Let us pray.
Like a father standing at the window of heaven you love us, O God, and welcome us home. Like a mother you search for us, grieve for us when we are lost, and care for us when we return from the far country. Thanks be to you for your amazing grace. Now, Gracious God, in your mercy open your word to our hearts and our hearts to your word. In the Spirit of Jesus, our brother, our friend, and our Savior. Amen.
In our reading this morning from the Gospel of Saint Luke we have what New Testament scholars call the “Lost” Trilogy – the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. We could even say there is a lost quartet, for the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son is also lost.
In each parable Jesus tells us of God’s amazing grace. Someone has said that there are three kinds of love. There is “because” love – I love you because you have been good, or I love you because you please me. There is “If” love – I will love you if you do what I want you to do. The kind of love which is most like God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ is an entirely different quality of love. You might call it “anyhow” love – no matter what, I love you. This love sets no requirements and never counts the cost. It is God’s amazing grace.
We love to speak of God’s grace. We love to sing “Amazing Grace,” which has become a favorite hymn of the church and our culture. Some of you may even remember when “Amazing Grace” was used on a television commercial to persuade you to use Visa instead of Mastercard or American Express. Certainly a perplexing use of grace! It is interesting, given this background, how the concept of grace can cause so many people to feel uneasy.
It was theologian Karl Barth who said, with penetrating insight into our humanity, that we don’t like the idea of grace, don’t like the notion that God does not owe us something, that we cannot earn our way into God’s grace. Barth said, “That is our sin” – the deep pridefulness that will not relinquish our ability to try to prove ourselves, to earn our way into God’s good graces somehow and accomplish our own salvation, our wholeness, our happiness. Grace is a gift – an unexpected, lovely, surprising gift, and all you can do with it is to accept it and say “Thank you.”
Why is that so difficult for so many, so difficult to image that you are loved by God. “Just as I am, without one plea,” as the hymn puts it. Why is it so much easier to believe that God will love me and bless me after I have worked at it for a while or for a whole lifetime? And what is the most interesting, as the Protestant Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin discovered, is that the Christian religion which intends to celebrate and communicate the amazing grace of God had and has as much trouble with it as everybody else.
Religion is frequently turning grace into grim determination, good news into bad, the joyful celebration of God’s gifts into a system where you must earn and deserve God’s love. We see it over and again throughout the history of the church. Whenever it has difficulty with grace, the church turns to erecting barriers, to the more manageable task of deciding who is making it and who is not, who is in and who is out.
May God guide and guard the church in our time that we might be remembered as the community of faith that responded gratefully to God’s grace by loving boldly, generously and graciously in the world, not spending our time and energy arguing who to exclude from the communion table and who to refuse to ordain –issues which, thank God, have been resolved in our United Church of Christ but continue to fracture other mainline denominations, threatening to turn us all into sideline denominations.
A word of caution—this does not mean that the church offers what Dietrick Bonhoeffer called “Cheap Grace.” Cheap grace is grace without cost. Cheap grace proclaims forgiveness without calling for repentance. The world or your life goes on in the same old way. W. H. Auden, the poet, said: “The world is admirably arranged. God likes to forgive sin, and I like to sin.” Cheap grace is grace without the call of Jesus Christ to discipleship.
Someone has written: “I have a friend who is a minister, but she is really a mixture of California religion. After a while I can’t sit through any more talk about my child within or the shadow side of myself. I can read anywhere about all that. That is not what I come to church for. I come to church to learn whether this thing is true and what difference it makes to me. . .we’ve tried to be all things to all people so that anybody can come. Just believe any old thing, you just come right in and smile and have a little sunshine.” She is describing cheap grace.
Costly grace means we run the risk of spelling it all out very clearly. Costly race calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ!
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
Well, what is so amazing about grace? Grace gives us a second chance, sometimes a third or a fourth. We see this, do we not, so very clearly in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son.
The son asks his father for his share of the inheritance. “Father, give me the share of property that belongs to me…” Imagine the father’s heavy heart. How many nights did he pace the floor before reluctantly giving in and giving his son his share of the property.
Jesus says, “The son went off into the far country and squandered his inheritance in riotous living.” He had a marvelous time living it up on the old man’s dough. Finally it’s all gone. He is broke. “The high cost of low living,” someone called it. He ends up working in a pig pen; he is glad to eat what the pigs eat. Jesus says, “When he came to himself” – I take this to mean when he woke up and remembered who he was and whose he was. He said: “I will arise and go to my father and I will say ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as you would one of your hired servants.’”
Jesus tells us, “When he was still far off his father saw him and ran and embraced him saying, ‘This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. . .’”
Amazing grace. Unearned. This is what Jesus tells you – unmerited, undeserved love. Amazing grace that saved a wretch like me.
Have you ever messed up, have you ever fallen flat on your face, have you ever been out there in the far country? Think for a moment of some time in your own life when you’ve been there, done that. Where in your own experience can you identify with the prodigal son, the prodigal daughter? If so, then I pray that you have also experienced the amazing grace of a second chance, of forgiveness and reconciliation and the amazing grace of a new beginning, a fresh start.
One danger of emphasizing the amazing grace of God’s unconditional love is for us to think that nothing is required of us. If we feel this way, then we have embraced cheap grace. Costly grace becomes truly amazing grace when it overflows in a life which is changed, transformed and filled with gratitude.
The Protestant reformers, Martin Luther, John Calvin and their followers taught that the mystery of God’s grace is so profound that we owe God everything. However, our salvation is not a matter of owing and paying, but comes from God as a gift. So the fundamental response, the way the reformers saw it, is gratitude. For John Calvin the knowledge of God produces love and devotion and reverence. Notice, not guilt or fear or moralism, but love, devotion, reverence. . .in a word, gratitude. This is a major biblical theme and it is very close to the heart of what it means to be a Protestant Christian. Amazing grace is truly amazing because, when it touches our lives, our hearts are glad and grateful. Grace is truly amazing when in response to God’s grace, we become more gracious and strive to live a life of gratitude.
How do we as Christian citizens of a nation involved in the first war we have initiated, live a life of gratitude in response to God’s gracious love? Regardless of your political opinion about the wisdom or folly of the war, it is critically important for people of faith to acknowledge that we can and should do better than this, that the resources of this great country can be and should be put to better use.
Did you see the political cartoon in the Boston Globe a week ago? The bombs are falling from a plane, each one with a label: “Jane’s job,” “Henry’s education,” “Mary’s health care” and so forth. It is important to acknowledge that even when it is necessary, war is always a failure, a sign of human sin and an affront to God who is the God of all people, our sisters and our brothers. It is our duty as Christian citizens to speak our convictions, to support or dissent as we believe we must. But also together to hold out for and hold onto God’s universal love that excludes no one.
As Saint Paul counsels the Romans in our epistle reading of the morning, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, so that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Saint John tells us that “God so loved the world.” We are to love the world which God loves –we are to be in, but not of, this world.
I believe as Christian citizens we are to carry on a lover’s quarrel
with the world.
Robert Frost put it well.
“And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own
I would have written of me on my stone
‘I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.’”
No longer can we complacently say, “My country, right or wrong.” Many of us have long since dissented from the blind rigidity of that slogan. At the same time let us remember that any quarrel with our nation’s actions is a lover’s quarrel and there is much to love!
Let us pray daily for the men and women in the military, pray for the families of those who have been killed, for the wounded that they may be healed, for those taken prisoner, pray that there may be a swift and just conclusion to the war. Pray that we will never give in to indifference to the suffering and death war creates on all sides. Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed!
It is finally a matter of grace. The mystery that God loves human beings, loves you and me, loves the people of Iraq – not because of anything about us that merits love, but because God is God. This is the grace we have been privileged to see and experience in Jesus Christ, who turned no one away from his friendship and his love. Gratitude is our response to God’s grace.
May God’s grace cause us to be gracious. May we be glad, and grateful, and try always to be worthy.
O God, of whom we ask so much, help us to listen for what you ask of
us.
In the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READINGS
Romans 12
(Page 141, Pew Bible New Testament)
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in sowing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
THE READING FROM THE GOSPEL
Luke 15: 11-24
(Page 68, Pew Bible, New Testament)
Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one— and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.”