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The Gift of Grace

3/11/2018

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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. Ephesians 2:8-9

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

We have just sung a hymn that is beloved to many, for many different reasons, and one nowadays that is almost universally known. Its author was a man named John Newton. He also wrote many other hymns, including “Glorious things of thee are spoken” (#522), but Amazing Grace, and the story behind it, is the best known.

John Newton was born in England in 1725, went to sea with his father at age eleven, and by the time he was twenty-three years old he had been forced into service in the British Navy; abandoned in Sierra Leone, West Africa and been sold into servitude to African royalty; freed by an agent of his father’s and returned to England; and become master of a slave-trading ship. On his way home to England, Newton survived a near-shipwreck, which began his process of turning to faith in God. At age twenty-nine he had a severe illness and gave up his life at sea and his work as a slave-trader, although he continued to invest financially in the slave business.

Ten years later, after years of trying to follow God’s call and being turned down by various Anglican bishops and leaders in other denominations, John Newton was ordained a priest in the Church of England; he became known for his gifts in preaching and pastoral care. In 1779 he moved to a parish in London: St. Mary’s, Woolnoth where he became a pastor and advisor to the young Member of Parliament William Wilberforce.

In 1788 Newton published a pamphlet titled “Thoughts upon the slave trade”; he paid to have it sent to every Member of Parliament. In the pamphlet he broke his silence on the experience of his work in the trade, making "a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." Newton’s support and guidance for Wilberforce and others over the course of thirty years resulted in the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, abolishing the active slave trade on British soil. John Newton died within the year, at the age of eighty-two.

This is the story not only of John Newton and the background for his hymn, but it is also a real-life expression of the grace of God. Grace is God’s gift to us, God’s generous initiative that we do not earn or deserve. Paul says in his letter to Jesus’ followers at Ephesus: 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. Our salvation, Paul says, is by grace, through faith and not the result of efforts or anything we have done to impress God or to make a deal with God.

Newton would certainly agree with that. He knew himself to be wretched before God, especially in light of what he had done and what he had lent his name and money to in his younger years. He certainly had not earned God’s favor and goodness toward him in any way. In fact, we know from Newton’s writing that he marked that start of his conversion to active faith in Christ as March 10, 1748; this weekend marks the 280th anniversary of that turning to God.

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.

What about your own turning to God? It may have happened swiftly, suddenly, or you may have struggled over a long period of time to be willing to trust Christ with the leadership of your life. For some of you, I know that faith has always been a part of your life – but even then, we all have ebbs and flows, and there always comes a time when you can look back and see the traces of where the Spirit has led you to embrace God more fully, making Christ more and more the center of your life, even as John Newton was able to look back and see the way Christ’s salvation in his life had unfolded over time.

But neither Newton nor Paul leave it there, with God’s gift of grace; there’s a response, and an answering call, a responsibility, just like in the covenants we have been reading and hearing about this Lent. Paul goes on to say: We are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. We are made for good works, to live our lives as agents of God’s goodness and blessing, Jesus’ representatives in all aspects of life. When William Wilberforce first sought out John Newton’s spiritual counsel it centered on the question of whether the younger man should leave politics and pursue the ordained ministry. His mentor’s response was to stay in Parliament, “serve God where he was.”

That is, in fact, what we are each called to – serving God where we are. There is nothing intrinsically more sacred in being a priest than there is in being a politician…or a teacher, a doctor, an engineer, a business person, a plumber. We need people with all of these skills and abilities if we are to be a whole and healthy society; and all of these gifts and skills can be brought to bear in the service of God. If we are each members of the Body of Christ, rooted and grounded in the love and grace of God, then God will indeed be able to use us, and we will be able to serve God where we are – whether our work is as dramatic as Wilberforce’s in abolishing the British slave trade, or as quiet as caring for children in a world that is riddled with fear, anxiety, stress, and a push for over-achievement.

In this season of Lent, one of the spiritual practices we engage in particularly is confession – acknowledging our failures, our “manifold sins and wickedness”, to ourselves and to God. It means taking stock of where we are, where we have been, and the foreseeable trajectory of our lives. Sometimes that examination reveals a pretty bleak picture, and we, like John Newton, know ourselves to be wretched. Other times the picture is less stark, but we see all the missed opportunities, the failures of kindness, generosity, and love – these are the sins of omission. Even those can cause us to be discouraged, disappointed in ourselves. But whether our sins are large or small, it does not matter. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, God’s best purpose and intentions for us.

And we sinners have all received grace – grace upon grace – from the loving and generous initiative of God in Jesus’ death and resurrection. And by his love and grace we are saved, each and every day. Our response is to turn and be gracious to those around us, so that we may all be drawn together in God’s circle of life and blessing and joy.

Let us pray.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares we have already come; ‘tis grace that brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 11, 2018
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What's Your Idol?

3/5/2018

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Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:1-3

When I was in high school and taking European history, we started out the year by reading some ancient Middle Eastern documents that were foundational for the legal and social arrangements that eventually developed into European culture: the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount, among others. In our American culture we often refer to our “Judeo-Christian heritage”; in large part, the ethical guidance given by these words that Christians refer to as the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue. They are more often referred to in the breech than kept in fact, but they are a part of the way we, as Christians and as Americans, think about how we are to act.

But they are not Ten Rules, with corresponding punishments if broken. In fact, if we dig into them a little more, we find that these words given by God to Moses are much richer and deeper than mere rules. These Ten Words (as the Hebrew puts it) are all about the relationship between God and God’s People – both as individuals and as a whole – after God has freed them from slavery in Egypt through the leadership of Moses. They have been led to Mount Sinai to worship God, back to the very place where Moses heard God’s call from the burning bush in the first place – to go and speak to Pharoah, to free the People from their suffering and oppression.

These Ten Words are a covenant – a outline for the relationship between God and the People. In fact, it’s the third covenant we have heard about in the Hebrew Scriptures. First, there was the covenant between God and all humanity, all creation that God made with Noah after the Flood. Then there was the covenant of trust and blessing that God made with Abraham and Sarah when they agreed to leave everything and throw their lot in with God. And now within that agreement between God and the descendants of Abraham and Sarah is a more clearly defined covenant of what it looks like to live as God’s People in light of God’s redeeming and saving act.

And right upfront God makes it clear: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol. In Judaism the first commandment is verse two, the reminder of what God has done for the People, and then verses three and four are the second commandment. The Christian version starts with verse three and makes four a separate item. But either way, it is God’s initiative in saving God’s People that is the ground for this covenant renewal. Keeping the commandments is their thankful response.

The first four commandments are all about our responsibility to God. The remaining six are all about our relationship to our neighbor, to the community. What become clear when we hear this passage from Exodus is that the most important responsibility of the faithful is to live with God as the primary focus of their lives. Anything else is idolatry; and even the command for Sabbath-keeping is to remind us that it is God who makes and keeps the world, and not we ourselves. Taking time for rest, sleep, refraining from work, is a powerful statement or our recognition that God is ultimately in charge.

And if God is truly in charge of the world and of our lives, then God will have quite a lot to say about how we treat others, and the quality of our relationship with them; which is what commandments five through ten are all about: Honor your father and mother. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness against your neighbor. Do not covet. These are all aspects that will tear apart the fabric of life together, that drive a wedge into human society and under-cut God’s desire for us to live as a community of faith and trust, stewards of God’s good creation, all of us made in God’s image of loving relationship, giving honor and glory to God.

Anything else that captures our attention, our hearts, our energy, our time, our money and becomes more important to us than the Lord God is idolatry. As human beings we are all prone to that, and I think we can each identify for ourselves those people, ideas, possessions, shiny objects and glittering prizes that are hard for us to say “no” to, or at least put them in their proper place, which is “not God.”

And then we hear today’s Gospel – Jesus turning over the table of the money changers in the Temple in Jerusalem. All four Gospels recount this story; Matthew, Mark, and Luke place it in the context of Holy Week after Jesus has entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. There were good and practical reasons for the money-changers to be there. No non-Temple currency could be used to purchase animals for sacrifice, and most Jews coming to worship in the Temple could not bring their own animals; they lived too far away. But in John’s telling of it, the event happens very near the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as if Jesus is saying right from the outset: even a place as holy, and beautiful, and important as the Temple must be put aside to make room for the Messiah, no longer God’s heaven-and-earth place, but now God’s heaven-and-earth Person. It was now to be in and through Jesus that the truest, fullest connection with God and worship of God was to happen. Anything else, no matter how sacred, no matter how time-honored, no matter how valuable, has to take second place.

And that’s still a challenge for us today. We all have ideals, traditions, habits, loyalties, relationships, possessions that sneak up on us, sometimes when we are not looking, and then claim pride of place in our lives. And then the divine anger we saw when Jesus turned over the tables and drove out the money changers becomes understandable. Time and again God has called us to be faithful, just as God is faithful to us. Time and again God has asked for our trust and loyalty and love; and how often have we given it elsewhere? We know that everything we have is a gift from God – good and necessary for human living. Our responsibility is to live with gratitude and faithfulness, putting all these good gifts in their proper place in our affections and loyalty.

This is why, when he was asked to identify which commandment was the greatest, Jesus said:
The first commandment is this: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." Mark 12:29-31.

This week ask yourself what are things that you are tempted to place above God in importance? Who or what can become a focus of loyalty and even worship for you? Is there anything that has taken God’s place in your heart, mind, or schedule? Then ask God’s forgiveness and strength, and commit to living your relationship with God in Christ anew, as well need to do, every day.
 
Let us pray.
Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to thee, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly thine, utterly dedicated unto thee; and then use us, we pray thee, as thou wilt, and always to thy glory and the welfare of thy people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. ~ BCP, page 832

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Third Sunday in Lent
March 4, 2018

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Faith Family Traits

3/5/2018

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I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. Genesis 17:7

This year during Lent we are in the season of covenants, in the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures. Last week we heard about the covenant that God made with Noah: that God would never again destroy the entire earth by flood; a covenant of care for the flourishing of all humanity and all creation. And just as a reminder, covenants in the Bible are binding agreements in which both parties have responsibilities and rights, and usually carry some sign, symbol, or tangible reminder.

Today’s passage is about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah – a very brief version of the much fuller story. Abram, you may remember, first heard the call of God in Chaldea, a part of Mesopotamia which became the Babylonian Empire, which we know today as Iraq. And Abram and his wife Sarai pulled up stakes, left their home to go to a place which God would show them (they knew not where), and make them the founders of a large and abundant family (as many as the stars in the sky), through whom God would bless the rest of the world. Pretty incredible promises – in both senses of the word – especially because Abram and Sarai had so far not been able to have any children together. So if this family of abundant generations was God’s part of the promise, what was Abram’s? It was faith – to have faith, to exercise faith, to trust that God was the center and focus of his life, his decision-making, his purpose. And the sign of this covenant, which the lectionary delicately skips over, is circumcision. Talk about something being etched into your very being! God also changed Abram and Sarai’s names to Abraham and Sarah – another mark of their life-changing encounter with God. If they would walk by faith with God, God would give them a family full of nations and kings, as we know today: Jews, Christians, and Muslims – all descendants, spiritual and actual, of Abraham and Sarah.

God’s covenant was for a world-wide family whose hallmark was faith, trust in God – especially trust for the things we cannot yet see or be sure of. And the mission of that big family was to be a vehicle of God’s blessing to the rest of the world. It’s a responsibility, a role, a job, a ministry to be God’s agents of blessing. These covenants that God made with God’s People in ancient times, in the Old Testament, are still in force today. God has not backed off of them. But they look different now; in many ways their true depth and meaning has been opened and revealed over the years and the centuries.

And so part of what happened in Jesus’ ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection is that he opened the way for Gentiles, for those outside the Jewish community, to be grafted onto Abraham and Sarah’s family tree. By faith – just as Abraham and Sarah had faith and trust in God. When we put our faith in Jesus, when we trust him with our lives, then we know that we are part of that world-wide family that is rooted and grounded in God. And the sign for us is no longer circumcision, but baptism. Our baptism ratifies our faith and seals us by the Holy Spirit.

Baptism is the sign that we have been joined to Christ, that we belong to the big family that God intended from the start and promised to Abraham and Sarah through faith. And in our Prayer Book we use the language of the Baptismal Covenant: the Apostles’ Creed – that ancient statement of faith used at baptism – in question and answer form, followed by the five promises of Christian living and practice:
  • To continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers.
  • To persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
  • To proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
  • To seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.
  • To strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.
These are the practices and the ways of acting and being in the world that God calls us to in our baptism as part of God’s big family of faith. This is what we do in our family, we who have Abraham and Sarah as our ancestors.

And we need to hang on to, and be rooted in, and engage in these baptismal practices, these markers of faith and spiritual family because the challenges of following Jesus and living as a Christian can sometimes seem daunting. It is both hard work, and we meet with plenty of resistance – both in our society and in ourselves.

We have a very clear example of this resistance in the Gospel reading. In the several verses before this, Peter has just gotten finished acclaiming Jesus as Messiah; Jesus’ identity has finally dawned on him and he has blurted it out, and Jesus commends him for it. So far, so good. Jesus then goes on to teach the disciples about his coming suffering, and rejection, and betrayal and death – and Peter is horrified: God forbid! Peter could not possibly imagine that the Messiah, God’s Anointed, the One whom he expected to be king and to deliver Israel from its oppressors, could meet such a fate. That did not match up with Peter’s expectations; it did not follow the script Peter was hoping for.

So Jesus had to speak harshly to Peter, rebuke him, essentially say “Snap out of it!” Peter needed to learn to see Jesus, and his ministry, and their whole project from God’s perspective, not from a human perspective. And we are just like Peter, all of us. Because, left to our own devices, we want to take the soft way, the easy way, the path of least resistance, the story that has the straight road to the happy ending. But that is not the way faith works, it’s not the way following Jesus works, it’s not the way the Kingdom of God works. Jesus tells the disciples and us: What will it profit a person to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their life? If you really want to follow me, you’ve got to be prepared to do the hard stuff, to take up your cross, to tell the truth about life, to put your own desires and ego aside.

We will meet resistance when we follow Jesus – out in the world, and in our own hearts, sometimes in our families, and even in our church. That doesn’t mean everything will be hard, or a struggle, or a life and death issue. There is plenty of joy, and glory, and exaltation in being a Christian, but there is no short-cut through the hard stuff; we can’t leap-frog over it, much as we would like to. And while we are in those hard places we need to remember that we are not alone. God is with us, accompanying us, preparing the way before us, waiting for us to catch up, to notice, to remember that our covenant with God places requirements on us: faith, trust, staying connected to Abraham and Sarah’s family of faith, living the practices that we promised at our baptism: We will, with God’s help.

And when we remember our covenant with God, when we walk through the hard stuff, take up our cross, we will be changed, and we will know the power of God’s presence and love – for the long haul.

Let us pray.

Take up your cross, the Savior said,
if you would my disciple be;
take up your cross with willing heart,
and humbly follow after me.
Take up your cross; let not its weight
fill your weak spirit with alarm;
Christ's strength shall bear your spirit up
and brace your heart and nerve your arm. Amen.
                                                                ~ Hymn 675
Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2018
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All Saints' Episcopal Church

 15 Basking Ridge Road, Millington NJ 07946    phone: (908) 647-0067    email: allstsmill@hotmail.com