A Cross Full of Grace

Ephesians 2:1-10 (NRSV)
You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.
But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ -- by grace you have been saved -- and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God -- not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

One of the prominent mid-century theologians of the 1900s, H. Richard Neibuhr, looked around at the kind of Christianity that was being preached in his day and he was not happy. What he saw was a Christian establishment that had emptied the teaching of Jesus and the cross of all of its power. The Church had no way to challenge the powers and principalities of the day because it preached a good news that overcame no obstacles and which did not require any real change in those who became Jesus’ followers. Niebuhr said that the Church was preaching something like this: “A God without wrath, led men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Ouch.

Niebuhr must have felt something was missing and the things that were missing were wrath, sin, judgment and, most importantly, the cross. What’s left when you take all these things out? An easy form of grace – cheap grace, if you will. A grace which claims that nothing within us has to die and nothing is required to enable us to live. As the public radio humorist Garrison Keillor once said, with this sort of theology sin and evil and all the things that God rejects in us are reduced to a matter of miscommunication.

Not that these words we have lost as a church -- wrath, sin, judgment, and the cross – are easy words. Not at all. They are not the sorts of words we postmodern people like to hear. You can’t draw a crowd to hear about wrath and sin these. Well, maybe you can, but perhaps not for the right reasons. But to ignore them is to make a huge mistake and the passage we have from Ephesians this morning will not let us forget them. Just about all of them are there and the ones that aren’t are lurking in the background.

So here’s my point today. I’m not going to hold out and try to create some suspense. The whole sermon is right here: grace doesn’t mean that “it’s all good.” Grace means that something has to die so that we can truly live. And the cross is where we find that costly grace. If it is NOT true that something must die so that we can truly live then the cross is the most absurd and empty symbol we have. But if it IS true then the cross is the point on which all eternity turns. If it IS true then the cross is the place we must go to discover what it is that God would have us to do and who God would have us to be. If it IS true then this sermon series on the cross is not just Alex’s little project, it’s the key to the universe.

O.K., maybe I’ve set the expectations a little high for this sermon, but here goes. There is a story that is told of a man watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from a cocoon. He watched for quite a long time as the butterfly worked and worked to release itself through a small hole. Finally the man decided that he would help that butterfly and he got a pair of scissors and snipped away the side of the cocoon and the butterfly emerged. But it looked strange. Its body was swollen and its wings deformed. It should have flown after just a little while, but it never flew. It was forced to crawl about for the rest of its short life.

Why would this be? Because an essential part of the butterfly’s development is the struggle it must go through to emerge from the cocoon. If it is spared this struggle it never develops the strength and the form it needs to be the creature God intended it to be. In seeking to preserve the butterfly from pain, the man condemned it.

The lesson that is usually drawn from this little story is that God gives us problems so that we can learn and grow from them. These things make us stronger, the lesson goes. I think there’s another theological lesson here, though. We should not try to filter out the painful parts of the gospel in order to present a Christian message that is more pleasing to the sensibilities of the world around us. We will have to reinterpret them for each new generation, yes, but the cross is a mystery into which we must be led if we are to get at the heart of what God is doing with us and with the world. We’ve got to struggle with the cross if we are going to learn the truth about what’s really going on. If we’re going to fly, it’s going to take a confrontation with the cross on which our transformation was begun.

Now the writer of Ephesians knew that if was going to take something radical to help us see ourselves through God’s eyes. Paul knew that the power of the lies that hold us. He was not afraid to say that we are living in a world constructed by lies and deceit and death-dealing powers. We’re living in enemy-occupied territory, he says. That’s something C.S. Lewis has said in Mere Christianity, too – something we have been reading in the Wednesday night class. When we are in the grip of the powers of this age, Paul says, we are as good as dead. The powers of this age are seductive. They tempt us to follow our passions and desires away from God. Our passions and desires are not all bad, by the way. God created us with passions and desires. It’s just that we tend to forget where they are supposed to be directed, which is back to God, and we follow them down some pretty harmful dead ends. That’s why Paul condemns “the passions of the flesh” and “the desires of the flesh and the senses.” We follow them to our own destruction and we discover that we have become tangled in all sorts of things that our better selves knew were not good for us. This is where God’s wrath comes in. God says “no” to the evils of this world and yet, before we know it, we are “children of wrath,” according to Ephesians.

Now, I admit this is a pretty old-fashioned way of talking. We don’t talk about the passions of the flesh very often these days. Before you know it we’ll be talking about the dangers of licentiousness and the fleshpots of Egypt. This is not language that we hear very much anymore.

But just because we don’t hear it doesn’t mean that we don’t deal with it. We can’t go through a day without running into temptations that remind us of how our impulses and desires can go astray. Advertising preys on our desires by presenting us with images of sex and power and sophistication to entice us to define our lives by what we can buy and own. Restaurants and convenience stores offer us calories and saturated fat that can ruin a diet in the space of one meal. Our endless supply of media possibilities means that we can be endlessly distracted. We move from television to cell phone to computer to iPod, never having to interact with the people around us, never having to share a meal with the people we profess to love.

Then there is the favorite myth of the Eastern Shore – the myth that there is nothing to do here. And even if Wal-mart were to show up tomorrow it would not fix this one. We will always be tempted to believe that things are more interesting, more complex, more attractive someplace else. Going across the bay will not cure the problem of despair and that is the temptation that our illusions lead us to.

There are also those old favorites, too, on the hit parade of passions of the flesh. Lust, greed, adultery, sloth, lying, hardheartedness, tearing the tags off of mattresses despite the dire warnings – there are all kinds of ways we can get into trouble.

So there is some truth in that old language of Ephesians. Our desires can be perverted. We do find ourselves, despite our best efforts, enmeshed in the problems that we fault others for. We are children of wrath.

But Ephesians doesn’t end there. In fact, it talks about all of these problems in the past tense, which is a very strange thing since we are dealing with them in the here and now. “You were dead,” it says, “through the sins and trespasses in which you once lived.” But God was not content to leave us that way. It’s strange because it sounds like we’re walking in on a story that someone is narrating about our lives while we’re still living it. “Wait a minute!” we may want to say. “When did this happen?”

The answer is: “It happened on a hillside outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.” It happened when we were dead through sin. It happened when we weren’t thinking about God. It happened when we weren’t ready. It happened when we didn’t deserve it. It happened because God was merciful. It happened because God is God and God is just. And God does not let evil prevail or endure or have the final victory. It happened when God made us alive together with Christ Jesus and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places.

Now watch what’s happening with the verbs here. It’s really going fast now. First, we didn’t know when God stepped in to transform us and to open the way to us from death to life. That happened then…before…long before we knew what was going on. On that cross God reconciled us to God’s own self. God made us alive. All past tense verbs. But then God raised us up and seated us with Jesus in the heavenly places. Wait a second! Those are still past tense verbs. That can’t have happened yet, can it? When were we raised up? When were we seated in heaven? I think I’d have noticed if something like that happened! I think I’d have taken a picture. I think I’d have asked God to autograph a napkin for me or something. When did this happen?

It happened on that cross. It started when God became flesh and dwelt among us. It started with the incarnation. It started when our lives became inextricably entwined with Christ’s. But on that cross God did all that was needed to raise us up from the sin and death into which we had fallen. Christ died for us and we died with him. Christ rose for us and we rose with him. If Christ is seated in the heavenly places at the right hand of God, there must be a place for us as well. It is not something we have to earn or merit. It’s something that came by a totally unexpected means. It came by grace.

Grace. We have been saved by grace through faith. That’s a very Methodist thing to say. Grace that met us before we had a chance to say yea or nay to it. Grace that claimed us before we could speak our first word. Grace that transforms us and justifies us and makes us right with God. Grace that makes us fit for a life in God’s presence. Grace that makes us holy. Grace that transforms the world. This is the thing we encounter on the cross of Jesus – a grace so amazing that we can only cooperate with it or reject it to our own damnation. If the cross is what we claim it is it presents us with a choice that we cannot escape. If God has saved us through grace and through the sacrifice of Jesus, then that grace is the most important thing in the universe. We can either cooperate with it or turn away and live a life that can only be an impossible contradiction. We can try to resist that irresistible grace. We can try to claim that we know best or know better. But we cannot rob the cross of its power. And we can only be a pitiful holdout in the face of grace’s overwhelming and ultimate victory. Like those Japanese soldiers who were found on isolated islands in the Pacific for many years after World War II who believed that against all evidence their nation had not lost the war, we can go on believing that the battle is still on and that God might yet lose, but who are we fooling but ourselves? And what can we do but fall?

One of my favorite saints is named Columba. Columba was an Irish saint of the 6th century who was so Irish that he inevitably got into a fight with his abbot and vowed to leave Ireland behind. He got into a tiny coracle, a boat made of twigs and leather, with twelve of his disciples and set off across the wild Irish Sea toward what is now Scotland. When he landed on the far side he went up on a hill and looked back to make sure that he could no longer see Ireland. When he was sure that he couldn’t he ordered his men to burn the boat on the beach.

Whether or not he knew that he had landed on a small island or not is an open question. He was on Iona, which became and remains a place of Christian pilgrimage to this day. But what impresses me is Columba’s determination that he was not going back. Once he was convicted of his purpose…once he knew what God was calling him to do…once he began his journey in the footsteps of Christ there was no turning back. And something had to be left behind…something had to die…nothing could remain of his old self that was twisted and distorted by lies. Once he knew the truth, the cross was all he had to cling to. Columba and his disciples went on to make disciples of Jesus all across Scotland and he started a mission that soon spread all over the northern part of England and into Europe as it was in the middle of the Dark Ages.

God knows we have a lot of things to leave behind. We have boats to burn and thing that must be put to death. The good news is that all that we need to truly live has already been done. The only thing we need to truly live has been given. In Jesus Christ and his cross we meet the one thing in the universe that has the power to turn lies into truth and death into life. In the cross we meet God’s grace and it is given for you and for me and for the whole of this wild and wonderful, suffering world. The choice for us is cooperation or contradiction. What are you going to do?

Thanks be to God.