THE GRACE OF GOD

A sermon preached at the Meditative Evening Eucharist on Sunday October 9th.

This evening we are starting a series of sermons on ‘Sensing the Sacred’, how we might see our world through a sacramental eye, how we might perceive the hidden depths of God’s creation. I will leave future preachers to develop this further but tonight I want to focus our attention on bread and wine, on the Eucharist. This is the greatest of the sacraments and it occupies the central act of Christian worship. I don’t want to dwell on the theological niceties of the Eucharist per se but rather on what the celebration of Communion means for us. I think it is the key way in which we experience the unique flavour of Christianity, something which C S Lewis once commented made Christianity different from any other world religion. That key thing is the concept of ‘grace’.

The sacraments are the most important part of the Church’s worship. Traditionally the Church has taught that there are seven sacraments - baptism, confirmation, communion, marriage, ordination, penance or confession and extreme unction, or the last rites. But what exactly is a sacrament? Why are they so important and how do they affect our day-to-day lives? St. Augustine of Hippo, probably the most influential figure in Christian theology since St. Paul described a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.’ That goes some way to explaining it but it still needs a bit of unpackaging.

The transforming and life-changing dimension to the Christian faith is to be found in the idea of the Grace of God. The sacraments are all meant to convey to us a portion of that grace into our lives but the ‘grace of God’ is not something which is only restricted to a time or to a place. It can be found all around us and by enveloping ourselves within it there are, at least three ways in which it can sustain us in our day-to-day lives. The Grace of God has the ability to empower us, to liberate us from ourselves and to sustain us in times of despair or difficulty. What then exactly is the Grace of God? The greatest theologian, thinker and philosopher of medieval Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica of the late thirteenth century wrote; ‘When it is said that somebody has the grace of God, that means that he has a certain something in him which is above and beyond all nature, and proceeds from God.’

Certainly though the grace of God is what gives the sacraments there special role for, through them we meet the grace in a direct and focused form. In a few moments, following after the four girls, we will all be invited to partake in the sacrament of Holy Communion, to eat and drink the bread and wine, in Augustine’s words, the outward and the visible sign of God’s grace, two ordinary substances we believe have become filled with the real and living presence of God through his son, Jesus Christ, becoming his body and his blood - the inward and invisible sign. By consuming them God’s grace runs throughout our entire being, filling every part of us with God’s acceptance and love. So let’s think for a moment about what the grace of God is and its effect upon us.

Grace Empowering Us

The grace of God is a tremendously creative power in our lives, acting in such a way that uplifts our souls and minds to give us a vision of how our lives and our world might become. Its empowerment for us is to give us a sense of determination and courage to realise some of our aims and ideals. A strength of will, aided by the power of God. In John’s Gospel Jesus told his listeners that ‘If you remain in me and my words remain in you (that is if we allow the grace of God to flood into our lives) you may ask what you will and you shall get it. Now, of course this doesn’t literally mean if we asked God for a pay rise or extra holiday from work or from school. then we would somehow get it through the grace of God. Rather it gives us an increased degree of self-confidence and worth, a realisation that we are incredibly precious and beautiful, as ourselves, in the eyes of God. Our potential is enormous.

Grace Liberating Us

In the letter to the Romans, Paul concludes by telling us that we must ‘regard ourselves as dead to sin and alive to God, in union with Christ Jesus.’ And earlier he talks of how through the grace given to us by Christ ‘so also we might set our feet upon the new path of life.’ The liberating power of God’s grace is that ability to take us out of ourselves, out of our own immediate temporal concerns, to liberate us from the drudgery and dreariness in our day-to-day lives. A friend of mine recently described this type of grace as the wonder and beauty of the Christian ‘feel-good’ factor. The grace of God frees us from our feelings of unworthiness, our guilt at what we have done or not done, our feelings of sinfulness, and from all those parts of our life we wish were not there.

There might also be a ‘double-liberation’ here. God’s grace may liberate us from the darker sides of our secular lives but might also serve to liberate us from the less attractive sides to our spirituality. There is nothing so powerful as the Church to produce pettiness and condescension into people’s judgments and behaviour. If we see the grace of God only at work in the sacraments and in church buildings and not at work in the world around us, or in the lives of others, both within and without the worshipping community then how petty we will have made our God and how little grace would we have shown to his created world. This pettiness and condescension is often found in the way all of us are able to fall into the trap of passing judgment on others, or being shocked or outraged at behaviour we feel is ‘inappropriate rather than immoral’ the way we might hurt people by deeming them somehow ‘unworthy’ of God’s grace and love, or the lack of generosity in spirit, the damage we inflict by simply ‘disapproving’ - something younger people are very sensitive, if not over-sensitive to. The liberating power of the grace of God here is the ability to find goodness and beauty in the most unexpected quarter, to always focus our attention on the good rather than the bad, to see the spiritual at home amongst the secular. One of the most celebrated court cases of moral judgments in the 1960s was the case of the Crown against Penguin Books Limited in October 1960, over the final publication of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’. Attacked by the moral majority as a ‘shameless publication’ Lawrence’s novel received its most potent defence from an unexpected quarter. The Bishop of Woolwich, John T Robinson gave evidence in the witness box of Lawrence’s attempt to depict the grace of God liberating the two main characters - Lady Chatterly and the gamekeeper through their love. He said, and I quote;

‘I think Lawrence tried to portray this relationship as in a real sense an act of holy communion.

For him flesh was sacramental of the spirit.’ And later on in the trial, another clergyman, Canon Hopkinson spoke movingly of the book’s moral purpose; ‘

It seems to me to be a study in compassion and human tenderness, it is a book of moral purpose which sets out a picture of understanding and kindness, emphasizing that God himself is a creator and shows himself throughout the behaviour of his creation.’

The point here is that God’s grace is everywhere in our world if only we could open our eyes to see it and let it liberate us, above all it is a nobleness in people that lifts them above judgment and spiritual arrogance. If we have that nobility in us, then we stand in the grace of God. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury in the thirteenth century wrote a very beautiful prayer developing this theme. In it he prayed that God would grant to him;

‘The grace of boldness for standing for what is right, The grace of strict truthfulness, The grace to treat others as I would have them treat me, The grace of charity that I may refrain from hasty judgment, The grace of silence that I may refrain from hasty speech, The grace of forgiveness to all who have wronged me, The grace of tenderness towards all who are weaker than myself and the grace of loyalty that I may continue to hold your graces within my heart.

Grace Sustaining Us

In St. John’s Gospel Jesus explains to his disciples how he is the true vine and how they, and we, are the branches who draw their strength and their nourishment from the vine as their source. They can only bear fruit in plenty by being linked to the vine, for if they are cut off from the vine they will wither and die. In verses 5 and 6 Jesus says that

‘Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty; for cut off from me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me is like a branch that has been thrown away - he withers: these branches are collected and thrown on the fire, and they are burnt.’

The grace of God is freely given us and is always available through the celebration of the sacraments. They do offer a sense of comfort and acceptance, In times of despondency, doubt or depression it is often very hard to discern God’s grace at work in the world but, there in the sacraments we are assured that it will always be present, and no matter what we have done or what has happened to us will prevent us from being accepted into that grace. The sacraments form part of the living vine that reaches out to us across history.

A sacrament then is the sign of a sacred thing, a means through which God’s grace and loves takes hold of our lives and surrounds them, cleanses them, empowers and liberates them and sustains us in the midst of our work-a-day world. So let us finish by together saying the words of the grace; The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, for evermore. Amen.