I
really don’t like preaching on Paul’s writings. Paul’s words, in spite of being
the foundation of much of our theology, are tough to parse, so I’m stuck in the
role of Paul’s translator and I don’t much like it. For example, in Galatians
today Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who
live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” And Paul says, “If justification comes
through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” And we say, “Oh yes, Paul. Give
us another!” Something about grace and faith; something about the law serving a
purpose but salvation is through Christ, etc, etc. There is more Paul in the
Lutheran Confessions than anything short of the Gospels, but just because this
is what the church confesses doesn’t mean it’s easy. Instead, I find that it
leaves people asking: But now what?
That’s the problem. I basically have one
sermon in me and it centers of grace. I preach on grace pretty much every
Sunday and some of you buy half into it 99% of the time, others of you buy into
it fully about half of the time; still others have no idea why any of this matters
and you are waiting for me to reference some cultural marker you can relate to so
you can perk up. Nothing is more offensive than grace because feels like I
might be saying “None of this matters!” And that’s what we’re afraid of after
all—that none of this does matter. So when the pastor stands up and proclaims
not expensive grace, and not cheap grace, but free grace—grace that is yours
free of charge, no acceptance necessary—well, that sounds like a free pass to
meaninglessness paved on a road of anything-goes. Just the kind of thing we
want to be telling our graduates, right? Anything goes?
What do we do with this grace?
For
graduates it comes in the following questions I’m sure you have heard once or
twice recently. “So, what are you doing next year?” “So, where are you going to
school?” “So, what kind of work are you doing?”
Paul is
not graduation sermon material because the grace Paul offers only makes sense
to somebody who is down and out and has all but given up on saving their own
self. Paul’s grace only makes sense to one who sees his or herself as beyond
any hope, beyond help. Paul was Saul, brooding, murdering Saul; Saul who
murdered Christians better than anyone else. He was beyond hope, beyond saving.
Paul is exactly that rare person who understood grace, who understood his
desperate need for something outside of himself to save him.
Graduates?
You probably don’t get grace. I don’t
want to assume anything about your to this point, but the truth is that you
don’t get it until you need it, until
you’ve lost something you can’t replace. Grace lives beyond our control. So, if
you’ve been measured on a scale from A-F, from pass to fail, for a long time, it’s
easy to assume that’s how everything in the world works. How do you stack up to
one another? But grace does not work like this. The test of your faith is
neither graded nor pass-fail. It is simply a test you cannot pass. You will
fail. 100%. And it’s not even a question of how well you bounce back. Rather,
grace is the thing that will only make sense when you are in the pit and cannot
even begin to climb out.
Grace is
for when all else fails because it will. How’s that for a graduation promise?
You will fail. And I’m not even going to tell you to pick yourself up by your
bootstraps and try again—you should try to do that, but I want to talk about
what happens when you can’t. We spend a lot of time in life assuring one
another it’s going to be alright when the truth is that, on this side of the
veil, it might not be. The witness of the saints is often about loss and death
and suffering. Prayer and patience and faithfulness are no promise that it will
work out like you imagine. We don’t have faith in God to stop bad things from
happening to us, as if God is up there somewhere smushing people under the
giant, divine thumb when they are not good faithful Christians. We don’t have
faith to make our lives comfortable. We have faith in God to lead us where we
cannot go.
Grace is not karma, and it’s not a free
pass from suffering. It doesn’t tell you that “God has a plan” or that it’s all
under control, because grace is for a time when we know that it’s not under
control. Grace lives in one place most of all and it meets us there when we are
at our lowest. Grace lives in hell and that is where it becomes unimaginably
powerful—in a place where hope has been extinguished.
So, graduates, you understand my
difficulty today. Grace is not for graduation. But it is for some moment in
your life ahead when it all falls apart. Don’t give thanks to God for today if
your faith is only about God helping you get what you want, because someday you
will not get what you want and if that causes you a crisis of faith it has less
to do with God and more to do with your little expectations. If faith is going
to mean something for you it has to be when you find yourself absolutely
beaten, because that’s where grace lives.
The problem we have—and why grace is so
stinking hard—is that you are likely not to discover what it means until you’re
already there, and if you’ve decided ahead of time that God exists to serve
your every want and need, that you are God’s gift to the world and you have
earned everything you’ve ever gotten in life against all odds (and probably
terrible parents and teachers and coaches and referees and judges and whoever
else has had cause to stack you up to perfection and find you lacking); if
you’ve already decided that the only way you believe in God is if God is good
to you, then you have nothing to fall back on when you find yourself in the
muck because you have decided that you are god after all. Grace is only for
those who understand they are not God, they cannot do enough on their own, and
they need help to get out of the pit.
Grace is offensive, because it means
looking at yourself in the mirror as you truly are. It means seeing yourself as
a beautiful child of God, created and called “good,” even while you are a
dirty, rotten sinner who deserves exactly the pit you will find yourself in
somewhere down the road. That’s tough. It’s not the graduation sermon you want,
but it might be the one you need because you aren’t perfect, things are not
always good, and you don’t deserve it—no matter what anyone says. It’s all
yours as a gift, and that’s grace. Everything is a gift. Your life, your
friends, your family, your future, and most of all your eternity. It’s a gift
you don’t deserve. That might not sound like good news now, but someday it
will. Thankfully, grace is in it for the long haul.
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