Grace Upon Grace

“SAVED BY GRACE”
Ephesians 2:1-10 (Read from Eugene Petersen's The Message)
Faith United
February 10, 2008


Our Sunday night Women’s Bible Study group
is reading a book by Philip Yancey,
called, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”
It’s a great book that I’d recommend to anyone
Especially since I find more and more
that when asked, people aren’t sure
what to say about grace
Our first response is usually
that grace is what we say before meals
which, of course, is true
but it is so much more than that!
Paul talks in big terms like being dead in sin
and now being made alive in Christ
and that God seeks to shower us with grace
There’s the basic Christian doctrine of being saved by grace
but what does that mean?

I don’t know about you,
but I’ve been saved by grace many, many times
Grace is not something you can define
so much as describe
and the best way to describe grace
is to tell stories
because it’s such a big word
that encompasses so many things

Frederick Buechner writes that
“Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about
any more than you can deserve
the taste of raspberries and cream
or earn good looks
or bring about your own birth.
A good sleep is grace,
and so are good dreams.
Most tears are grace.
The smell of rain is grace.
Somebody loving you is grace.
Loving somebody is grace…
A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion
that people are saved by grace
There’s nothing you HAVE to do
There’s nothing you have to DO.”

The word grace means “gift.”
Grace is a gift from God,
and that is a basic doctrine in the Christian faith
We are saved by grace
but what does that mean?

I look back over my life
and I can tell you all my stories of pain
of grief, of hard stuff and challenges
I could make you feel really bad for me,
but then I look back, too,
and it’s very true
that “Grace has brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home…”
as the old hymn says

It’s absolutely true
I am here by grace
I am alive by grace
I am still hopeful
I can still love
I can forgive
I can go on
by God’s grace alone

Someone also said,
Everything is grace
Life is grace

You know that, if you’ve ever seen the birth
of a child
The first thing I think of when I think of grace
is the birth of my daughter
I can still remember her-- gray and slimy
looking up at me from on on top of my belly
crying her guts out --
she didn’t look that great
after all, she’d just been through
a tight spot, you might say!
But to me, she was the most beautiful thing I ever saw

I was pregnant with her
during a really tough year of ministry, my first year,
after which we had to move
but having a new life growing inside of me
kept giving me hope
and taking care of that new life
has gotten me through a lot
of tough days
She continues to give me grace upon grace
even at 13… !

Have you ever had a really good laugh?
I mean, the kind that comes up from your belly
and takes over your whole body?
And you just can’t stop?
Your stomach starts to hurt
and tears are rolling down your face
and your nose is running?
Isn’t it great?
Or has someone ever made you laugh
when you were in the midst of crying?
Now THAT is grace
Laughter-with-tears is a remarkable gift of grace

I can keep you here all day
with stories of grace from my own life
and I encourage you to think of those stories
think of those moments in your life
where you have been covered with grace
We didn’t do anything to deserve it
we can’t earn it
we can’t control it
we can’t get it exactly when we want it
it just comes
like that drenching rain
after too many days of drought

You know I love to sing
but I was so shy in high school
that every time I tried out for the choir
I choked
I was paralyzed
It wasn’t until my junior year of high school
that I even made it INTO the high school choir
but still couldn’t get a solo

My senior year of high school,
I tried out for the musical program
that was to be a musical revue
of several Broadway shows
I tried out for the part of Laurey
in “Oklahoma!”--
the part of Curly
was already given to the most popular guy
in our class
Class president,
class clown,
in the top five academically,
popular with all the girls
and president of the choir, too
he didn’t even to try out,
the part was given to him

Here I was, dork of the century
so scared I thought I was going to throw up
and I had to try out with two other girls
who were the top two sopranos
in the choir
and who ALWAYS got the solos

But to everyone’s shock,
mostly my own, I got the part
Before that, I had sung so quietly
that the choir director said
he didn’t know I could sing so well
I know he knew that by choosing me
he was risking me blowing it
he was risking me throwing up backstage
and never making it out front
he knew as well as I did
that I was so scared
I very well could have choked onstage
in front of 600 people
but he took that chance
and to me, that was gift

I almost DID throw up backstage
but I managed to get out there
and sing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning”
A friend of mine from the choir at church
met me afterwards with a dozen roses
I’ve savored that memory for all these years
as a gift of grace
and I wrote my high school choir director
just a few years ago
to tell him what he did for me
what a moment that was….

Fred Buechner went on to say,
“The grace of God means something like:
Here is your life.
You might never have been,
but you ARE because the party wouldn’t have been complete
without you
Here is the world
Beautiful and terrible things will happen
don’t be afraid
I am with you.
Nothing can ever separate us
It’s for you that I created the universe.
I love you.”

Grace changes us….
Grace is falling in love
finding that person who loves you back
for who you are
sometimes in SPITE of who you are
Grace is when you fall apart in front of someone
and they still love you
in fact, they hold you up
and hand you the tissue box

In the Bible,
it means that God loves us for who we are
that God sees past all the crap
all the shortcomings and mistakes
God sees past the short tempers
or the hardness of heart
and God looks at us
like a mother looks at her newborn baby,
gray and slimy on her chest,
screaming its head off,
and feels a love that simply cannot be put into words
THAT is grace

My earliest memory of grace
is when I was 8 years old
and I got to know a woman
who was my mother’s best friend
She had a way of making you feel like
you were the most important person
in the universe
And she made me feel like that throughout the years I was growing up
She hugged me a lot, played with my hair
held my face in her hands
and told me I was beautiful
even when I didn’t feel beautiful
She’s the one that made me sing for her
and convinced me I COULD sing
She’d look at me from across the dinner table
and I’d catch her staring at me
and she’d just smile
making me feel like she was simply
delighted with what she saw --
Oh, I hope you’ve had someone
look at you that way at least once in your life!

A lot of us have a hard time
having grace for ourselves
We might think that if people really knew us
they wouldn’t accept us very much,
they’d be appalled or disgusted
But the Bible tells us that God is never appalled
that God looks upon everything he created
including us
and says, “wow, that’s good.”

Anne Lamott wrote:
“Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze
that takes you from that isolated place
and puts you with others who are
as startled and embarrassed
and eventually as grateful as you are
to be there.”

Sometimes we can only receive grace
when we’ve lost everything
when there’s nothing left
all those walls have been torn down
and into the dark corner
where we may crouch in tears
light comes in and surrounds us,
fills us, warms us
and gives us the strength
to stand up again

Kathleen Norris writes
that maybe that’s one reason why we worship God
maybe we worship in order to respond
to that amazing thing called grace
because the only way to respond to grace
is to sing, to pray
to open our hands,
to hug our neighbor
to say… “wow, thanks.”
or to simply let the tears come to our eyes
We worship in response to grace
and I’d go so far as to say
that I’m here, in the ministry
as my own response to grace
to the grace upon grace that God has given me
showered me with in this life
and all I can do is try to share it

Grace doesn’t make any sense
we get it when we don’t deserve it
or as Larry likes to quote from somewhere,
“Grace is getting what we don’t deserve
and MERCY is NOT getting what we DO deserve.”

Maya Angelou, another one of my favorite writers,
wrote about the event
that brought her back into the arms of God:
She writes about a voice teacher who asked
her to simply read to him
“I was twenty-four, very erudite, very worldly,
He asked that I read from the book,
Lessons in Truth, a section which ended
with these words,….God loves me
I read the piece and closed the book
and the teacher said, ‘Read it again.’
I pointedly opened the book
and I sarcastically read, ‘God loves me.’
He said, ‘Again.’
After about the seventh repetition,” she says,
“I began to sense that there might be truth in that statement,
that there was a possibility that God really did
love me
me, Maya Angelou--
I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all
I knew that if God loved me,
then I could do great things,
learn anything, achieve anything
For what could stand against me with God,
since one person, any person with God,
constitutes the majority?
That knowledge humbles me,” she says,
“it melts my bones, closes my ears,
and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums.
And it also liberates me.
I am a big bird winging over high mountains,
down into serene valleys.
I am ripples of waves on silver seas.
I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation…”

St. Paul writes to the Ephesian Church,
“Now God has us where he wants us,
with all the time in this world and the next
to shower grace and kindness upon us
in Christ Jesus…”

We’re here because the party wouldn’t be complete
without us….
THAT’S the good news
so what are you going to do about it??