Grace

Sermon

If someone were to lay out in video form, HD, all of the worst mistakes and worst decisions you’ve made in your life, and had you watch it, how would you feel? All the times you’ve hurt someone, your regrets, your sins, laid bare before you?

Our Scripture for today, Psalm 130, provocatively asks us what would happen should the Lord God mark all our iniquities, but at least for me, what would really cause me horror is if I had to mark all my own iniquities and lay them out for myself. I suspect for some of us, a film like this plays out in our minds over and over again.

Psalm 130, though, asks about God marking all our iniquities rhetorically because it suggests that God does NOT do this. “There is forgiveness” with God. Psalm 130 is ultimately about grace.

So, perhaps, Psalm 130 provokes another film reel. Imagine laying out in video form all the moments you were shown grace in your life, moments of second chances, moments where you were given forgiveness and healing, moments where people around you gave you grace, whether you deserved it or not.

Can you imagine those people who maybe held your hand or who heard you over the phone? Those people who extended something or someone to you? Maybe even that moment of grace in the mirror?

For me, it was my Lola, my grandmother. When I was in middle school, my grandmother from the Philippines came over for about a year to help my mom and dad with childcare because they worked long hours as nurses. I, as a middle schooler and someone in suburban white New Jersey, wanted to fit in and assimilate real hard. I couldn’t really articulate this at the time, but as a middle schooler, my grandmother – a brown Filipino immigrant with an accent – symbolized everything I didn’t want to be. Because I wanted to fit in with white America.

So I was very angry at her and I didn’t treat her very well. And I know that of course I was a young person and I can’t fully own that. I processed a lot of that. Thank you, therapist.

But it symbolized a lot of the ways which I was complicit in the racism of America. Even as an adult I continued a lot of those patterns.

I was also an atheist in middle school, high school, and college, and when I came back to faith in college, I told my mom, “Hey, by the way, I believe in God again, don’t hate me anymore.”

And my mom said, “Of course I don’t hate you, and also I knew you would come back to faith. Your grandmother prayed for you in the Philippines every day.”

Even though I treated her badly and yelled at her like a punk, she was praying for me.

She in many ways was the face of grace for me.

I think as we go through life and imagine that film reel of grace, we see how vulnerable it is to live by other people’s grace and by grace itself, and yet how necessary it is to live.

But I also think grace is a tricky thing to talk about. I talked to a pastor once who told me he was talking to someone who was very hurt by a religious person. And that person who was hurt said, “Oh, you’re a Christian? Christianity is the religion where people can do terrible things to you and then say it’s perfectly fine ’cuz God says it doesn’t matter anyway.”

People can feel entitled to what they call grace that shields them in their privilege or from consequences. “Don’t make me feel bad for what I’ve done, you should forgive me.” This happens individually, and this happens systemically. Ask any woman in an abusive relationship how much her partner manipulated her into forgiveness, or all the women who have had to put up with terrible men throughout history. “We are your legacy!” Props to everyone who sang “Hamilton” during the youth mission week.

There are so many times in America where a racist mass shooting is committed against black people, and they will be called upon by authority figures to forgive. And often because black people, brought up in a robust and rich Christian tradition, WILL show forgiveness, that becomes praised and expected by white onlookers.

And then there are defined iniquities that are not iniquities but definitions for control. It is not an iniquity to identify as lesbian or trans. In this situation, it is not grace that has been granted to you, it is grace that you would even step inside an institution that denied your existence and dignity. God has always been with you; it is we who need to take responsibility and cry out of our depths before we can even talk about grace for us.

And so these systemic patterns are not a coincidence; they are the demonic work of white supremacy, of patriarchy and homophobia, of 500 years of colonialism, to twist grace, specifically Christian grace, into violence.

But despite it all, real grace is still worth seeking, still worth celebrating. I actually do believe grace triumphs over our violent systems. But we need to recognize the direction of God’s grace, where we are and need to go.

Psalm 130 helps provides a picture for this. The narrator says, “Out of the depths I cry to you.” This implies that the narrator recognizes their iniquities as plunging them into the depths and wants to get out. It is about taking responsibility for your actions and then wanting to do better.

In other words, we should seek growth. Growth in ourselves, growth in this world.

And once we seek this growth, once we take actions that show we are stretching our arms out to God and we want to be better, Psalm 130 says we then “wait for the Lord” more than those who watch for the morning.

This is an active waiting, a waiting that takes responsibility, a waiting that takes steps, but ultimately still waiting in faith, a trusting that eventually the sun will come up, the morning will come. That the “great power to redeem” ultimately rests in something or someone outside of ourselves.

Anyone who chooses growth knows that it doesn’t seem to come overnight. In fact, you sometimes feel like you take all these steps, only for you to feel like you’re stumbling backward. You need to find the faith that if you put yourself out there, it will mean something.

So here is how I would summarize all this into a mantra:

God gives us grace to grow. So choose growth, trusting in grace.

God gives us grace to grow. So choose growth, trusting in grace.

This means choose the paths in your life and in this world that lead to growth. When you inevitably fall down, allow yourself to experience and feel the grace that picks you up, that video reel of people who grant you grace. And then, as you aim toward growth again and again, trust that God’s grace will ultimately work itself out, that growth and the morning will ultimately come.

This is how we stay motivated in fighting for justice. When it seems like there’s just too much injustice, and any contribution you could make seems like a drop in the bucket, all you can do is choose growth, trusting that God’s grace is weaving together all of our movements toward the morning.

That’s how we stay motivated in fighting for ourselves. From talking to people, I know growth is possible at every stage in life, from 5 to 55 to 85. Think about this for yourself; where do you want to grow?

In Jesus Christ, through the power of the Spirit, we can slowly become the people we want to be, and we all can rely on God’s grace wherever we are when we stumble.

God’s grace is a wind blowing through this world, a river flowing through our lives, if you just seek and hold on to it. Martin Luther of the Reformation put it this way in his hymn version of Psalm 130, “live alone by mercy.” The other great reformer, Anna from Disney’s Frozen 2, sings it this way:

“So I’ll walk through this night

Stumbling blindly toward the light

And do the next right thing.”

If you’ve seen Frozen 2, you have a tear in your eye right now; you know how meaningful that was!

God gives us grace to grow. So choose growth, trusting in grace.