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Sunday, August 15, 2010
We Begin With Grace
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: Luke 15:11 – 24 New Revised Standard Version
11 Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. 12 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. 13 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. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 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. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 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! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands." 20 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. 21 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. 22 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. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.
Last week I had the privilege of sitting with 8 or 9 members of our Senior High youth group and talking about prayers of confession and how we understand grace and sin as United Methodist Christians. The meeting came about because one of the youth asked me a couple of months ago about the prayer of confession we typically use before our communion service. She said it only seemed to emphasize our negatives and what bad people we are and she felt that when we stand before God in confession, we are not just wrong and worthless, but that we are a mixture of good and bad.
I took that question as an opportunity to begin a dialogue with our senior high youth, and the True False survey in your bulletin is how we began that evening so we could look at the more complex way churches in the mainstream understand all of what it means to be human.
We also had as a resource the short verses in Psalm 8, an inspiring witness if you ever feel down on yourself, because Psalm 8 tells us that each of us is a wondrous and marvelous creation of God and that God has created us just a little lower than the angels!
We talked together about how there can be two extremes in Christian theology. One extreme says that we are all just worthless, wretched worms with no good in us at all, and the other says that there is nothing wrong with us at all, that we are perfect and perfectible, and that we have no need to ask for forgiveness from God and from each other.
In the midst of those extremes is a more Biblical image of people that says God has created each of us in God’s image, that God loves us, but that we also make bad choices and selfish choices and sometimes we do feel like wretches when we have betrayed God’s best hopes and our own best hopes for our lives. So we do need to confess our failures and wrongdoing and sin before God.
Perhaps the most familiar way that we talk about that mix of faith and failure in our lives is in a hymn like Amazing Grace written in 1779 by John Newton who, by that time, had become an Anglican priest. Before his conversion to a life of faith he was involved in the sinister and evil work of being a slave trader, buying human beings in Africa and bringing them to the American colonies to sell as slaves. So we can understand why Newton would write in verse one of his hymn that God’s amazing grace had saved a wretch like he. But we may not as often identify with his very low image of himself as much as we do with the line that says he once was lost but now is found and once was blind but now can see.
We believe, as United Methodist Christians, that the place to begin in our relationship with God is with the grace and love of God and with the fact that we have been created in the image of God. In a recent article in a national church newspaper, Professor Donald Haynes tells the story about being at a picnic. He is approached by someone who has just received a little pamphlet from another faith tradition laying out what is supposedly the four line way of salvation that began with a statement that we are all sinners. Dr. Haynes’ comment to his friend who had gotten the pamphlet was this: “We Methodists don’t believe that God’s way of salvation begins with the person’s sin, it begins with God’s character which is love.”
I would even add to that definition of God’s character; it is not only defined by love, it is defined by grace.
First of all, God is gracious and compassionate.
This is an essential part of the character of God that Jesus offers us most clearly. It is not the only characteristic of God. God accepts us where we are and then God helps us change and move beyond just where we are. But first of all, God is gracious, more gracious than we are at times.
There is no place we see that gracious stance of God more clearly than in the story Jesus tells in Luke 15; the story of a father who had two sons.
By the way, Jesus told some 38 or so parables, but if we only had this parable in Luke 15 and one other parable in Luke 10 about a Samaritan who acts with kindness and compassion, we would know all we need to know about God and about God’s hopes for how we treat each other. The parable of the waiting father tells us how God is and who God is with us. The parable of the Good Samaritan tells us about how God hopes that we treat each other. He hopes we treat each other with compassion. The Greek word for compassion shows up in each of these stories. It means that we are moved inwardly, in our gut, to act with kindness and grace.
In the story of the father who had two sons, when the younger son asks for his share of the family inheritance, he is saying to his father, “I wish you were already dead!” He would typically get his inheritance at the death of the father. His family has worked very hard to build up that wealth, but he does not realize that or appreciate it and goes away to waste it.
He finally comes to his senses when he is doing the most repulsive thing a Jew could do, feed the pigs. As he is feeding the pigs he realizes what he has done to his father, his family, and himself. He composes the speech he will give about what a fool he has been. He rehearses it all the way home. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you and I am no longer worthy to be called a son, just treat me as a servant.”
He practices his speech all the way home. Does he get to give all his speech? Just part of it because his father has been looking for him, hoping each day that he will return. His father runs to meet him, something no self-respecting Near Eastern father would ever do. He RUNS to meet a son who has betrayed the family and the honor of the family by wasting himself and the family resources.
By the way, as Jesus told this story, the people in Jesus’ audience were expecting that the father would be strict and upright and punish this sinful, foolish son and probably just take him back as a slave. But the father does not even let him finish his well rehearsed speech. He has a robe and ring brought to him to show that he is back in the family because the chief character trait of this father is one of Grace.
Jesus is saying that God is first of all, not a vengeful, condemning finger shaking Judge—God is a God of Grace.
St. Andrew musician Jon Sherman found a song by U2 about Grace that he prepared a few months ago for an Afterhours service. I was so moved by it that I asked him to include it in the sermon for today.
GRACE by U2
Did some of those lines stick with you? Every wrong you have done and every wrong done to you, I know about it. And in you I will create marvelous wonders.
You and I believe, along with John Wesley and with Jesus of Nazareth that the first thing we must say about God is that God is gracious. And when we tell God some of the words in that U2 song: “You don’t know what I have done,” God says, of course I do, and God still welcomes us home and brings us back and helps us acknowledge what we have done and He helps us change and take a new direction.
God accepts us right where we are AND loves us too much to just leave us where we are.
And God is more gracious than we sometimes are.
We occasionally get requests from people in our community to host a funeral for a loved one who has died. The family may have had minimal or no relationship with this or any church. We almost always say yes. We believe that people deserve to have a place where their life is honored and commemorated, and they deserve to have a service where they are remembered and where the good things they have given are celebrated, where we thank God for life and we return this person’s life to God.
And sometimes we say during the service, God is more gracious than we are.
God is more gracious than we are. That is one of the truths of the story of the father with two sons, a faithful and responsible son who stayed and worked and did what was right and expected, and a selfish and disloyal and irresponsible son who finally came to his senses and came back and still was welcomed because this one who had been lost was now found. This one who was dead has now come to life once more.
There are many things we can say about the character of God, but the first thing we must say is that when we begin to talk about God we must begin with Grace. That same God asks us when we relate to each other to begin with Grace as well.
Can we do that also?