Grace Upon Grace (sermon for the second Sunday of Christmas)

(By guest preacher the Rev. William Palmer during Mike's vacation)

Invariably during the holiday season, when my wife and daughters get together, someone turns the TV or the VCR to a movie they all regard as a favorite: “The Sound of Music.” As most of you know, there’s a place in the movie where the stern Captain Von Trapp and his children’s governess, Maria, discover their love for each other. They sing a lilting duet, repeating to one another the words, “For here you are, standing there loving me, whether or not you should. So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” As a romantic song, it’s wonderful; as theology, it’s terrible. No wonder Maria never was able to make it as a nun!
 
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with the idea of doing something good, whether it is in our youth, our childhood, or our mature years. But if something else that’s good—such as finding the love of our life—should happen to us later on, it does not come as a reward for having done something good in the past. It is a gift, not some kind of divine repayment for services rendered. It is grace.
 
The prophet Jeremiah appears at first glance to be the unlikeliest spokesperson for grace. Yet in the passage read for us this morning, this “weeping prophet” who had been reviled, jailed, and generally ignored because of his critique of king and clergy, proclaims a God who is remarkably generous in forgiving Judah’s sins and promising their restoration.
 
The residents of Judah in Jeremiah’s time were people we might recognize today. They had been blinded by their prosperity to the threats all around them. They had abandoned the faith of their fathers and mothers for faith in military alliances, an economy that favored the wealthy and despised the poor, and the pursuit of their own selfish pleasures. Jeremiah’s lone voice warned that a day of reckoning was about to come. The prophet would live to see his warnings go unheeded and the awful consequences descend upon his homeland. The cities of Judah would be razed by enemy armies, the great temple of Solomon would be left in ashes, and the survivors of this war and destruction would be marched off as slaves to faraway Babylon.
 
Nevertheless in the midst of all this Jeremiah not only produces a dirge that we call today the Book of Lamentations but also the wonderful passage read for us today. It is a passage reminding us that God is faithful even when we are unfaithful. It is a message of forgiveness: “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.” It is a message that predicts a complete reversal of fortune: “I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” Those who were driven from the smoking ruins of Jerusalem in a procession akin to the Bataan Death March are assured that their return to that place will come under completely different circumstances.
 
Did they deserve it? Did they deserve to be forgiven after they had abandoned belief in God, treated the neediest among them with disdain, and ignored the prophet sent by the Lord to set them straight? No, they didn’t deserve it. Had they done something in their youth or childhood that was called up by the Lord to somehow balance out their more recent bad behavior? No, nothing they ever had done would have served to balance out the indictment lodged against them. Had they done anything during their enslavement to make sufficient amends for the sins that had put them in chains? There’s no indication that this was the case. It never was a matter of their making some kind of atonement for their sins. Their restoration simply was a matter of God exercising the mysterious action of grace.
 
Grace is a concept that doesn’t come easily to us. We prefer that people pay for their sins. We want to see evildoers punished to the fullest extent of the law. Drunk drivers who kill people in highway accidents, child abusers, those who prey upon the elderly—“Throw the book at them!” “Lock them up and throw away the key!” In fact, why should we expect society to worry about feeding and clothing them for life in some maximum-security prison? Why not just give them the chair!
 
The problem with our high dudgeon, of course, is the old adage about pointing the finger. When I point my finger at you, it’s hard to ignore the fact that four fingers are pointing back at me. Paul reminds us that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Jesus put it another way. He said something like, “While you’re stressing out over the speck in another person’s eye, you somehow manage to ignore the telephone pole in your own.” Could it be that our offense at the darkness in others is a means of avoiding the fact of our own darkness? Are we so out of touch with our interior lives that we no longer acknowledge the truth about ourselves?
 
Until we come to the place where we can acknowledge the truth about ourselves, grace will be only a word—an old-fashioned name for a girl, an attribute with which we may describe the skill of a dancer or an ice skater. Its greater meaning will be lost on us.
 
Yet the remarkable thing about grace is that its operation is in no way dependent on our understanding of it or even our awareness that it exists. Grace is not restricted to the theologically literate or to the experientially desperate. It falls like the rain; it baptizes everyone who is touched by it equally, whether they know it or not.
 
Our gospel reading provides us with a different perspective on the coming of Jesus into the world. Unlike Matthew and Luke, John tells us nothing about the taxes levied by Caesar Augustus, a crowded inn at Bethlehem, a wondering band of shepherds, or wise men bearing gifts. He simply says that the Word arrived in a world that had come into being through him, and the world did not recognize him. This Word in the flesh tented among us, and for those to whom the gift was given, there was a glimmer of recognition—the ability to see his glory, full of grace and truth.
 
And there of course, right at the beginning, occurs that operative word—grace. Indeed, John goes on to say that “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” Grace upon grace—not just grace by itself but some extension, some expansion, some amplification of grace that makes it even more that we ever could have imagined. As difficult as it might be for us to grasp the concept of grace by itself, how much harder is it even to wrap our minds or our souls around the phrase, “grace upon grace.”
 
The law—that’s what we all know about, the law that metes out justice for those who break it—came, according to John, through Moses. But grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. Grace and truth embodied in the child of Bethlehem, the baby in the manger. Grace and truth, tenting among us, hiking along the hilly, dusty roads of Galilee. Grace and truth, offering bread and wine in such a way that we could never again look at them simply as bread and wine. Grace and truth, nailed to a cross, for the sins of the world, for your sins, for my sins. Grace upon grace, active at this very moment, in your life, in my life, in every life—working in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. Grace upon grace, which we are free to despise and ignore or embrace and celebrate, even now, as we stand and as we sing.