Rev. Tessie Mandeville
January 13, 2008
Christ Covenant MCC
Decatur, GA 30030

The song, “Amazing Grace” is by far one of the most popular hymns among religious people as well as people who don’t consider themselves religious at all. There are a lot of myths and stories that surround the writing of this song but this much we do know: The author, John Newton, was involved in the slave trade between West Africa and England in the 19 th century. Some like to say that Newton had an “epiphany” or a revelation and turned around a ship loaded with slaves and returned to Africa. That probably didn’t happen. But what we know happened is that his written accounts of the slave trade were pivotal in ending slavery in England. Something happened to his heart and soul and he experienced a transformation—so much so that he wrote a song about it called “Amazing Grace.”1

The author, Anne Lamott says, “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”2

I can’t think of a better way to begin our New Year together, and to celebrate the season of Epiphany, than to talk about the grace of God and to go one step further: to let God’s grace transform us. So for the next four weeks, we are going to talk about what grace is, how it shows up in our lives when we least expect it but need it most, how it saves us, and how we can embody it in the world.

To talk about grace is to talk about one of the mysteries of life. It’s to try and explain something that can’t truly be explained and yet we know when we experience it. We also know when it’s lacking. We know when we aren’t receiving it from one another and we know when we aren’t offering it to one another. And we know that if it weren’t for the grace of God, we don’t know where we’d be today. Grace is a mystery and one that we depend on.

For many, the grace of God appeared in Jesus Christ in a particular way. In the gospel of John it is said about Jesus that, “…the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.” Jesus came full of grace and truth. I love that! I love the fact that the grace of God that I know through Christ leads me to places of truth...places that I do not need to run from. Instead, God’s grace draws me closer and closer to God’s own heart. Because of that, I can own my stuff. To use “recovery language”, I can do step four and take a fearless moral inventory and deal with my issues in the light of day, and experience the grace and forgiveness of God. I don’t have to hold my head in shame and condemnation any longer.

The Apostle Paul could have said the same thing. Many of us know Paul by his original name, Saul, the man who persecuted the early Christians but who was later converted along the road to Damascus. In his book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Bishop John Shelby Spong refers to persecution and conversion in this way: “Persecution is always so revealing. One does not persecute something that does not scare, and it cannot scare unless it has appeal. Conversion in such a person is always traumatic. Earlier convictions, passionately held, cannot be passionately abandoned without a volcanic internal crisis.”3

In my estimation, Paul was a man full of shame and condemnation, and he experienced a volcanic internal crisis. When you really spend time reading his words, you can tell that he struggled with accepting God’s love and grace. He was always in some kind of battle and he constantly referred to himself as a wretched man. He had a lot of self-loathing and self-hatred.

There is a lot of speculation about what he struggled with. Was it some kind of physical affliction? A spiritual affliction? Did it have something to do with his eyesight? My own thoughts lead me to believe that it was something intrinsic to his nature. Something so strong inside himself that he couldn’t change it no matter how hard he tried. And he tried. I think we hear this struggle most profoundly in his writings when he says later in Romans 7, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this?”

I believe Paul struggled with his sexuality. I believe he was in a constant struggle with what he truly desired and with what he’d been taught in synagogue. As a devout Jew, he knew that in the eyes of the law, he would be considered an abomination; he would be condemned by society and potentially put to death for his desires.

We won’t ever know the details of what Paul struggled with but for those of us who’ve been on a similar journey, we understand this struggle that Paul writes about. We understand the battle between what our minds tell us we should desire and what our bodies tell us we desire, between what society and our churches tell us we should desire and how we feel.

Paul prayed for this thorn in his side to be taken away from him. How many of us have prayed the same thing more than once? But the answer that Paul received from God was this, “My grace is sufficient for you.”4 It’s the same answer that we receive from God too.

And though Paul was a devout follower of the law, he didn’t know a lot about grace until he met Jesus. In the middle of all that self-hatred and self-loathing, he started to hear the gospel message of unconditional love. He met a Jesus who loved him just as he was. “Nothing Paul could do or be placed him outside the love of God present in Jesus the Christ. Somehow that message broke through…It had all the force of an exploding, blinding light at midday. The scales fell, as it were, from his eyes. What the Law could not do, the grace of love had done. Paul was justified. Paul was loved…Paul was accepted.”5 Paul realized that he did not have to become righteous by keeping the law. He received the grace and truth of Jesus Christ that said that nothing could separate him from the love of God—not even his desires.

January 25 is the Feast Day for Paul and his conversion from the man who persecuted Christians to the man who spent the rest of his life trying to help people experience the grace of God that would save their lives. That’s one of the amazing things about grace: once we receive the gift, we respond to it.

Paul tells us that when we are baptized we are united with Christ in his life, death and resurrection that we belong to Christ forever. That’s the principle of saving grace. But I believe Paul also shows us that there’s a practice of saving grace. Because we are united with Christ who embodied love and grace, we, too, must embody that same love and grace to our neighbors. The great theologian Karl Barth said, “Grace must find expression in life otherwise it is not grace.” In other words, one gracious act gives birth to another gracious act which gives birth to another gracious act and so on….

Sometimes grace is in the smallest acts of kindness that we show one another, like when someone gives us an unexpected gift or calls us when we’re sick. How many of us have been blessed when we received a card from Cathy Giarusso in the mail for our birthday or because we weren’t feeling well? And did you know we have a “secret angels” ministry team at Christ Covenant? I don’t know even who they are but I do know that when I’m feeling tired or overwhelmed, I get a card from them. That’s grace to me.

And one of the ways that we will embody grace at Christ Covenant is by becoming a “no shame, no blame” community. A place where we listen to one another’s stories without judgment, without adding to the shame, and without blame. A place where we can love and accept one another with the same love and acceptance that Christ shows to us. In this community of faith, we need to mean it when we say “whoever you are, wherever you are from, wherever you are on your journey, you are welcome here.” And when we can do this, our healing will go to a whole new level and we will know grace.

Grace is a mystery and one that we depend on. Wherever we are on our journey, grace will meet us but it will not leave us where it found us. Because once we are found, we won’t ever be the same. Blessed be and amen.

See David S. Blanchard’s book, A Temporary State of Grace, 1997, Skinner House Publishers.

See Anne Lamott’s book, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, 2007, RiverHead Books.

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, 1991, HarperCollins Publishers.

II Corinthians 12:9

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, 1991, HarperCollins Publishers.

Copyright © 2008 by Rev. Tessie Mandeville. Permission granted for non- profit circulation with attribution of author and venue. Other rights reserved.