“Free but Not Cheap”
Jeremiah 31:1-3; Ephesians 2:4-10
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
May 22, 2016
I’ve been thinking a lot about grace these days. In part, my thoughts are inspired by our conversations with Grace Church about joining together. While we are not planning to change the name of our church, we will certainly be finding ways to incorporate their name–Grace–into on-going and new ministries. “Seeds of Grace” gardening boxes, for example. Grace is one of my favorite church-y words, and I’m looking forward to using it even more often.
This morning’s baptism has also prompted my thinking about grace. We proclaim today that the water of baptism is a symbol of the grace of God. On top of that, I’m a United Church of Christ pastor baptizing a baby named Calvin. Our little red-headed Calvin shares his name with John Calvin, a 16th century French theologian who deeply influenced the Puritans who are our forebears. For John Calvin, grace was the heart of our faith.
A third reason I’ve been thinking about grace comes from a series of conversations I’ve shared through Open Spirit’s Interfaith Book Group. This spring we’ve been reading a provocative book by Dr. David Liepert called Muslim, Christian and Jew: Finding a Path to Peace our Faiths Can Share. Dr. Liepert grew up in a Christian church that drew heavily from a line from our Ephesians text: “For by grace you have been saved by faith.” As a child, Liepert learned that no one can earn salvation through their actions: when we have faith, God’s grace saves us. As a youth and a young man, he interpreted grace to mean that, as long as he professed faith in Jesus, he could do whatever he wanted. He was already saved; his actions didn’t matter. Ultimately, he rejected Christianity as a religion that didn’t ask anything of him.
As we discussed that chapter, I kept saying to our friends, “But that’s not what grace really means.” And I kept trying to explain what it does mean–or at least what it means to me. I struggled to find words for something that is so important in my life.
With all these thoughts about grace swirling around and within me, I decided it was time to preach about it. Just for fun, I called up a Bible program in my computer and did a word search for “grace.” This particular search engine happens to also select larger words that contain the requested word. The results revealed a strange truth. The word “disgrace” is used hundreds of times in the Bible; “grace” itself is pretty rare. Our beautiful reading from Jeremiah is one of only a few times the word is used in the Hebrew Bible. In the gospels, the stories of Jesus’ life, it is used only twice, and never spoken by Jesus. The mystery of grace deepens…
It is the apostle Paul, in his letters to the early churches, who makes grace a central spiritual concept. In the midst of some of the most dense and complicated writing in the Bible, Paul introduces this word I love so much. What does he mean by it?
To understand Paul’s writing, it helps to start with the defining moment of his life. Paul was an angry, hate-filled man who was determined to destroy this new Jesus movement. One day, on the road to Damascus, he was stopped short by a bright light and a voice– Jesus. His life changed. He became a passionate teacher proclaiming the good news of God’s love made known in Jesus Christ. It was not his own efforts that saved him from a life of hate; it was the power of God’s love–what he called grace.
That moment shaped the language Paul used when he wrote to churches, like the one in Ephesus, that were struggling to figure out who was included in their community. In their church, there were Jews who followed the law laid down in their holy scriptures; there were non-Jews who did not. The biggest sticking point, at least for adult men, was the law requiring circumcision. Did Gentiles have to follow that law in order to follow Jesus? Drawing inspiration from his personal experience, Paul said no. We are not saved by our adherence to the law. We are not saved by what we do. We are saved by God’s love–the gift of grace.
Some of Paul’s words are stunningly beautiful: “the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.” The beauty is easily obscured by the elaborate, sometimes convoluted arguments he uses to make his point. Still, the message shines through: grace is a free gift, God’s immeasurable, everlasting love for us.
Some 1500 years later, John Calvin drew heavily on Paul’s understanding of of God’s grace. He was influenced, of course, by many thinkers in the intervening centuries. While his starting point was the overwhelming goodness of God’s grace, he ended up focusing much of his writing on our need for that grace, what Calvin described as our human depravity. On our own, he wrote, we cannot do anything good at all. Compounding that shift in focus was his belief that not everyone would receive this gift of grace. If you were not one of the people predestined for salvation, there was nothing you could do. Our Puritan forebears struggled mightily with this belief: desperately searching for signs they might be one of the recipients of God’s grace, despairing that there was nothing they could do about it either way. Grace went from being a fount of comfort and hope to being a source of fear and helplessness.
Given the anguish John Calvin’s writings about grace have caused so many people, I’m glad the Calvin we baptized today was named instead after a comic strip character–the wild-eyed little boy with his tiger from Calvin and Hobbes. Perhaps there is a little bit of Calvin the theologian in Calvin the comic strip character. The six-year-old certainly struggles with his inability–or sometimes unwillingness–to do all the things he is supposed to do to be a good boy. I wonder, though, if the comic strip Calvin actually understands grace better than his theologian namesake. No matter what mistakes Calvin makes, no matter how he falls short of some adult’s standard, he is never alone. Hobbes, his stuffed but very much alive tiger, sticks by him. Calvin knows he is loved. Calvin knows grace.
Grace is a simple word with a complicated history. As soon as we say grace is free, we risk making it cheap–like the young David Liepert’s conclusion that we can do whatever we want. As soon as we say grace is free, we risk making our own actions irrelevant–falling into the helpless desperation the Puritans faced. Given this complicated history, given how easy it is to distort the meaning of grace, is it a word worth reclaiming?
I know my answer: Yes. Absolutely. Grace is what frees me from the despair of trying to be good enough to earn God’s love. Grace is what wakes me up in the morning with a sense of joy and possibility. Grace is what assures me my actions do matter.
At the Massachusetts Conference’s spring confirmation retreat, in place of the traditional passing of the peace, the worship leaders had the confirmands greet each other with the words our young people used a few minutes ago: “God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” It was a fun way to make a powerful statement about grace to kids at a vulnerable age, when they wonder who they are and where they fit and whether they are good enough.
I loved that moment in the retreat, but it felt incomplete, as though it was only half the story. I found myself wishing we could have gone around a second time with a follow-up line: “God loves you, now what are you going to do about it?” Paul and Calvin and our confirmation leaders are right: God’s free gift of grace is the starting point. We don’t have to earn God’s love. We don’t have to prove our worth. We don’t have to pay God back. There’s more, though: We do, thank God, get to respond. Thank God, our response matters.
For me, the only possible response to this free gift is gratitude. We say thank you with our words. We say thank you with our lives, letting our actions be the ultimate expression of gratitude. Grateful for the gift that we are loved no matter what, we try to love one another. Relieved that we don’t have to earn our worth, we dedicate ourselves to upholding the inherent worth of each person we meet. Overwhelmed by God’s grace poured out over us in all our complexity and imperfection, we offer grace to one another, forgiving freely, letting go of our need for perfection. We respond with gratitude when we attend an anti-racism training to try to bring about change, when we bring a new neighbor a loaf of bread, when we write our senator or plant an edible forest garden.
Grace is free–a gift. Grace is not cheap, for we are called to respond to this gift with our whole lives, given in joyful service to the God of love.
God loves us, and there is nothing we can do about it. God loves us, and what we do because of it brings healing and hope to our world.
Today, we put little drops of water on this Calvin’s forehead. The drops remind us of the grace of God that is poured out over us: streams of mercy, a shower of love, a river of hope. May Calvin and each one of us revel in the free gift of grace. May Calvin, and each one of us, respond with lives of grateful, joyous love. Amen.