Rooted in Grace by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 5 January 2020
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Ephesians 3:1-20 NRSV
This is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles— for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you, and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ. In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power. Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him. I pray therefore that you may not lose heart over my sufferings for you; they are your glory.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine,
It's been a year already, really has been. Because when you look at the news and when you think about what has happened since the clock struck midnight and it turned 2020 already we are on the precipice of world war three. The United Methodist church is imploding and we haven't even hit the end of the month. Not to mention what I'm sure is happening in all of your lives. New year comes around with this promise of something better. This promise of this will be the year that I do the thing that I've been telling myself I'm going to do for 25 years. This will be the year that when I make those resolutions for new year new me, I'll figure out what I'm doing and I will stick to them this time. Some of us are really, really good with our resolutions until 8:00 PM January 1st.
Some of you have better willpower than I do and make it a little bit longer. But somehow in the midst of all of this new year new me, new us, we are reminded that the world is exactly the same as it was yesterday and the turning of a clock and the beginning of a new year does not ultimately determine that somehow all of the bad things of 2019 are no longer at play in 2020. What if instead of promoting a new year new you, we took 2020 and thought about who we actually are and claimed the fact that there's nothing wrong with who we've been, or that perhaps the goal for 2020 is not that you somehow become a new version of yourself and like those really gross snake things you like shed a skin but that you learn to sit wholly in who you are.
I mean both wholly with a W and holy with just the H. Over the next eight weeks or so, we're going to be talking about who we are at our core, not who you will be if you lose 20 pounds or who you will be if your marriage gets fixed or who you will be if all of these conditional statements happen, but the core of who you are, of who God created and called you to be perfect in his image. So that when the darkness seems to be overwhelming you know and you trust who holds the light.
New year new you often begins to say that somehow there's something wrong. What if there was absolutely nothing wrong with us and we just need to go on a journey of self discovery to learn how to love ourselves, not for the people we think we should be, but for the people that God called us and created us to be even when maybe it doesn't fit into the norms and the standards of the world around us? How do we do that individually and how do we do that as a community? Pearl Rivers mission statement is that we are a community that is rooted in grace, growing in faith and reaching out with God's love. So the next three weeks are going to focus on what that looks like for us and what does that really mean?
And then in February we'll start to move more into what does it mean for us to fit fully and to sit fully in who God has called us to be good, bad and the things we wish could be different? So what is grace? Grace is definitely not just that thing that you say before you eat your meals. Okay? It's not just the little rub, a dub dub, thanks for the grub, yay God that you sing before you eat or it's not just the thing that you say before you go to bed. Grace in and of itself is the most important thing to Christianity. And yet most of us do not understand it.
Grace is what God offers to us. The love and the light and the hope and the joy and the peace, the access to eternal life that we are offered even though we do not deserve. I want you to thank those of you who are parents and for those of you who are children, which is all of you and we got to think about that time that either you or one of your kids did something that was really bad. Like for those of us who are a little bit older, I want you to think about that thing that you have done that you didn't want to go home and tell your parents you did.
What are the things that you carry deep inside of you that you certainly did not want your parents to know about? Relationships, conversations, actions and inevitably as all parents know, those things tend to come to light anyway, right? We are really bad at keeping secrets and oftentimes the things that we are most ashamed of at some point come out, some point they expose themselves to the world. Now, this may not seem like a big deal to all of you, but I am an overachiever. I am deep rooted in my sense of identity being a good student was vitally important to me. I was not a person who got Cs, I was not a person who got Ds, I was really not even a person who got Bs.
I worked hard and smart in order to be able to maintain my grades. Being good at school was one of the deep ways that I identified my own self worth. And so in my junior year of high school when I really started to struggle with Math, like really struggle with Math, it scared me because all of a sudden what I thought I was good at was telling me that I was an average student, and for me average was not acceptable. So getting a C on my algebra 2 exam and my teacher threatening me with not passing for the marking period, horrified me.
And so I did what you're supposed to do and I went to extra help every single day for months on end and I picked my grades back up and I didn't pass that class with an A but I passed it with a B after doing a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of work to get there. So when I went to college and I went to Smith, which it's a hard school, if women have been allowed to be educated as long as men have, Smith would be an Ivy league school. My classes were extraordinarily demanding and it was the first time that I was really living on my own and had control over what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it, when I took my classes.
It's still so much of my worth was wrapped up in this ideal that I was going to double major in religion and psychology and I was never going to take a math class and I was never going to take another foreign language ever again because Smith had this beautiful gift of an open curriculum. So you got to take whatever you wanted as long as you fulfilled your major and 64 credits outside of it. Yes!
My first year and a half at Smith, my psychology classes tanked me sick so bad, so bad. I got a D in a college class and it broke me at my core because I had to go home to my mom and dad over winter break and say I'm really close to going on academic probation and I look my parents in their eyes who are doing everything that they knew how to do in order to help me get this education and I was so close to academic probation. And I hated myself because that's not who I was, I didn't get Ds. I took Hebrew, this is why I didn't take Hebrew in seminary, I took modern Hebrew and on week three they took away all of my vowels. Okay?
So I had to read Hebrew with no vowels then I had to speak Hebrew with no vowels. I want you to think about it English, if we just started dropping vowels, right? So if you look at hope over there, if it was just HP, would you have any idea what that word was? No. You'd be like, "I have to make many guesses." Now everybody else in my class had been in Hebrew school at some point in their childhood. And so they had a lot of Hebrew under their belt and I was the only one there who said, "So it took six years of Latin, I don't know what I'm doing." Tanked to that class to worked really hard but tanked to that class. To a year and a half into my college career I had to go home to my parents and say, "I have to do something different cause this isn't working." And it scared me.
And I was so afraid that my parents were going to get mad at me and that they were going to be disappointed in me, which all children know, especially us overachiever types. Your parents can be mad at you, but when they're disappointed in you, it's even worse. Right? It's even worse. And my parents looked at me and said, "It's okay we love you. You don't have to transfer unless you want to. Let's figure this out." So my parents and my advisor helped me talk through the fact that I had absolutely no desire to double major. I was clinging onto this idea that a mentor in my life once told me that I should have a backup plan in case this Jesus thing didn't work out.
So in that moment, as I was struggling to do all of these things, I wasn't even trusting God to really live into my call because if I trusted that God had called me and named me and claimed me for a time such as this, then I wouldn't need a backup plan. So I dropped my second major I picked up a minor in ancient Greek. I did really well in ancient Greek they had vowels and I didn't have to speak anything. And I managed to completely shift and graduated with honors and on the Dean's list. My parents could have turned around to me and said, "Absolutely not we're pulling you out. You'll go somewhere closer to home. We do not trust you with the resources that we have worked so hard for." What they offered to me in that moment and through that time was unfailing, steady grace that I did not deserve. I had gone and squandered the gift that they had given to me and yet they told me that that didn't define who I was.
That is grace. What God continues to do is offer to us this deep sense of you are okay it doesn't matter how bad your life gets, it doesn't matter how many wrong turns you have taken, it doesn't matter how much you hate yourself, still I offer to you eternal life because I love you. Not because you got straight A's, not because you have your life figured out, not because you raised perfect children, not because you got married, not because you have done all of the things right in your life, because you are my child and I love you.
Grace is given to us not because we have earned it and not because of anything that we do, but because of who God is, who God has called us to be. And I think that that is where the beauty of God lies. He is not some judgemental, angry old man sitting in a grand throne saying, "You, you said a bad word and therefore I don't talk to you anymore," or "You did a horrible, no good, very bad thing and therefore you will be cast out into hell for the rest of your life." What God does is just like in the prodigal son parable when the lost son returns home and the man picks up his dress, his garment, which let me just tell you all you didn't do, men never expose their ankles to anyone or anything. It was considered completely indecent and inappropriate and this man was so excited that his son had come home, that he picked up his garments, revealed his ankles and ran.
Ran to wrap his arms around his son and said, "You, I have never stopped loving you. No matter how far away from me you were. No matter how many times you squandered my name and all of the things that I built for you, still I have loved you and I have been waiting for you to come home and you do not come home to live some less than life. You do not come home to be reminded of your continual embarrassment and shame and guilt. You come home and you are reinstated as an heir of all that I have built for you because I love you. You do not deserve it. You will never deserve it, but it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with how much I love you."
That is grace. It is something that we talk about all the time, but when was the last time we really thought about the image of God picking up his garments and running to us and saying, "Welcome home. I love you. You are my child, I have cared for you and I have created for you and I have surrounded you your whole life. I love you." So when we talk about being rooted in grace, that is what we are rooted in. We are rooted in welcome home. We are rooted in a God who says, "No matter how far away you think you are running, no matter how many wrong turns or bad decisions that you have made, you still belong here. You have a place at this table. I love you."
When we say that we are a community that is rooted in grace we are a community that is rooted in that. That says to each and every person in this space, in each and every person who walks through the doors you are welcome here, welcome home. It doesn't matter what you have done in your life, it doesn't matter the poor choices that you are currently making. All it matters is that we love you and we love you because God loves us. And you don't have to do anything to belong here you don't have to serve on committees, okay. You don't have to work the train car, but that you simply for the fact that you are here belong. And when we begin to look at each other as a community where we belong, not because of what we put on Sunday mornings, not because of what we do, not because of how much we put into the offering plate, but simply because of who we are, we begin to truly become a community that is rooted in grace, rooted in welcome home today and every day. Amen.
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