Hilton Head Island, SC – October 20, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 15:11-19; 25-32
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "'It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.'" - Luke 15:32 (RSV)
Many years ago a man named John Fetterman was the rector of Grace Episcopal Church on the Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin. He was renowned in Madison. He had the same name as the United States Senator John Fetterman, although the rector had that name before the senator. One time he told of a maiden lady in the congregation in her 90's who had died. In her will she stipulated that there were to be no male pallbearers at her funeral. In her own handwriting she had added this codicil: "Men wouldn't take me out when I was alive. I don't want them to take me out when I'm dead."
What on earth does this have to do with grace, which is the subject of this sermon? Not much, really. But perhaps it is an amusing way to begin a sermon on grace. What that little old lady demanded was not exactly grace-filled. However, I don't know that I blame her for wanting only female pallbearers, even if that wasn’t very graceful, and even if she was a lifelong member of Grace Episcopal Church.
So what is grace? A simple and short definition of grace is that it is unmerited love. Parents love their children, not only because they are their children, but simply because they love them. No matter what those children do or don't do, they will continue to love them. Sports fans love their heroes, even when they drop the pass or miss the basket or strike out with the bases loaded, mainly because they love them --- period; end of story. Many people love politicians in a grace-filled way, because no politician can do everything everybody would want done, but they respect and admire these public officials so much that they will continue to feel grace toward them, regardless of their displeasure over particular political positions. Everybody needs to be loved with a grace-filled love, because all of us do things which may seem, and perhaps are, ill-conceived or wrong or even perverse.
God loves all of us with unmerited love. He loves all of us like that, not just the good ones or the loveable ones or the popular ones, but each one, every one. That is what Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son is all about. It is a mis-named parable, however, because it should really be called the Parable of the Grace-Filled Father, but nobody ever calls it that, so I'll also call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son, that you may know which parable I mean. In the story both sons were loved unconditionally by the father, whom Jesus wanted us to perceive to be a parabolic figure for God. God loves all of His children who try to take advantage of His goodness and mercy, and He loves those who think (incorrectly, I might add) that they have earned His goodness and mercy. God loves all of us, no matter what, simply because we are His, we belong to Him, and how could He, who is our heavenly Father, not love us? If most of us, who are human, love our children regardless of what they do or fail to do, how could our heavenly Father not love us like that, even to an infinite or eternal degree? Grace is therefore the unconditional love of God.
John Oman wrote that "Grace is grace precisely because, though wholly concerned with moral goodness, it does not depend on how moral we are." God is good, and He wants us to be good, and He will not stop working us over until we become good, but even when we aren't good (and none of us is always good) He will continue to love us anyway, because that's the way He is. Don't fight it, folks; accept it. God is a God of grace whether you like it or not, but because it is so, God bids you to accept it and even more so to luxuriate in it, for everyone else as well as for yourself.
Rob Craig is a long-time friend of mine. For years he was the pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian in Washington, DC. He was also a member of The Community, a Presbyterian ministers' group with whom it was my privilege to meet twice annually over several years, many years ago.
One time the Community met in Toledo for our semi-annual Community gathering. Rob was telling a group of us about going through some things in the attic of his parents' home. Rob's father had died, and his mother had recently moved into a retirement home, so the attic needed to be emptied. On four different occasions during his father's life, Rob told us, his dad had mentally and vocationally packed his bags, and he had started over with an entirely new career. But because he could never bear to part with anything, he had simply shoveled all the stuff on and in his desk into a big box, and had taped it up and labelled it. Each time he would buy a new stapler, a new set of pens, a new calendar, and so on. The old had passed away into that cardboard box, and behold, the new had come. I’ve never forgotten that story. As January 5 speeds ever closer to me, I can identify with what Mr. Craig did four times. My problem is that I just haven't managed yet to find my shovel amidst all the other high mounds of stuff in my office waiting to be shoveled into my big box.
Grace is like that. Grace says that no matter what is behind us, before us is God. And God's grace -- which is to say, His love -- does not demand that we overcome or obliterate or make restitution for the past; God simply takes us by the hand and says He will go with us into the future, wherever we shall go.
Remember Francis Thompson's immortal poem, The Hound of Heaven?
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him.
Francis Thompson was an addictive person with an addictive personality. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic for much of his life. He fell into indescribable depths of human degradation. But nonetheless, all that time he felt as though he was being pursued by God, and God kept coming after him until He caught him. And that is what grace is; it is God's pursuit of us, even when we run from Him as fast and as far as we can.
Clarence Page, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, wrote this: "Every year professional sports teams practice a form of corporate communism. The worst teams get the first pick of the next year's draft picks....The most popular teams get the same cut of the [league] profits as the least popular. But, curiously, the exact opposite happens in the public sector. Our poorest children get the worst schools with the worst resources, which almost guarantees they will stay poor. The result is a steadily widening gulf...between those who have the greatest chance and those who have the least opportunity to get ahead at all."
God's grace works, amazingly, so it seems, like the draft picks of professional sports. God chooses the worst for the best. But since He is the best, and we, all of us, are in some measure the worst, we all end up with the best team, the only team, which is God's team.
It doesn't seem to make sense, does it? Grace doesn't make sense, and that is precisely why it is grace. As the world understands it, unmerited love does not make sense. We tend to love one another because we tend to think we deserve one another's love, but God loves us because He loves us, and that's that; there is no more to it. Well, actually, there is a great deal more to it than that, at least for God; there is endless pain and heartache and sorrow. But for us, for those of us who experience grace, that's all there is to it. God reaches out, and we are grasped.
The younger son in Jesus' parable had a hard time accepting that amazing truth, as did the older son. The younger thought he had to work his way back into his father's good graces, and the older son thought he had always merited his good graces by how much work he had done, but the father loved them both, strictly because they were his children; for that reason, and no other.
Listen carefully, especially you who have been golfers: Grace is the Mulligan of God. Did you catch it? Grace is God's Mulligan! No matter what we have done, no matter what we do, God always gives us another chance! Once we have accepted His grace, He won't let us keep getting away with all the stuff and each muff and fluff we do, because His grace is bound to transform us once it becomes operative in our lives. But God's grace is always extended and re-extended to us: always!
John Updike wrote a novel called In the Beauty of the Lilies. It traces four generations of the family of a Presbyterian minister named Clarence Wilmot. Although he was supposed to be a Calvinist, believing in prevenient grace and divine election, Clarence Wilmot believed that faith is really an heroic act of self-determination on our part, and God has nothing to do with it.
Listen to Updike's characterization of this obviously flawed human being, as he delivered his final sermon, the one which left him literally speechless ever afterward. "'Election,' [Wilmot] mouthed, 'is winners and non-players. Those who do not accept Christ's great gift of Himself waste away. They become nothing. Election' -- the word hurt and scratched -- 'election is choice. Our choice. It is God's hand...reaching down, to those who reach up. If we cannot feel God's hand gripping ours, it is because' -- and now his throat felt catastrophically closed, his breath reduced to a trickle, a wheeze -- 'we have not reached. Not truly.' He could speak no more."
What Clarence Wilmot told his congregation may sound plausible to you. It may even sound convincing. His misreading of scripture has appealed to millions and millions of Christians since a Galilean carpenter walked the mountains and valleys of Eretz Yisroel, attempting to put to flight that alluring but misguided belief. If we don't reach up, we may try to convince ourselves, God won't reach down. Wrong!!! God's grace never depends on our positive response to that grace: never! He is the Hound of Heaven to us all, and He chases us until He catches us! When we finally understand what grace really means, we have been caught by God! And if His grace doesn't manage to catch us in this world, it will catch us in the next! It is, as the great old divines of the Church said, irresistible! We can avert it for a while, maybe for an earthly lifetime, but we can't resist it forever --- not God's grace, we can't! Our own grace, maybe, but His grace: Never!
And so, in His parable, Jesus has the Father (who is God), say to His household servants, who are mightily miffed at what He tells them to do, "'Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.' And they began to make merry" (Luke 15:22-24).
When God's grace finally penetrates into our all-too-frequently graceless lives, it brings joy to the heart of God! Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, as St. Augustine said, but when they do find their rest in Him, when we finally do get the big picture, the Master of the Universe rejoices!
And so, at the end of the parable, the father says to the older son, the one who thinks he has done what the father wanted before allowing the father's grace to empower him to do it: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found" (Luke 15:31-32).
In her wonderfully thought-provoking novel The Good Husband, author Gail Godwin tells of a conversation between one of her central characters, Magda Danvers, and Tony Ramirez-Suarez, a fellow professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. They are speaking of eternal truths, for Magda is dying of cancer, and she says, "Something awful has occurred to me, Tony. What if, however hard you try on your exam, or however stupid or smart you are, everybody gets the same grade in the end?" "Dear lady" [said Tony], "you are truly inspired today. And of course we do, we all do get the same grade, in the sense I think you mean." "Tony" [said Magda], "you are one the few who do know what I mean" (The Good Husband, Ballantine Books, New York, 1994, p. 248).
Don't count on your goodness, your passing mark, your own personal merit or the depth of your faith to bring you your salvation; count only on God's grace. That alone can save any of us, and in the end it shall save all of us, because God and His grace are like that. He -- and it -- are ultimately irresistible.