Based on Psalm 117 and 2 Corinthians 4:5-15

God is good!

People: All the time!

Let’s try that again: God is good!

People:  All the time!

What you are hearing is a traditional call and response. The leader proclaims: God is good! The people respond: All the time! The leader then proclaims, All the time! The people respond with, God is good!

Let’s try it again. God is good!

People:  All the time.

All the time!

People:  God is good!

The astonishing thing about that particular call and response is that it comes from the heart of the African American Church. It comes from a people for whom life has not been good all the time. Yet, it is just such a community who utters this joyful, proud, undeterred, profoundly theological proclamation that even though life is not good all the time, God is.

You see, they’ve got it! They’ve caught it: the assurance of God’s grace. They know that, in spite of suffering and injustice, in spite of raw and painful memories, God’s grace is ever present. And so it is with confidence, even with defiance, that they make this theological declaration:

God is good!

People: All the time!

Of course, St. Paul got it, too. How did he get it? Paul had dedicated his life to rooting out and persecuting that new disruptive group in the Roman Empire – the Christians. He presided over the stoning of Christians. But then God met him on the Road to Damascus – and Paul experienced something he had never known before: absolute forgiveness and acceptance … unearned, unmerited, but absolute.

It changed him forever. His life took on a new and powerful purpose that would lead him to a missionary life of preaching and teaching, of influencing millions from that day to this. Paul experienced God’s grace … and he couldn’t keep it to himself.

“Grace to you …”, he writes as he opens each of his letters: “Grace to you and peace from God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, etc.).

It is also how he ends his letters, how he signs off: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

He begins and ends with grace, because grace is the best thing he has to offer. He showers it on everyone he meets, wishing them grace … because, by grace he was saved.

When Apollo II landed on the moon in 1969, earthlings eagerly awaited the pictures. What did the moon really look like, up close? What did this luminous, silvery celestial body really consist of? But when the pictures appeared, it wasn’t the moon that so caught our breath. It was the glance backward, the image of the earth, our earth, our home that startled and enthralled us.

It was so very, very beautiful … an image of ourselves we had neither seen nor imagined. And in that instant, it was as if we stood in God’s shoes and looked through God’s eyes at the creation. And behold, it was indeed very good.

A Catholic theologian sees in this first photograph of the earth an image of grace. “The doctrine of grace,” she writes, “is telling us what, under normal circumstances, from our limited point of view, we cannot see: that we are beautiful, we are lovely and that in God’s eyes, we are very good.”

The problem with grace, she says, is not being without it. We can never be without it; it is an inherent quality … it’s an all-the-time thing. The trick is in seeing it and knowing it. We don’t often get it, we miss it, because we aren’t looking.

So, what about us? Have we got it, at all? Have you got it? Well, we do say grace … or, most of us do, at least some of the time.

Saying grace at meals is part of getting it. To be honest, with respect to food, it is hard not to get it. As we eat, we are aware of just how blessed we are to have food to eat – and so much of it, and so tasty and varied and aromatic and fresh – something for which millions in our world cannot give thanks.

For the Christian, every meal is a breaking of bread, a little communion, an occasion for thanksgiving. It is an occasion to pause and give thanks to God our Creator, to praise and cherish God, our Provider … to savor the taste and smell and touch, the variety and the colors, of the fruits of the earth.

I mention this because, typically, when Christians come together, we eat. We’ll be eating in a few moments here, sharing the Lord’s Supper. Then, there will be refreshments in the Gordon Chapel after worship in our fellowship time, and still later many of us will eat together yet again, at the All-Church Picnic this afternoon. And, that’s a pretty typical day around here.

We eat together a lot in imitation of Jesus. One of the accusations against him was that he was “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matt. 11.19). His critics were shocked that he so obviously enjoyed this life: he enjoyed people, conversation, food, weddings and parties! Apparently, they were expecting someone skinny and hollow-eyed, joyless and hungry. In fact, the Pharisees pointed to John the Baptist’s disciples, who were skinny and hollow-eyed and joyless and hungry. ‘Look at them!’ they said, ‘They must be really religious! After all, they look miserable.’

But Jesus offered a different way. He said, ‘Let the party begin!’ It’s all part of being aware of God’s grace. It’s part of getting it. Jesus got it. He got it that God is good all the time. When you get it, when you get that, well, everything just flows from there.

That getting it, that knowledge of God’s all-the-time grace, was what Jesus was able to communicate to others. For instance, Luke tells the story of when Jesus participated in the service in the synagogue in Nazareth. Everyone was there: all the neighbors, the elders, Jesus’ friends, his family and cousins and uncles and aunts. Everyone was anxious to hear what the hometown boy would say. They were hoping for something learned and intelligent. But after he spoke, Luke tells us that they were astonished “by the words of grace that fell from his lips” (4.22).

Astonished, they turned to one another, saying, ‘Have you ever known such grace? If religion is like that, if it really is what the carpenter’s son says it is, we want more of it.’

That’s grace. That’s God. Those people got it!

I am sure you have gotten it, as you, too experienced moments of grace in your life: perhaps in a moment of forgiveness you did not deserve, in being upheld by others at difficult times, in a sudden unexpected word or act of kindness, in knowing that there is something bigger and grander than your own life that gives purpose and perspective to the few years we are given on earth, perhaps you have experienced the gift of being loved when you felt unlovable.

The point is that when you get it, when you experience grace that you didn’t earn and can never deserve, your natural response is to pass it on, to give it back, to become part of an extravagant and symbiotic process of give and take, of grace and graciousness, that has no ending or boundaries.

Isn’t that why we come here, Sunday after Sunday? We come to place ourselves in the presence of this God of grace; to give back with our songs, our prayers, our praise and thanksgiving. We come to bask in God’s grace – God’s all-the-time grace. We come, in turn, to give of ourselves in service – of our time, our talent and our treasure – in grateful response to God’s grace toward us.

The life of the Christian is the life of one who knows – who knows in their bones that they are swimming in grace, breathing it in, basking in it, wallowing in it. It is around us and in us. It is inevitable and unavoidable … if only we have eyes to see.

In the tradition of the African American church, let us proclaim what we know:

God is good!

People:  All the time!

All the time!

People:  God is good!
 

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