Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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     On a Spring day in Lent, a communion Sunday, in fact, we come to this famous passage from Ephesians, bread and butter to our faith, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God…."  A modern paraphrase puts it this way, "Saving is all his idea, and all his work.  All we do is trust him enough to let him do it.  It's God's gift from start to finish."

    "By grace you have been saved through faith…"  Grace is what God does; faith is what we do in response.  And salvation always begins with grace, with God's unmerited, unconditional love.  It is so easy to slip off that point, and so disastrous -- to think that we are saved by our own efforts, or by our goodness.  (We need to think that, I guess, for our pride.  We need to think we play some role.)  But at the very bottom of things, when our souls are bare, we know Paul was right.  God acted first, and still does.  "We do not come to this thy table, O Lord, trusting in our own righteousness (Perish the thought!)  Fact is, we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.  But thou art the same Lord," always full of mercy.

    Advertisements directed at us fat folk often feature "before" and "after" pictures.  They are persuasive.  Of course, we want to look like "after" and not like "before."  Who wouldn't?  The early Christians had a "before" and "after" picture of world history, and of each Christian life.  And the dividing line was Jesus Christ.  It was a lost world, they said, a lost life, before Christ came.  We were toadies of the devil.  We served the powers and principalities of this world.  We were numb to the evil all around us.  We accepted the unacceptable.  Everything we did led to sin and then to death.  "I once was lost ("before"), but now am found ("after"), was blind ("before") but now I see ("after").  And this wonderful transition, Paul reminds us, was not of our own doing -- lest we should boast -- it was God's idea from start to finish.  Therefore we praise God in the morning and when we lie down at night to sleep.

    There are good reasons to emphasize the primacy of God's grace, not the least of which is that it makes us more bearable, more humble human beings.  As Paul emphasized in all his writings, it leaves us nothing to brag and boast about.  What changes would there be in us, and in our church, if we truly believed in God's grace and trusted Him to save us, and stopped struggling with our salvation.  We don't have much time for that struggle.  We have work to do.  The Gospel message is two-fold: that God saves us by his grace, on the one hand, and that we therefore live gracious lives,  loving others, as much as we are able, with the same unmerited, unconditional love with which God loves us.  "Freely you have received; freely give."  The Gospel changes the way we live, or it's not the Gospel.  Robert Crosby says some people are "grace givers", while others are "grace robbers."  Which are we?

    Surely, the message of God's grace enables us to reject the pessimism, the thoroughgoing pessimism that cripples so many today.  Pessimism is a grace robber.  It is easy to become discouraged, especially if we are counting on ourselves, or on our humanity, to rescue us.  Some people build their lives on pessimism, they read the papers and wring their hands.  That's easy to do.  I went to Yad Vashim, the memorial outside Jerusalem to those who died in the holocaust.  Six million Jews murdered, one and a half million of them children.  And this was not the crime of some Mongolian warlord, or of some medieval Tsar.  This unspeakable crime was perpetrated by a nation that was the epitome of modern culture, a Christian nation, a well-educated, sensitive, artistic people.

    The Children's Memorial was an experience I will never forget.  A large room completely dark, with hundreds of small mirrors on the walls and ceiling and with just four lit candles in the middle.  But because of those mirrors, the light from those candles is reflected everywhere, and it looks like the night sky with a million stars.  Visitors walk around the room in the dark, holding a railing, and a voice slowly reads the names of the children: "Janis Kadar, eleven years old, Czechoslovakia.  Rebecca Marcinzski, two years old, Poland."  It takes over a year to read all the children's names.  It is easy to be discouraged.  If we count on our humanity, or our civility to rescue us, the horrible reality of evils such as the holocaust will bring us to a bitter pessimism.  Only God can save, and that is exactly what he has done, and continues to do.  As one emerges from the Children's Memorial, he finds himself on what is called "the Avenue of the Righteous."  Along that wide path are planted four thousand trees, each one baring a plaque with the name of some non-Jew (most of them Christians) who helped the Jews in those terrible days.  We saw the tree for Oscar Schindler, Raol Wallenburg, Cori Ten Boom.

    Deliverance comes from God.  He will remember us in our distress, as he remembered the Hebrew children in Egypt, as he remembered Noah and the animals on the ark, as the loving Father never forgot his prodigal son.  He will deal with our sins and love us still.  All guilt is washed away.  Sometimes guilt feelings are justified, sometimes not.  Sometimes we impose guilt on ourselves, sometimes others do it to us.  A man called his mother who was living in Florida.  "How ya doin', Ma?"  "Well, I'm not so good.  I haven't eaten for thirty-eight days."  "Ma!  Why haven't you eaten for thirty-eight days?"  "I didn't want my mouth to be full of food when you called."  Guilt.  The message of the Gospel keeps us from being devastated by it.  As Christians we may learn lessons from our mistakes ("Maybe I should call my mother more often."), but we are never overwhelmed by guilt. For we understand that we are fallible and subject to all human weaknesses, and while we are not proud of our failures, God has made allowances for them.

    The biggest failure of all, of course, was to crucify Jesus.  But in Holy Week it is not only what we are doing.  It is also what God is doing.  We are at our worst, denying him, betraying him, running away, afraid.  He is at his best.  Giving all there is to give, loving with a love that has no end, preparing us to go on in his absence, giving us this sacrament "on the same night he was betrayed."  I once was lost.  We all once were lost, and still would be but for the grace of God in Jesus Christ, which we celebrate now.