The House of Grace: Made Perfect
University Park United Methodist Church
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 8, 2024
Scripture: Matthew 5:43 – 48
Did you ever think about air? I mean, air is amazing.
The earth is almost 8000 miles in diameter. But according to NASA, space begins at just 62 miles above the earth’s surface. And once we get even four miles above sea level, we can’t breathe. There’s just not enough oxygen up there. So without this thin, almost infinitesimal band of air around our planet that is only 1/2000th of the planet’s diameter, we wouldn’t be here. Even if we could somehow get enough oxygen without air, we’d all die from exposure to gigantic doses of cosmic radiation, because air combines with our planet’s magnetic field to protect us from that. And even if we were somehow immune to cosmic radiation, we’d get wiped out by meteorites, which air also protects us against because they mostly burn up in the atmosphere before they hit the ground. Or we’d starve to death, because obviously without air we couldn’t grow any food. Have you ever seen pictures of the atmosphere from space? It seems so thin it’s almost not there at all. But all life depends on it in one way or another. And don’t even get me started on water, or having the sun the proper distance away from earth: not too close, not too far, so we get the energy we need without being incinerated. We are here through a conspiracy of creation that we literally had nothing to do with.
Now I’m going to nerd out a little here, because I know there is an argument in philosophy called the anthropic principle, or sometimes it’s called the observation selection effect, because philosophers never want to use a simple term where a complicated one will do. The anthropic principle just says that my point about this amazing conspiracy of creation is kind of nonsense because without air and sunshine and water and all the rest of it, living beings wouldn’t be here to think these thoughts in the first place. The anthropic principle says we have a kind of goldilocks universe because it’s the only universe we could have. But that actually kind of IS my point: without air, we wouldn’t be here. Not only that, but air, sunshine, stars, life: we didn’t earn these things. We just get them. They’re free.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been talking in worship about grace: this idea that God loves us beyond anything we can possibly understand or imagine, not because of anything we needed to earn or deserve or accomplish or achieve, but simply because that’s just who God is. And of course that’s really what I’m talking about here when I point out the miraculous gifts of air, and sunshine, and water, and life; and how even though we do evil things to harm each other and cause each other misery and destroy the planet, somehow, God’s creation just keeps giving, and keeps on being beautiful and miraculous anyway. It’s funny to me, it’s kind of odd, that our culture has such a hard time believing in grace when our very existence would be impossible without it.
Grace shows up in the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments, which means it’s both very Jewish and very Muslim. But grace seems to me somehow especially Christian. I don’t think Christianity makes much sense without grace, and that’s part of what makes our faith so counterintuitive and countercultural. We’re taught from childhood that we need to hustle. We need to work. We need to earn and achieve and make our mark. We’re taught to prize hard work and hard-earned competence. We’re taught the best possible world is the fairest possible world, and everyone should work hard to get what we deserve.
Christianity sees things in a fundamentally different way. It’s not that hard work and competence are bad things. They’re good things. But at the heart of our faith is the notion that God does not give us what we deserve. God gives us far more than we deserve, and this is true no matter who we are. We’re given life, for one thing. Didn’t ask for it, didn’t earn it. We just showed up. It would be ridiculous to ask if we had somehow earned our life, or earned blue skies and sunshine, or starry nights or rain or air. These things are just here. They’re gifts, like grace.
Most Sunday afternoons, I go for a bike ride. Sometimes I’m on the highline canal, and along a gravel stretch of the canal there’s a place where you can look west and see this jaw dropping view of the mountains. And beside the trail, a few years ago somebody put up a little sign that says, “view compliments of God.” I think that’s a marvelous summation of grace. “This day compliments of God.” “Sunshine, compliments of God.” “Air, compliments of God.” All of creation, compliments of a God who is extravagantly, unfairly generous with love, acceptance, dignity, compassion, even life itself. But somehow, even in the midst of all these gifts, we’ve created a world in which we have to buy our belonging.
We buy our belonging by achievement. We buy our belonging by living up to the high standards others set for us, or by trying in vain to live up to the impossible standards we set for ourselves. We buy our belonging with money, or trying to fit in where we don’t, or keeping quiet about who we know ourselves to be. But if grace is real – and I think it is – in God’s family, in God’s economy, we don’t have to do any of that.
About, I don’t know, six years ago, while I was serving at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, I got an email from a guy who attended a much more theologically conservative congregation. He wasn’t looking for a new place to go to church. He was just curious about how other churches understood Christian life, and he wanted to know if it was OK to come worship with us and talk to me. I said of course, we’d love to have you. So the next Sunday, he came to worship. And afterward, we sat down for coffee in our fellowship hall.
He had questions about our worship. There were things in the sermon and elsewhere in the service that he clearly disagreed with, places he thought our approach was wrong. But we had a really good conversation. I so appreciated his attitude of openness and genuinely wanting to know how other Christians understood our faith. And at the end of our conversation, I told him how much I had enjoyed talking, and I said, “obviously, we believe differently. But I’m really curious about something. If you had to sum up the Christian message in one sentence, what would you say?” He said, “Oh, that’s pretty easy. The Son of God died for your sins.” He said, “how about you? What would you say?” I said, “I think I would say, “you belong here.” And I don’t mean here in church, although of course everyone’s welcome. I mean here in the universe. You belong here. God’s creation is your home. You are not a stranger, not an alien, not alienated. You belong here. You have every right to be here and be who you truly are.” He said, “that’s more than one sentence.” I said, “Fair. I’m a preacher. Sorry.”
I’ve thought about that conversation every once in a while since then. And as different as we may have been, I do think there’s an important commonality between us. For him, there was an unbridgeable gap between us and God, created by human sin, a gap that could only be bridged by God’s action. My emphasis was on God’s love for us and the way that God is constantly reaching out to us. But in the end, both of us know a God who looks at us in love and says, “there is nothing you can do to make me love you less, and I will do anything to draw you closer to me.” We both know a God of grace.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at how John Wesley, one of the primary founders of Methodism, understood grace. Wesley said grace works differently for us depending on where we are in our lives: prevenient grace draws us to God before we’re even aware of being drawn. Justifying grace leads us into Christian life. Sanctifying grace, over the course of years, gradually allows the image of God to shine ever more clearly through us.
Now Wesley talked about a final phase of grace, one that Jesus begins to get at in the passage Abby read for us this morning. Wesley called it Christian perfection, but that term can be a little misleading, and to see why it helps to examine the reading we just heard.
The verses Abby read for us are some of the best known in the Gospels. Jesus says, “you have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemies. But I say to you, love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you, so you will be children of your Father in heaven.”
For me, what stands out is the relationship that Jesus describes. In the first century Mediterranean world where Jesus lived, to say that someone was “a child of,” or “a descendant of,” or “an heir of” someone else was to say they were like that person. Jesus is telling his first century listeners, and I think us too, that if they want to be like God, they need to practice loving their enemies. And love here has nothing to do with warm, tender feelings. To love someone in this sense means to act in their best interest, to do the right thing by them.
And then there’s this piece at the end. Jesus says, “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In Greek, the language in which the new Testament was written, the word translated “perfect” here doesn’t mean “flawless,” or “free of errors.” It means complete, fulfilled. To be perfect in the way Matthew’s gospel uses the Greek word means to come fully into the purpose for which you were created.
I think there’s something truly beautiful about this. We were created to be like God by extending grace to the world. To extend God’s grace into the world is to fulfill the purpose for which we were created. It is to become who we truly are by participating in God’s work of bringing the world back home to itself.
One of my favorite lines of poetry comes from the end of T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding. He writes,
“…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
In the end, prevenient grace, justifying grace, sanctifying grace, it’s all the same grace. It’s all God’s spirit moving through us to shape us into fully human beings, offering a feast of grace to a world that simply does not yet realize that we’ve all been sitting at God’s banquet table all along.