The Grace of Christ
Text: Galatians 1:1-12
Reverend Luana Uluave - Guest preacher
April 23, 2023
A book called “A Crazy Holy Grace,” by Frederick Buechner, starts with these opening lines:
When I woke up this morning, before I’d gotten out of bed, I was looking around to see what was going on in my room. Not much was going on, I’m happy to say. But there was a cricket on the glazed stone floor. He didn’t belong in the room. Crickets don’t belong in rooms. I looked at him and decided to give him a helping hand, so I picked him up as gently as I could so as not to either alarm him or hurt him, and I carried him out into the sunshine. And he hopped away to do whatever crickets do, where they belong. And I thought to myself, that’s what it’s all about: to be lifted up carefully and in a way not to frighten us, to be taken out of the confinement of the room where we’re locked up away from where we belong, and to be carried out into the fresh air.
This sums up the whole book, and I start with it because this sums up this whole sermon. This is grace.
As Pastor Phil talked about last week, the Letter to the Galatians is a scold, and the first verses we talk about for this week are almost frantic. Paul had come to the people of Galatia and taught them about Jesus, about the grace of Christ. But other teachers came after him and convinced the people that in order to be good believers, they also needed to observe Jewish law, including the initiation of circumcision. The people of Galatia believed the second teachers, and in Paul’s letter, he is indignant.
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel--not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you.“
Paul’s goal is to unconfuse the Christ followers in Galatia, to remind them that he, their teacher, had been called by God to teach them, and to remind them of the lesson he shared, that God’s grace was everything. This is the content of the rest of the letter.
Many years ago, I was at a summer learning institute in New York City about religion in America, and as part of it, we were invited to visit all sorts of worship spaces to see how people from many different walks of life sought God. One place I visited left a permanent impression on me, and it was a small storefront church in Brooklyn called St Lydia’s.It wasn’t like any other worship space I had ever visited.
For one thing, the entire “sanctuary” was a small but well equipped kitchen and three large, round dining tables. The central worship practice of St. Lydia’s is making dinner and eating it together. When I visited, there was room for about 20 people. Candles were lit in celebration, and a eucharist loaf blessed and passed around the tables. The stated mission of St. Lydia’s church was to “dispel isolation, reconnect neighbors, and subvert the status quo.” I wondered if this is what it felt like to be a member of one of the small house churches in earliest Christianity.
The actual service ended up being about 10 minutes long, and in it Pastor Emily stood at a small whiteboard at the side of the dining room. I remember thinking she looked like a camp counselor - she was in her 20s and wearing a gray tank top and converse sneakers. I don’t remember all of what she said, but I clearly remember this: With a black expo marker she drew a ladder on the board. “Some people think there is a ladder between us and God, and there are rungs on it that represent the good things we need to do to get to God.” She labeled different rungs. Go to church. Be good. Say prayers. Church sacraments.”
Pastor Emily paused, then drew a big X over the ladder. “Grace means there is no ladder. We don’t have to climb to God. God comes down to us.”
There were other parts of the sermon, but I don’t remember them. I remember just being blown away to learn something that I had known my whole life but not fully understood. There is no ladder. We don’t have to climb to God. God comes down to us.
This is what Paul is so passionate about in Galatians. Guys! There is no ladder! When you pretend there is a ladder you deny that God comes down to us. You deny God’s grace.
What happens if we live as if we truly believe, if we truly understand and accept, grace?
Because if you are anything like me, your desire to do good and be good comes from a desire to, I don’t know, hedge my bets a little. Give myself a bit of a buffer in the cosmic sense, just in case. It’s what Christian writer Sarah Bessey calls “my crippling belief that God loves me more when I’m working hard.”[1]
And the problem with that kind of believing is that it is impossible to do enough and be enough on our own. There have been times in my life where I have felt either frantic in all the good causes I had taken on to be a part of, or desolate in view of the fact that I could never measure up to what I thought I would need to do to make God love me.
But I want to say, I don’t think I’m particularly strange or unfaithful in my desire to “do enough” to earn God. Even Paul, this same apostle who is so mad in Galatians, frets about his own human failings in the book of Romans, a book written years after this one. “Wretched man that I am!” Paul says. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:14). I think it is normal, in our desire to please God, to imagine that there is just one more thing that we should have done.
But guys, Paul says to the Galatians. There is no ladder. This is the Good News. I ask again, what would happen if we lived like we really believed in grace? For one thing, I think we would be more free of self-doubt and self-criticism, which would free up space to use our energy to bless others. It is time consuming to dwell on my shortcomings. What if instead, I used my energy to love?
As I’ve thought about the grace of Christ in recent weeks, I’ve tried to think of some concrete examples of when others have extended grace to me, and it turns out there are a lot of them. I’m sharing them with you today because I want to illustrate another important principle about grace, and that is, not only do you not earn it up front, it is not an IOU that compels you to pay it back. Our behavior changes in response to grace, not because we “owe” on a loan. It changes because we see a better way of living and freely choose it.
Some times of grace.
Summer 1989, I was working as a nanny in CT and my friend’s employer bought us tickets to Phantom of the Opera and drove us into the city. I had never seen anything like a Broadway play, and the magic of it overwhelmed me. I have loved live theater ever since.
Another example. I grew up as one of 9 children in a loud and active family, and as people in a large family know, you learn to “self-advocate” in a situation like that. I learned, for example, that if there were popsicles, I needed to jump in quick and get mine or I might go without. This is not a criticism of my family - it was great to grow up an Uluave in so many ways. But then I married into the Miller family. My husband Jason also comes from a large family, he is the oldest of 8 kids. But in the 31 years we have been together, I have seen them again and again say to each other, “You go first.” I’ve seen Jason by instinct or habit step back and make sure there was enough to go around. The specific case I remember was a time we were making pot stickers and I definitely got more than my share. But I have since learned a bit about the grace of living in a group that puts the needs of others first.
My dog Henry is a shih tzu that mainly spends his life sleeping in the sun. When I am writing sermons, he lumbers over, half asleep, and lays on my feet.
My final example: When I was 16, I spent 2 weeks at Debate Camp at Loyola Marymount University in LA. In a travel plan that somehow seemed perfectly reasonable both to me and my parents at the time, I flew there and then caught a ride home with 3 classmates. No cell phone, no credit card, never met the dad that had offered to pick us up. I didn’t even know the classmates very well. What could go wrong?
It was a really odd trip home from the outset. It started when the dad showed up in a 20 year old pickup truck with no air conditioning and with a camper shell on the back to take us home. One of the boys was late to the meeting spot, so the dad left him in LA. I remember shifts in the camper with one of the other students, where the only food we had somehow was a big box of raisins, and shifts in the passenger seat up front, where at one point the dad got mad at the car behind him for tailgating and started chucking raw hot dogs out his window to try to hit them so they would back off.
I also remember two flat tires. The first was somewhere near Baker, CA and I remember standing on the hot shoulder of the freeway with the dad putting on the spare and the more dramatic of my classmates gesturing wildly to oncoming traffic, “Get away! Don’t hit us, get away!”
The second flat was somewhere outside Fillmore. And the details are fuzzy - this was now 38 years ago - but somehow a nice couple with their young grandson picked us up, and grandma and the tired teenagers ended up in a cafe, while grandpa and the mad driver dad went together to buy a new tire and change it. One oddly specific memory was the grandma pressed me to order the carrot cake. I had never had carrot cake before and I loved it. Still love it. Grandma paid for all the food, and I remember thanking her.
She said, “Well you gotta try to help people out when you can. Once someone helped us with a flat outside of Vegas. People should try to help each other when they can.”
It turns out, Grandpa bought the tire too. The mad dad was flat broke by then. We got home without further excitement, and I never did tell my parents about that strange ride home.
My hope is that in telling you these stories I have not merely asked you to indulge me for some sentimental memories. Because each of these stories is a story of grace, a story of a time when I received something I had not earned in any way, from a generous giver who expected nothing in return.
And the point I want to make is that in each case, I changed because of the experience, because in each case, in a different way, I learned something about a better way to live. I like living a life where art and beauty matter. I like being a person that sometimes steps back to let others go first. I like being a person who knows “people should help each other if they can.” Grace didn’t require effort up front from me. It just showed me possibilities that I had never before imagined. And grace didn’t tell me I had to pay it back. It just opened up new desires in me about how I wanted to live. I was a cricket, and crickets don’t belong in rooms. Grace was being lifted up carefully, and carried out into the fresh air.
The grace Paul is so fervently preaching in Galatians is much more like this, only better. When Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” he wasn’t kidding. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
This, this is grace.
Amen.
[1] Sarah Bessey, Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, p. 170