According to the Grace of Our God

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 1: 10-18 and 2 Thessalonians 1: 1-4, 11-12 Sermon Title: According to the Grace of Our God Preached on 10/30/22 Inspired by that reading from 2nd Thessalonians, I’m focused today on grace, even though we just heard a very angry word from the Prophet Isaiah in our first Scripture lesson. Our beadle read this passage from Isaiah, where God is saying to the people: I cannot endure your solemn assemblies. My soul hates your festivals. They are a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. [So], when you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Why would God say these things? [Because our] hands are full of blood [God explains]. [Because we must] wash [ourselves]; make [ourselves] clean; remove [our] evil deeds from before [God’s] eyes. Learn to do justice, rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan, plead for the widow. On and on, God says to us through the Prophet Isaiah: “If you expect me to listen to you, you’re going to have to do better.” What does such a message of judgement have to do with grace? Let me tell you that there is a difference between grace and cheap grace. Have you ever heard that term before? Cheap grace? The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a hero worthy of celebrating today, on this Sunday we call Reformation Sunday, wrote that: Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. On the other hand: Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. It is costly because it cost a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. In other words, cheap grace is accepting that God loves us despite our imperfection, which is true, God does, but not being afraid of doing something about the imperfection. Cheap grace is settling for mediocre. It’s entitlement. It’s going to bed without ever flossing your teeth. Speaking of dental hygiene, the last time I went to the dentist, the hygienist asked me if I had been flossing. I told her that I had just flossed last night, which was true. I had. I had not flossed the night before that nor the night before that. Immediately upon walking into the dentist office, I wanted to hide what I haven’t been doing. I was taking comfort in what I had going for me: the strong teeth I inherited from my dad and the fact that I brush them twice a day. So what if I floss sparingly? So what? Why hide what is broken from one who can help us? Why rely on what we’re doing right while ignoring what could be better? If we’re saved by grace, we can’t be afraid of sin. Sin is holding us back from abundant life, and grace can give us the confidence to deal with it without fear of condemnation. Everyone fears condemnation, so we hide what needs to be healed. We must get over that. That’s why, in this place, we try to work against the tendency to hide what is broken by standing together to boldly confess, and we do it Sunday after Sunday. This morning we said before God and one another: Imagining that you are weak, I confide in my own strength. Imagining that you are distant, the worries of the world threaten to undo me. Imagining evil’s power is greater than yours, I tremble before the prince of darkness. I write these prayers each Sunday I preach. People ask me where I get the inspiration to write the Prayer of Confession Sunday after Sunday, and I tell them, “I just look in the mirror and try to be honest with myself about what I’m struggling with,” and in this prayer, you can see what I’m struggling with: confiding in my own strength instead of relying on God’s power. That’s a bad habit. Bruce and Fran Myers gave me a plaque that says, “Pray First,” quoting Philippians: “Don’t worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank Him for all he has done.” That plaque is such a good reminder for me. I love it because when I face a trial, my first inclination is to try and fix it myself. I confide in my own strength, which is foolish. I worry over everything. I tremble before the evil in the world, rather than asking God for help. That’s what confession is. It’s asking God for help. Today, I get the truth of my struggle out in the open. That’s hard to do, but it’s also wonderful because when I tell God the truth, His grace washes over me. Grace is what enables confession. We can confess because we trust in God’s grace. When we rely on God’s grace, we just might gain the courage to be honest about what’s broken inside us. That’s something we must do as individual Christians, and that’s something that we must do as a church, so Paul wrote our second Scripture lesson to the church in Thessalonica saying: We always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what Paul wrote, but how? How are we to be made worthy of God’s call? How might we live according to the grace of our God? We must remember that God is ever ready to forgive, but we must be ready to confess. We must look in the mirror and remember that we are simultaneously saints and sinners, inheriting a legacy from our foreparents, which is both their virtue and their sin. Can we hold onto the virtue while confessing the sin? Of course we can, and we can do it by following Martin Luther’s example. Today, on this Reformation Sunday, we remember Martin Luther, who in Germany more than 500 years ago, broke from the Roman Catholic Church. In doing so, he tried to hold onto what was virtuous in his tradition. He valued the Scripture the Church gave him, and he felt connected to God through the sacraments. On the one hand, the Church gave him gifts, yet he hated the idolatry the Church passed down to him on the other. That was the sin he was trying to get rid of. He didn’t deny that it was sin. He faced it. He called it by name. Boldy, he wrote that the Church was guilty of idolatry, and he nailed what he wrote right on the side of the church door in Whittenburg, Germany, getting sin out in the open. We are called to do the same thing by examining ourselves and the patterns our foreparents passed down to us, for we cheapen grace when we never deal with sin. We punish ourselves when we never confess. We sell ourselves short if we never examine the way we live or the tradition we inherit. On this Reformation Sunday, I remind you that God doesn’t expect us to be perfect. Instead, God calls us to rely on His grace, and so, we examine the history of our church founded by 12 families in 1835 just as Martin Luther looked on his. From them, what do we keep? What sin do we confess? On the one hand, our foreparents deserve our admiration. The first members of this church broke ground when this was a frontier town. Later, just 96 of them built a sanctuary to seat 400. Many dispute that number saying, “You can’t fit 400 people in that sanctuary.” Given the size of rear ends in 1854, you could. Yet while we are called to follow the example of that handful of people who built a sanctuary to sit 400, we must also remember that most likely in 1854, the ones who laid the bricks, plastered the walls, and raised the steeple were among the oppressed people who labored without pay. That’s their sin. What do we do with their sin? We take the virtue and confess the sin. We confess that what they did was wrong, and we promise to learn from their mistakes, knowing that grace, costly grace, enables us to look ourselves in the mirror, honest about what is good and what must be better. Part of Reformation Sunday is freely admitting that about our heritage: Not all of it was perfect. We are not perfect either. For this reason, Martin Luther confessed that the idolatry he inherited was sinful. We confess that slavery was sinful, and not all of what we inherit is worth holding onto. Speaking of inheritance, last week, which has been full of funerals, I heard Ken Farrar tell a story about his father, Ralph. On a long car ride, his dad, Ralph, once told his son, “Ken, I’m afraid you’re not going to inherit much from me, and I’m sorry about that.” To that, Ken said, “From you, Dad, I’ve inherited character, integrity, strength, yes, your temper, but also your heart and especially your faith.” Hearing him say that got me thinking about my own father, from whom I’ve inherited good teeth and a hair line. He also has a heart of compassion, which I’ll always aspire to. Like all of us, my father had to think about what he would inherit from his father. There was a lot he let go of and tried to do differently than his father did. Growing up in Atlanta, my dad was the kid in the scout troop whose father never showed up, yet to me, he became the father who was always there. He was at every baseball game, and he led my scout troop. My friends, today we stand in a long line of Christians. We stand in that great line of faithful men and women, but as we think of them, let us remember that faithfulness is well embodied by those who live according to the grace of God and know how to confess and be changed. We are not perfect, so let us wash ourselves and be made clean. Let us remove evil deeds from our lives. Let us learn to do justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow, and while we’re at it, let us floss our teeth. Let us live according to the grace of our God. Amen.