Starting From Square One : Prisoner of Grace

Watch the video version of this sermon here.

Hello and welcome back to another week here on Making Waves! If this is your first time joining us, we’re glad you’re here! What a wonderful time to join us here; you’re just in time for the new year. 2016 was a year full of hope and loss, disappointment and excitement. However, through the ups and the downs, Christ held us through all of it.

We are going to be starting a new sermon series on Making Waves with this session and it spawns from this idea of a New Year’s Resolution… odds are you made one of these this past Saturday at midnight. These resolutions are goals or aspirations for the coming year. We set them for ourselves and we hope to hold strong on them throughout the coming year to see what becomes of our resolve this time next year. We pledge to lose weight, eat healthier, work out more, love deeper, clean up after ourselves, try to be happier, and the list goes on and on.

I have always found this piece of tradition so bizarre and specific. But I had never taken the time to look up where it kind of spawned from until in preparation for this sermon. This idea of the resolution of the New Year dates back to the days of the Romans in 153 B.C.E. There was this mythical god of the Romans, Janus, whose name actually was the inspiration for the month of January, which we know of course to be the first month of the year. Janus was a bit of an odd bird. As you can see in the picture below, he had two faces, one that faced forward and the other that was looking backwards. This was a symbol of the ability of Janus to look figuratively “back” on the past, whilst also managing to look “forward” to the future. This led to January being a month where we looked back on the last year, what went wrong, what went right, what should change and then start afresh for the new year of the future, resolving to make it better than the past.

This idea of a New Year’s Resolution and this Roman god of Janus led me to wondering, what can the church learn from this concept? What should be on the checklist for the resolution of the church in 2017? How could the concept of starting each year with a fresh new take benefit the body of Christ?

That’s what I want us to explore of these next several weeks together… as we break down our towers and start from the grassroots of our faith, what are we learning? We are going to take a step back from it all and start from square one, as the expression goes. Let’s start this year off by building up our faith from the ground up and let’s see where that leads us in 2017.

So, before I ramble on any further, let’s get to the real meat of the conversation here: the Word. Let’s dive into it. If you’ll join me in your own text or follow along with the provided scripture below.

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.

- Ephesians 3:1-12

Will you pray with me?

Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be acceptable in your presence, O God, for You are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Now, some of you might be slightly confused here so far. “Hang on just a second, Pastor. Sounds to me like all you’ve done so far is talk about some other Roman god that has nothing to do with me. Why should the church focus on these resolutions, when it comes from Pagan tradition?”

Well, good question. I would argue that a lot of what comes from this idea of resolution can be backed by the teachings of Christ, first and foremost what we just finished celebrating: the birth of Christ. The Advent season translates into the season of coming. It is the time when Christ comes to us in human form to save the souls of the children of God. And, as we can see in the New Testament, Christ doesn’t come empty-handed, but instead He comes bearing the offering of the New Covenant (Luke 22:20). And what else is the new covenant besides a form of a new resolution?

So, Christ is born unto us in the form a child in a manger and He brings with Him a new covenant, a new resolution, filled with the bedrock of our faith that we’ll be focusing on these next several weeks. So, what is the first root that Christ brought with Him to those of us here on Earth? Well, it’s that which we see Paul talk about in the scripture above: delivering the Word of God through the gift of our Grace.

Paul was arguably one of the most famous missionaries in the Bible. He would go from town to town, nation to nation, country to country, spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ to people of all different races, ages, and classes. Paul attributes this calling to something known as the great commission, which we might recognize from the gospel of Matthew, in which Christ calls the disciples to “Go, and make disciples of all nations.” This message echoes the promise of Christ as He first gathered His disciples to make them “fishers of men.”

But Paul doesn’t stop there, he doesn’t only attribute it to any ol’ commission, because anyone could make a commission, right? Paul goes so far as to call it a commission of God’s grace. So, we know it’s not just Paul doing all of this evangelism purely for the glorification of himself, right? He’s not just trying to sell his t-shirts, cds, and merchandise to provide for himself, he is delivering this message out into the world empowered by the grace that God has given him. A grace that we are all given through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in our Easter season coming up later this year.

However, this seems too easy, doesn’t it? All that I have to do for the first root of our faith is just to tell people about God? Come on, Pastor, I can easily do that this afternoon with a little scrolling around on Facebook. Well, the gospel is never quite what it seems. Paul uses some other words in this scripture to describe his commission that might not make us totally comfortable. Can you find them?

“...a prisoner for Christ Jesus…”

“...a servant according to the gift of God’s grace…”

These aren’t the words I like to hear as a young and rebellious punk. I’m barely into my twenties and I still have plenty of my teen angst to go around. The words prisoner and servant tie me down like two-ton handcuffs. You see, Paul doesn’t just say that the first root of our faith is the commission to deliver the Word of God through our gift of Grace, but it is to be enslaved to that commission. We are held captive and servants to that mission from God.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist tradition, has been attributed as having this brilliant quote that sums up this idea:

“Do all the good you can.

By all the means you can.

In all the ways you can.

In all the places you can.

At all the times you can.

To all the people you can.

As long as ever you can.”

This idea of being a prisoner of Grace, despite it’s heavy verbiage and tone, is actually a call to be as Christian as we can be. So completely “Christ-like,” that we are living a life filled with grace, despite it’s shortcomings.

Let me share with a story that was shared by missionary Del Tarr, who served fourteen years in West Africa with a mission agency.

“I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I went to the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year's food, of course, must all be grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields. October and November...these are beautiful months. The granaries are full—the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday's Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep. December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day. By February, the evening meal diminishes. The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don't stay well on half a meal a day. April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel. Then, inevitably, it happens. A six or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. "Daddy! Daddy! We've got grain!" he shouts. "Son, you know we haven't had grain for weeks." "Yes, we have!" the boy insists. "Out in the hut where we keep the goats—there's a leather sack hanging up on the wall—I reached up and put my hand down in there—Daddy, there's grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!" The father stands motionless. "Son, we can't do that," he softly explains. "That's next year's seed grain. It's the only thing between us and starvation. We're waiting for the rains, and then we must use it." The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why? Because he believes in the harvest. The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so much that he cries. But as the African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, "Brothers and sisters, this is God's law of the harvest. Don't expect to rejoice later on unless you have been willing to sow in tears." And I want to ask you: How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don't mean just giving God something from your abundance, but finding a way to say, "I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense. The world would call me unreasonable to do this—but I must sow regardless, in order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy."

If we hope to start from square one and take a look back at where our roots begin, we will always find that they find their start in the patient, graceful love of sharing the good news with our fellow man.