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June 12 2005 North Park Presbyterian Church Gospel Basics: Grace Patricia K.
Townsend Psalm 116 Romans 5:1-8 Hymns: 2 Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing 202 Amazing Grace All things bright and beautiful (in bulletin)
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
With some variant of this greeting the Apostle Paul begins each of his letters, including Romans, the epistle we are currently reading. Grace to you. And so he ends his letters as well, echoing “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” Grace meets us coming and going. Today’s lectionary passage from the Epistle to the Romans is as concentrated as a multi-vitamin. In it Paul summarizes his whole argument. I won’t even attempt to deal with it all but only one phrase from the 2nd verse: “This grace in which we stand.” The image that comes to me on a hot summer day when I think about “the grace in which we stand” is the creek that ran through the pasture in our farm in Michigan. When I was a child I would play in the creek or just stand on the sandy creek bottom with the cool water running over my ankles and legs. The pasture was long and narrow and the creek cut through it with a barbed wire fence at both sides. After leaving the pasture, the creek flowed past our big cornfield and separated our house from our neighbors the Oreskovichs. It was not even tempting to go through the fence and wade upstream or down, because the creek changed in character, deep water, the steep banks overhung by tall grasses. The pasture was a fordable spot, further widened by cows going to drink in earlier years. As a child, I took the creek for granted, never even questioned where it came from or how it made its way down to Lake Michigan in the many miles after it disappeared under the railroad bridge across the road from the Oreskoviches’ house. Grace is like that. It is a free gift that flows from God’s love. We do nothing to deserve its refreshment. As the Psalmist wrote, and Ted read to us, “Gracious is the Lord, and righteous, ..and merciful” “What can I render to the Lord for all his bounty to me?” Nothing really, except our praise and thanksgiving. Yet it is such a temptation to think that there must be something we can do to please God, to pay God back for the bountiful creation, the love of friends and family, the gifts of health and salvation. And then we are reminded that faith is trusting God, not working to earn salvation. When Bill and I were traveling in the high desert plateaus of the national parks of southwestern Utah, one of our stops offered a trail down into a canyon for a closer look at the natural bridge in the rock that we could see in the distance. Bill was interested in going down, but as I studied the map I discovered that the trail included several ladders down cliff faces. As you can imagine from my expressed fear of precipices, I decided to take a pass on that one. In the two weeks since then, the tune of “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” has annoyingly been running through my head, I suppose partly because the Mormons covered the landscape of Utah with place names that recall the Old Testament: we stayed in Moab, for example, and drove in the direction of Zion. The old camp song buzzing in my head is particularly annoying because it is so anti-grace. We are not “climbing Jacob’s ladder” to get to heaven at all, nor was Jacob climbing the ladder in his dream, instead angels were going up and down on the ladder. The story is one of pure grace. Young Jacob had just done the most deceitful, dastardly deed. With the connivance of his mother Rebekah, he deceived his blind old father Isaac into giving him the blessing that was due his elder brother Esau, cheating his twin out of the inheritance that was rightly due to him. Running away, he lies down to sleep in a lonely place, with a stone as pillow. He encounters God, who was perfectly well entitled to blast Jacob as a cheat and a liar. Instead Jacob is given this beautiful dream of a ladder. God renews to him the promises he had made to his randfather Abraham (read Genesis 28:13-22) The story in Genesis 28 is a perfect companion to the passage from Genesis 12 that we read last week. In chapter 12 Abraham started out on a risky journey toward Harran In Chapter 28 his grandson Jacob is traveling away from Harran back to Abraham’s home country in search of a bride within their circle of kin. Who are these people that God has chosen for this covenant of promise and what did they do to deserve God’s love? Nothing, that’s what. It is sheer grace. Amazing grace. Unmerited favor, unconditional love, undeserved salvation. It is a concept unique in its significance to Christianity. Judaism speaks of God as gracious and merciful, but law and covenant are central. Islam too has a code of law, with its 5 pillars (testifying that there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet, prayer 5 times a day, charity, fasting during Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca). The Buddhist eight-fold path and the Hindu doctrine of karma--each of these offers a way to earn approval. (C. S. Lewis as quoted by Philip Yancey) We disciples are so resistant to the idea of grace that Jesus has to talk about it all the time: In the Sermon on the Mount he reminds us to consider the wildflowers; they grow without toiling and spinning. Look at the birds; they are fed without planting or harvesting. (Mt 6). The Father makes the sun shine on the evil and the good. It rains on the just and the unjust (Mt 5). The creek flows through the pasture without our having done anything at all to earn its coolness on this summer day. “What shall I render to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. Praise the Lord” (Ps 116). Amen. (Without footnoting all my borrowings from them, I commend to you two books, Amazing Grace: the Vocabulary of Faith, by Kathleen Norris and Why Is Grace So Amazing? by Phillip Yancey.)
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