Grace and Peace and Nothing Else

Isaiah 7:10-16

Romans 1:1-7

Ten year old, New Jersey fifth grader Edbert Aquino is the national champion in . . . cursive writing!  That’s right – young Edbert has successfully mastered the task of loops and curlicues.  And for all his painstaking trouble, Edbert took home the national trophy, five hundred dollars, and bragging rights for his grade school in Bergen County, New Jersey.  Now those of you under 30 probably don’t know what cursive writing is.  But back before we typed with our thumbs, we wrote things on paper with pencils.  And we basically had to learn two versions of the English language – one in which the lower case “n” is one-humped, and then another language called cursive where the lower-case “n” has two humps!  And young Edbert Aquino has risen to the top of this dying art.

 

Here’s another habit that is old-fashioned and out of style: writing letters on paper and actually sending them to others, not to mention beginning that letter with a long, introductory salutation.  Our reading from Romans is just that – one, long salutation.  The apostle Paul includes an opening salutation in each of his letters in the New Testament, but this salutation is by far the longest.  Can you imagine getting a text or an email from someone with five or six lines of salutation?

While the salutation is long, the basic point is not.  Everything Paul has to say in this letter to a congregation in Rome can be captured in this wonderfully simple blessing: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 7).  That’s it.  Even sent as a text message it would have been economical.  Posted as a tweet it would have only used 74 characters.  Grace and peace to you.  Nothing else.  There’s no fine print.  There are no asterisks directing us to tricky qualifications at the bottom of the page.  Just grace and peace.  Grace means that everything we are and everything we have is a gift from God.  Peace means that our well-being is tied to the well-being of every other person, every other creature, and all of creation itself.  Grace means that you are important and valued and loved beyond your wildest dreams.  Peace means that you are no more important and valued and loved than anyone else.

Sometimes good news just is what it is.  Not everything has to be hard and complicated.  Not everything comes cloaked in algorithms or code. So I’d like to try to convince you this morning not to make this blessing of “grace and peace” any harder than it is.  As we welcome the celebration of Jesus’ birth, the message for each of us is “Grace and Peace and nothing else.”

At Christmas time we often tend to the stories of Jesus’ birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  But this is Paul’s story of Jesus’ birth.  And Paul’s praise of God’s arrival in Jesus’ birth feels different.  Did you catch it?  Paul says about God’s Son: “as to his earthly life was a descendent of David.”  Other translations say that God’s Son “was a descendent of David according to the flesh.”  For Paul, Jesus’ birth story was his connection to David’s family tree.  It was about his connections to Holy Scripture and to the longing of the prophets for the coming of Messiah (our reading from Isaiah was interpreted this way by Paul and the early Christians).  Paul was unaware of or uninterested in the birth narratives that begin two of our gospels. This reminds us that the earliest Christians had no single way to confess their loyalty to the significance of Jesus.  

Paul may not give us the standard Christmas story replete with manger scenes and angels and shepherds and wisemen.  But he does give us a simple and clear word about our lives.  Christmas is the time to hear that we live under the blessing of “grace and peace.”  This is news – news that keeps surprising us every time we hear it.  It comes to us not as common sense, but as a life-giving tradition of stories told by generations and now passed down to us.

In many areas of our lives, the goal is to add layers of nuance and complexity as we grow and develop.  But sometimes, the real art is in the subtraction, the ability to remove something.  We made a beef stew Friday that calls for a half cup of cognac.  After you add the cognac, you light it on fire.  When the flames shot up about three feet, my wife yelled and jumped back.  Luckily, I handled the situation with poise.  Anyway, the point of lighting the cognac on fire is to burn off the alcohol in the cognac.  You might think of other examples of subtraction, like skimming off the solids to get clarified butter.

The art of sculpture provides us another image of the importance of subtracting and removing.  Whether you’re carving a masterpiece from marble like Michelangelo, or simply carving something from wood, the desired object emerges slowly as you engage in the process of removing one bit at a time. It is that practiced, studied subtraction that gives birth to the final, desired, form.

So as a person who LOVES complexity, nuance, and ambiguity, as a person who lives his whole life in shades of grey, in uncertainty and endless qualifications and imagined “what ifs” – I am not a very good candidate to be calling you to simplicity.  I surprise even myself by asking you to consider the benefits of simplifying the good news down to the basics.

But Jared, it can’t be this easy!  You’re making things too simple.  After all, Paul writes a very long salutation at the beginning of this letter.  He doesn’t just say, “Grace and peace to you . . .”.  He also says that all of us are called to “faith and obedience” (v. 5), called to “belong to Jesus Christ” (v. 6), and called to be “saints” or “holy people” (v. 7).  Faith, obedience, belonging, holy saints – it sure sounds like the fine print of obligations and expectations are piling up.  Well . . . maybe.

Catholic writer Thomas Merton invites us to consider our calling to obedience and to sainthood in terms of a call to be true to our own unfolding lives.  If you can catch the radical power of Merton’s witness, it will make all the difference in the world to you.  Merton’s claim is that trees are saints.  Birds and mountains are saints.  According to Merton, God calls all of us to a life in which we become more and more ourselves.  Trees praise God by doing their tree thing.  Birds praise God by doing their bird thing.  Rivers and mountains praise God by doing their river and mountain things. 

And – here it goes, this could change your life – you praise God by doing your own thing.  Your life sings God’s praise not by seeking out artificially hard things to do in order to please God.  Your life sings God’s praise when it unfolds more and more into itself.  There will be some difficulty along this path of growth and development.  It can feel painful to molt out of versions of your life that were too small, too confining, too constricting.  Leaving behind those forms of life that pinch you into a life too small will often be confusing and frustrating.

One of the hardest things to believe about the good news of Christmas is that God loves you just as you are; that God takes delight in you even as you stumble and struggle through an unfolding life.  Because we are so frequently frustrated with ourselves - with our mistakes, our regrets, our weaknesses, our failures – we project that frustration onto our picture of God, assuming that this must be how God sees us too.  But God was pleased to come to us in the flesh, in the mess and muck of first century Palestine, in the life of a poor an unimportant Jew from an unimportant part of the Roman Empire.  And this story is God’s attempt to persuade us to rejoice in the mess, our mess, even as we keep longing for a better world.   There’s nothing you need to do to make yourself more loveable or worthy or acceptable.  There’s nothing anyone else needs to do to make themselves more loveable or worthy or acceptable. 

Last Saturday morning, Oliver was scheduled to take the ACT exam.  On the evening before the exam, I heard his mother say at least four times, “Now do you have your calculator?”  Every time, he responded with more and more exasperation.  “Yes, my backpack is already in my car.” He set his alarm.  He showered.  He left the house around 7:40am.  At 7:50am I received a panicked call from him, informing me that he forgot his backpack and his calculator and I needed to bring it right now, and fast, because I had to get there before the door closes at 8am.

I was sitting on the couch, drinking my first cup of coffee, unshowered, wearing sweat pants and slippers.  So with a jolt of adrenaline, I jump up, find his backpack sitting right by the back door, right where he would have had to literally step OVER it to leave the house.  I grab the backpack, and drive very fast to get to the HS before the door closes.  I call his cell three times when I pull up, he doesn’t answer.  It’s 7:58am.  So now I have to get out of my car, in sweats and slippers, and walk into the high school to deliver his backpack.

So let’s suppose, if at that precise moment of intense frustration with my child, you had asked me whether I really believe that God loves all of us just as we are; that there is nothing we need to change or do to make God love us -- I may have pleaded the Fifth.  And yet, even when our loved ones complicate our lives, there’s nothing they need to do to make God love them.  This is a story about me too, and you, and everyone you know and everyone you don’t know.  There’s nothing we have to change.  To be alive, as one of God’s beloved creatures, is to live a life in which the “spirit of holiness” is helping us grow into our fullest lives as God’s “saints.”

The script writers Josh and Benny Safdie have a new movie out: Uncut Gems – a movie set in the diamond district of New York.  The film stars Adam Sandler, who plays an unsavory diamond dealer who gets himself deeper and deeper into debt and other kinds of trouble.  In a recent interview, the Safdie brothers were asked about their habit of making movies that feature rather unlikeable characters.

“The Safdies have long resisted the idea that film-making should be morally instructive, with admirable heroes and clearly identified villains.  Instead, they take an approach that is at once more generous and more unspairing, refusing to either condemn their characters or prettify them.  Most of all, they resist the idea that movie characters must learn and grow; their heroes tend to be stubbornly stuck.  ‘I don’t know many people who change – in particular, who change over a short span of time,’ Josh Safdie says.  ‘That’s just not how life unfolds’.”  (The New Yorker, “Outside Shot”, by Kelefa Sanneh).

“I don’t know many people who change,” Safdie says.  He’s not denying that people make changes in their lives – of course we gain and lose weight, we get older, we move here and there, we change jobs, we marry and divorce, we experience successes and failures.  He is making a different claim – that human beings usually don’t alter their basic approach to life.  People develop a fairly sturdy and enduring framework for life, a fixed scaffolding that stays in spite of the many changes. 

I think Safdie might be right.  The words that Christians use to describe life with God - like “salvation” and “conversion,” like “transformation” and “calling” and “sainthood” – these words don’t require that we become fundamentally different people than the people we already are.  Instead, God’s call to each of us is always a call to enlarge, expand, deepen, and intensify the life we already have.  God’s call is a call to bring more of ourselves to the table.  To get all the different parts of who we are into the game of life.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not trying to make the life of faith sound easier.  What I have in mind is far from easy.  To chisel away the false forms your life has taken; to loosen your grip on the poses you normally strike; to let go of precious coping mechanisms you have used your whole life to avoid facing the real question at the center of who you are – these are terrible and terrifying parts of the work of repentance and renewal.  They are so hard, in fact, that there is no way you can even attempt them unless the “spirit of holiness” (v. 4) comes to your aid.  To summon the courage to go out in search for the overlooked and neglected bits of who you are – to gather them all up and welcome them to the table of your life – this is the life-long adventure of those called to belong to Jesus Christ as God’s “saints.”