28th July 2013;
Pentecost X Col. 2:6-15
“Growing in Grace by Grace”
I. All
is Grace
I
recently completed a two-year course to become a spiritual director. It was a very interesting and helpful
course. I had to read various spiritual
classics, such as Brother Lawrence’s The
Practice of the Presence of God, learn some new spiritual disciplines, and
both give spiritual direction and have a spiritual director myself. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed it and I
was able to grow a lot in it.
One of
the things that deeply impressed me as I read works both new and old and as I
engaged in spiritual direction was the utter graciousness of God’s grace. Grace, of course, is a core idea of the
Christian faith, and we are familiar with such Bible passages as Ephesian 2:8,
9, “For by grace
you have been saved through faith. And
this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so
that no one may boast.” All the authors I read, ancient and modern,
spoke of how growth in Christ is a matter of God’s grace at work within
us. St Teresa of Avila, a Spanish nun
from about 1600, said time and again, “All is grace.” She and her contemporary, St John of the
Cross, both said that while we may engage in prayer, fasting, and other
spiritual disciplines, God is the one who gives us the desire to do so, and he
is the one who empowers us to meet him and to know him more fully.
It is hard to
explain what spiritual direction is to someone who has not engaged in it, but I
will try to do so in a few sentences. To
be a spiritual director is to help someone see more clearly what is going on in
their own heart as they think of the Lord and to become more aware of his
presence – and of things in their thoughts, attitudes, and values that either
help one be aware of God’s presence or hinder that awareness. A spiritual director also helps a person to
see the presence of God in the events of their lives.
As I learned about
spiritual direction, from reading, from engaging in some new spiritual
disciplines, and from being under a spiritual director myself, my breath was
taken away by the reality that life with God is indeed all of grace: he pours
out his love on us lavishly and freely.
There is nothing we can do to make God’s love come to us or to earn any
form of blessing we might seek. This is
true whether we are just beginning our walk with the Lord Jesus or if we have
had decades of walking with the Lord seeking to enjoy and serve him.
I speak of this
reality because it is at the heart of the passage we read from Colossians,
chapter 2. The key verses in this
passage are verses 6 and 7, “Therefore, as you
received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and
established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” Paul’s point is that just
as the Christians of Colossae received Christ by grace so they need to continue
to grow by grace. All is of grace.
II. Paul
Warns the Colossian Christians
The
first two verses of our reading from Colossians say “as you received Christ
Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the
faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” The next verse of the passage is a warning: “See
to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according
to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not
according to Christ.”
By
“philosophy,” Paul is not referring the academic field of philosophy, which is the
study of ways of understanding how life and the universe have meaning. In New Testament times, “philosophy” could
also refer to something smaller than that, such as the teachings of some group,
a person’s point of view, or even a set of magical practices. What Paul is warning the Colossian Christians
about is a view that says our life with God depends on something we do, just
because we do it. Our reading stopped
with verse 15, but verses 16 and 18 tell us of the specific “philosophy” Paul
is warning them against. These two
verses say, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and
drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath… Let no one disqualify you, insisting on
asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up
without reason by his sensuous mind.”
Many
religions of that day had systems of practices – special days, dietary
restrictions or requirements, appeals to angelic beings, a focus on special
spiritual experiences such as visions, and so on. There were a great variety of practices and
focuses, but the major idea behind nearly all of them was that, if you performed
the proper ceremonies, or had the right experiences, or followed a special
calendar of feasts and fasts, then the deity was indebted to you, and you would
receive a reward of some kind. There
were branches of Judaism that taught these kinds of things, and of course there
were many groups among the Gentiles that did as well. The variety of spiritual teachings and groups
would make us dizzy now, and they were probably just as bewildering then to
someone exploring the new faith that had arrived, Christianity.
While
there are a great variety of religious practices now, I want to mention three
basic attitudes that I have found to be common, even among professing
Christians. Each of these is a variation
on the idea that there are certain things a Christian is supposed to do – or
not do – and that when we do the right things and avoid the wrong things, God
is pleased with us, and blessings come.
The most
stark example of this attitude is represented by the experience of a man named
Kevin Miller. He says:
When I was
five-years-old, I first fully understood the message of these words: “He sees
you when you're sleeping, He knows if you're awake, He knows if you've been bad
or good, So be good for goodness' sake!”
Until that moment, I had
lived in this childhood bliss, in which Christmas was the best day of the year.
I had always believed that the gifts at Christmastime were there because
Christmas always came with gifts. You could count on them. But now I painfully
understood that if I wanted any gifts at Christmas, I had to be good. It was
all riding on me. There was this all-seeing, all-knowing Santa, and if there
was going to be any gifts, I had better shape up. But then I thought, How good is
"good"? Can a person be "pretty good"? Does Santa
understand that I have a twin brother, so I have more reasons to be provoked
than other kids? It was all so
worrisome to me.
I grew up a little more
and went on to elementary school. In the fourth grade, when I was 9, I
continued to learn that all the good stuff in life depends on my effort. We had
a reading program called SRA. Here's how it worked: There was a giant box of
color-coded cards on the side of the classroom. You went and got one of the
cards in the front of the box, read what was on it, and then answered questions
about what you'd read. If you got most of the answers right, you moved up to
the next highest color—red, yellow, blue, and if you were good enough and
worked hard enough, you reached exotic colors, like magenta. Moving up in SRA was all we cared about,
because if you were still on one of the lower-level colors—red or yellow—you
were a loser. Everybody's goal was to move up—to work really hard and reach the
ultimate pinnacle of fourth-grade glory: aquamarine. But if you wanted the
glory, you had to hustle.
I do not
know how many people I have met who tell me, “I want to go to heaven when I
die, so I am doing the best I can. If I
am good enough, then God will love me, and he will take me to heaven.” That, of course, leaves you with the
questions that five-year-old Kevin was asking, “How good is ‘good enough?’ Does God understand my special
circumstances?” and so on. There have
been more than a few people who have simply given up on God, thinking, “I’ll
never make it, so why even try.”
A second
variation recognizes the reality of grace.
This idea is what you might call, “The God of the Second Chance.” This view says that God forgives us by his
grace because Jesus death atoned for our sins, so we begin over again with a
clean slate. Now that we have a fresh
start, the rest is up to us – we must be careful to do what God wants us to do,
and to avoid those things he has called sinful.
There
was a time in church history when many people delayed their baptism as long as
possible, because it was held that all sins committed before baptism would be
forgiven, but any sins after baptism had to be confessed and some form of
penance done for each of them. The ideal
was to be baptized on your deathbed, so you would have very little time and
very little opportunity to commit any sins.
But that plan was always a gamble: if you were killed by an accident or
in battle but were not baptized, your certain destination was hell, and nobody
wanted that.
Baptism
on one’s deathbed is not the ideal any longer, but it makes sense if you take
the view that Christ’s death delivers me from all sin before I became a
believer so that now I have a second chance.
Most of the time when I encounter something like this idea, it is more
like God will give us a second chance, then a third, then a fourth – but one
never knows when his patience will run out and no more chances will be
given. And that is a pretty scary way of
living with God, when you think about it.
There is
a third “philosophy” that recognizes that the death of Christ on the cross was
sufficient for all our sins, past, present, and future. In Colossians 2:13-14, we read, “And you, who were dead in
your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh God made alive together with
him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that
stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” God forgives our sins completely. This third view is convinced of God’s mercy
for sin, but is also convinced that growing as a Christian is up to the
individual.
The more
we do, and the more we try, the better we will be. A person whose “philosophy” is of this type
will say, “The more Christian things I do, the more Christian I will become.” And so such a person gets into Bible studies,
prayer meetings, service projects, church committees, and the like. Growth comes by effort and by activity. Differing denominations may have differing
clusters of activities that are supposed to be the Christian thing to do, but
the purpose is the same: do these, avoid those, and become a better Christian.
III. It’s
ALL Grace
Here are
the opening verses of our passage again: “Therefore, as you received Christ
Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in
the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”
We
received Christ by faith, a faith which is itself a gift of God’s grace, and we
continue – Paul uses the term “walk,” which meant “to have a pattern of life” –
in the same way, by faith, depending upon the Lord and his mercy. Paul uses two metaphorical words to describe
how we grow in verse 7: “rooted” and “built up.”
Jeremiah
17:7-8 tell us of the person who is rooted in God: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that
sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its
leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not
cease to bear fruit.”
Brennan
Manning, a former Roman Catholic monk and author of The Ragamuffin Gospel, has a story of how he took the name
Brennan. While growing up, his best friend was Ray. The two of
them did everything together: bought a car together as teenagers, double-dated
together, went to school together and so forth. They even enlisted in the Army
together, went to boot camp together and fought on the frontlines together. One
night while sitting in a foxhole, Brennan was reminiscing about the old days in
Brooklyn while Ray listened and ate a chocolate bar. Suddenly a live grenade
came into the foxhole. Ray looked at Brennan, smiled, dropped his chocolate bar
and threw himself on the live grenade. It exploded, killing Ray, but Brennan’s
life was spared. When Brennan became a
priest he was instructed to take on the name of a saint. He thought of his friend,
Ray Brennan. So he took on the name “Brennan.”
His entire life after that night in the foxhole was colored by the
recognition that his best friend had willingly laid down his life for him. Every decision was made in light of the fact
that the only reason he had an opportunity to make a decision was because his
friend had died for him.
And Ray Brennan’s
deed gave him a deeper understanding of the death of Christ – who did not die
for those who loved him already, as Ray died for his friend, but who died, as
Romans 8:5 tells us, “while we were still sinners.” Christ died for us while we were his enemies,
opposed to God’s rule over us. And so, our
lives are to be rooted in Christ, depending on him moment by moment, trusting
that we are given life and growth through his mercy and power.
Paul also uses the phrase “built up” to
describe our Christian lives. “Rooted”
is an agricultural term and “built up” is an architectural one, so Paul is
guilty of the grammatical sin of mixing his metaphors – but his point is that
we are to increase in our faith and to show that increase in how we live.
I am preaching from our passage in Colossians,
but we also read Luke’s account of the giving of the Lord’s Prayer. That prayer also illustrates the reality that
all of life depends on grace. In the
Lord’s Prayer, we do not ask for many things – we ask for basic things – God’s
Kingdom, daily bread, forgiveness, protection from the power of
temptation. If we need God’s
participation these things, we need him for everything, not just extraordinary
things that are beyond our power to influence.
All is of grace in our lives. All
is of grace.
IV. We
Act in Grace
When I
spoke of my training to become a spiritual director, I talked of learning a
number of spiritual disciplines and deepening ones I was already doing. If all is of grace, then why would I take the
time and effort to practice these spiritual disciplines? If all is of grace, then why pray, read the
Bible, attend worship, share our faith, offer help to others, and so on? Should we not simply wait for God to work in
us?
In Phil.
2:12-13, we read, “Therefore,
my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only
as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with
fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work
for his good pleasure.”
There are two ways
of engaging in Christian activities. One
is the way I spoke of a few minutes ago: “The more Christian things I do, the more
Christian I will become.” The activity itself produces
the change in this way of looking at spiritual activities. We are rewarded by God because we do what
pleases him. The other way is to say,
“God has offered me this path as a way to know him better. As I engage in this, he will meet me, we will
enjoy each other – and he will change me.”
The Celtic
Christians used to speak of certain places being “thin places.” A “thin place” was where the boundary between
the physical and the spiritual was not very great; one could experience the
reality of God at such a “thin place.”
Spiritual disciplines are a kind of “thin place” right in the midst of
our daily activities. When you engage in
prayer, you are opening your heart to God’s presence. When you study God’s Word, you are opening
your mind and heart to God’s way of thinking.
When you share your faith with someone, you are opening your ears and
heart to be aware of that person and his or her needs, so that you can speak
God’s hope to those needs. When you
serve in a soup kitchen, you are opening your heart to the image of God present
in every person, however obscured that image may be by the circumstances of
that person’s life.
We neither earn
nor deserve anything by engaging in the various spiritual disciplines that are
available to us. We cannot command God,
“Now you must love me more, now you must help me.” But as we engage in activities and
disciplines, we see more clearly the presence of the Lord and more aware of his
activity in us – and of his activity through us. We change, not because God is rewarding us,
but because we are drinking deeply of the waters of grace as we become more
aware of his love for us, his presence in our lives, and his workings the world
around us. The more we see God, the more
we are aware of the reality that our lives are all of grace. And that awareness, through the power of the
Holy Spirit, cannot help but change us and enable us to grow in grace.
The final phrase
in the two verses from Colossians I have been focusing on is “abounding in
thanksgiving.” The more we are aware
that all is of grace, the more thankful to God – and to others – we
become. Everything is a gift to us, and
we can rejoice in it because our loving Father has graced us with it.
With that in mind, I would like to conclude with
the General Thanksgiving from Morning Prayer: “Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your
unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and
loving-kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless you for our
creation, preservation, and all the
blessings of this life; but above all
for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus
Christ; for the means of grace, and
for the hope of glory. And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show
forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be
honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen”
