls, to confess our sins, to ask forgiveness, to be reformed and reshaped and renewed in the life of faith.

Friends, the faith of Paul’s Epistle and the obedience of Matthew’s Gospel belong to one and the same life. Faith is not expressed as abstract belief; it’s lived out as a tangible reality. The life of faith is indeed like a house built on a rock, and it is lived in obedience to the teachings of Christ.

That is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls costly grace. “Such grace is costly,” he says, “because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.” It will cost us our lives, he tells us, but will return the only true life we’ll ever find.

In his book The Christian Life, Michael Lindvall tells the story of a young man newly come to faith and the church. As the day for baptism nears, he asks his minister if they might not just go down to the pond and “do” the baptism. The pastor explains the intricacies of Presbyterian polity, the requirements for baptism. When these reasons lie exhausted in the face of the young man’s persistence, the pastor asks him how the congregation will know of his baptism and his profession of faith if they are not there as witnesses. “By the way I live,” he replies.

They will know by the way I live.

That’s what saving faith looks like. It is lived out in our lives, God’s grace set in motion. Amen.