To live by grace

​Kent M. Organ, Interim Pastor
Text: Romans 5:6-11

To Live By Grace 

    “While we still were sinners  Christ died for us.”  This sentence  is the heart of the gospel.  John Newton  understood that sentence  fully.  Two hundred-some years ago,  he was pastor  for the people of Olney  in Buckinghamshire, England.  He was also a hymn writer,  his best known hymn being  “Amazing Grace.”  But long before that,  John Newton  served as a sailor  and then captain  of a slave ship.  He transported  African men, women and children  to distant ports  where they would be sold.  He first went to sea  at age eleven.  And over time, he coarsened, and gained a reputation  for vulgarity and depravity.  Newton looked back  on his sea-faring years  as  one continuous round  of rebellion and excess.

    But in 1748,  his ship was caught in a storm at sea, and he experienced  a dramatic conversion.  He renounced  slave trading – gave it up – and later,  accepted a call to the Christian ministry.  He became  one of the great evangelical preachers of the eighteenth century.  The hymn “Amazing Grace”  is  John Newton’s summary  of God’s transformation  of his life.  In the Olney churchyard, there is a marker  with the epitaph he himself wrote.  It says:
JOHN NEWTON
CLERK
ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE
A SERVANT OF SLAVERS IN AFRICA
WAS
BY THE RICH MERCY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR
JESUS CHRIST
PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED,
AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH
HE HAD LONG SOUGHT TO DESTROY

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

    Newton experienced what the Apostle Paul learned  in his own experience,  the astonishing gift  of God’s redemptive acceptance,  in no way deserved.  Paul, who had been  a deadly persecutor  of the followers of Christ,  was startled to discover that  despite his ruthlessness,  even “while I was still a sinner,” he wrote in Romans, “Christ  died for me.”  

* * * *

    Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables  is another story  of God’s amazing grace.  As Les Miz begins – you’ve probably seen the stage play – its central character, Jean Valjean,  has just been released from nineteen years in prison  for stealing a loaf of bread.  Bitter, ferocious, seething with the injustice of it all,  with no place else to go,  he turns  to the church,  where a bishop  befriends him, takes him in,  feeds him, and gives him a place to sleep.  But during the night,  Jean Valjean  slips into the bishop’s quarters,  steals some silverware,  and flees.
    
He is quickly apprehended by the police  and hauled back to the rectory.  He is caught  red-handed – undeniably guilty – but to everyone’s astonishment, the bishop says,  mercifully,  “Oh,  Jean Valjean,  when I gave you the silver,  I meant for you to have the candlesticks as well.  Here.  Take them.  And don’t forget, you promised  to use the silver  to become an honest man.”
    
The police are left with no choice  but to release Valjean without charge.  He is not innocent.  Everybody knows it.  But innocence  has been bestowed on him.  This is a parable  about the grace of God.

    God’s love  initiates,  doesn’t wait for our prior worthiness.  (It would be a long wait.)  God  makes the first move,  and does so  again and again.  Continuous new beginnings  are what the Old and New Testaments  are all about  and, above all,  it is what  the cross of Christ  signifies.  God doesn’t wait for worthiness.  God  creates  worthiness.

* * * *

    Let’s do  some theological work,  starting with  an old-fashioned word  that is straight out of our  Reformation heritage.  The word  is  “righteousness.”  And what is  righteousness,  but the opposite of what we  are  by ourselves,  given  things we have done,  and  things we have left  undone.  “While we still were sinners,  Christ  died for us.”

    Martin Luther,  commenting on this verse from Romans,  called our righteousness  an “alien righteousness,” because it is a righteousness, like Jean Valjean’s,  that is not of our own making;  it is bestowed on us  by someone else.  We are accepted, not because of our worthiness – what we  have done, or not done,  or hope  or promise to do – but because  of God’s redemptive and persistent love  for us.  “Alien righteousness” is God’s  gift of grace  to us.

    But then, Martin Luther suggested  another kind of righteousness, which he called “proper righteousness.”  By proper righteousness, he meant  the good  that we ourselves may do.  Proper righteousness is our living into  God’s acceptance of us – in gratitude,  taking on the tasks  of mercy and forgiveness  and responsibility  for which the gift  of loving us in spite of ourselves  was given in the first place.

    Now, we  mainline Protestants  characteristically  have  some difficulty  understanding  “alien righteousness.”  We are generally not  people whose  personal biographies resonate with

I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

We tend to be  decent, law-abiding people of moderation,  not  given to excess,  making our own way  responsibly  in the world.  We  are not  used to thinking of ourselves  as the “once was lost, now am found” kind of Christian.  But – if we look back, and are honest – there have been times, haven’t there?  when we also  failed to live up  to the standards  of our parents,  our communities,  our own selves.  There were periods  in our own histories  about which – when we remember  what we did, what we said, what  hardly anybody knew – we can’t help  but  shudder  and thank God  that  somehow  we got past it, got over it.  We were forgiven.  It is  forgotten.  Amazing  grace.

    And if  we dare to remember  our own  painful experiences  with the forgiving grace of God,  it will surely help  us  to forgive and embrace others  in their  life struggles,  and to live our lives  with gratitude  and generosity.

* * * *

    In Les Miserables,  you may remember what happened  to Jean Valjean after the incident with the bishop’s stolen silverware.  The story relates  the step-by-step transformation  of a defiant and cynical outcast  into  a socially responsible, generous, loving, even noble  human being.

  Jean Valjean’s metamorphosis  isn’t a sudden turn-around.  It is full of setbacks and heartbreaks.  Which is the way life is,  isn’t it?

    Victor Hugo called Les Miserables  “a drama in which the hero  is the Infinite, the second character  [humanity].”  Jean Valjean’s story  is a fictionalized telling  of God’s way in the world,  and  with each one of us:  each day  with challenges  for our renewal and transformation,  each day  learning from the past, internalizing God’s gift,  responding  in love,  making mistakes,  reevaluating,  realigning,  growing.

    In the closing pages of the novel,  there is a glimpse of the essence of the story.  It would be very easy to miss  because Victor Hugo is an artist;  he is careful  not to shout, not to preach.  He speaks his deepest convictions  in a whisper,  so the reader may  fail  to recognize them.  But, at the very end,  when Jean Valjean is very old and ill,  he lies alone in his bed.  He feels for his own pulse, but can’t find it.  Driven  to try to tie things together before he dies,  Valjean, with great difficulty and effort,  gets out of bed,  dresses,  and goes to his desk  to write a letter to those whom he loves.  There are some things about the past that he wants to explain.  And what you might miss  is  that, as the old man shuffles across the room toward his writing desk,  he reaches for the silver candlesticks – the same candlesticks the bishop gave him years before.

    Valjean moves the candlesticks to the desk  and lights the candles  as he sits to write the epilogue to his long pilgrimage  toward  a moral and responsible life.  Victor Hugo doesn’t say it.  But the words of the bishop echo off the page  for those who remember  how the story began:  “Don’t forget, Valjean.  Don’t forget: you promised to use the silver  to become an honest man.”

            Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
                  -- with thanks to Buddy Ennis, Linda Jo McKim and Kenneth Osbeck