AMAZING GRACE John M. Buchanan
Galatians 2:15-21 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 13, 1983 Columbus, OH

Christianity rests on the unlikely and improbable proposition that
Almighty God, creator of all that is, loves us and has saved us eternally
through the death of his son. The irreduceabile assertion of Christianity
ts that God loves totally, without conditions, with no strings attached:
whether we're good or net so good, whether we are liberal or conservative,
rich or poor, whether we spend Sunday morning in church or on a golf course
or in bed. The essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an amazing asser-
tion about God's grace and it will not be guatified or reduced by our
need to be reasonable.

Religion, on the other hand, js largely a human attempt to be reasonable
with God, to strike a fair bargain: God's love in return for our goodness;
a quantity of divine favor as it were, in exchange for a reasonable amount
of moral behavior on our part.

Christianity is an assertion too goed to be true about a grace that
can only be called amazing. Religion is what happens to grace when people
think about it for very Tong. And therein lies a story, a significant
portion of which occurred in the first century in the cities of Galatia,
which we know today as Turkey,

An impetuous, brilliant new Christian by the name of Saul of Tarsus
took another name and headed North from Jerusalem, When Paul reached
the Northwest corner of the Mediterranean he turned left into what was
known as Galatia, after the tribes of Celtic people who lived there, the
Gauls. It was the fourth decade of the first century. All the Christians
th the world - and that wasn't very many ~ were Jews. The Celtic people
in Galatia were what was indelicately described as heathen.

Paul told the story of Jesus and enough of them believed to be organized
into churches in the Galatian cities. And then the conservatives, in Jeru-
salem, heard about it and sent out their truth squads to correct the errors
Paul had made. “You must adhere to this law", they told the Galatian
Christians who stil? looked a lot like heathens. They didn't care about
ritual cleanliness, they ate pork and treated Friday night like any other
night. “In order to be a Christian, you must keep the law of Moses." The
Galatians, of course had never heard of Moses, but many of them, for the
best of reasons, began furiously to try to reorder their Tives on the
basis of his Taw.

Now Paul, a scholar, a lawyer, a Roman citizen, and a fighter ~ got angry.
In the midst of the confusion about what makes a person a Christian, all the
goodness and joy and laughter was lost. All the freedom disappeared and
Christianity looked amazingly like every other religion: a grim device by
which individuals ingratiate themselves with God. So he wrote his angry
letter to those Galatian Christians, and it is called the Magna Charta of
Christian freedom and its theological foundation is this amazing grace
which is at the heart of it all.

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He is echoed by John Naisbitt in the book everyone ig talking about,
Megatrends. Having defined and illustrated the ten major trends which are
already radically changing our life, Naisbitt adds an intriguing postscript:

"We are living in the time of the parenthesis," he says, "the time
between eras. It is though we have bracketed off the present from
both the past and future, for we are neither here nor there. We

have not left behind the America of the past..... But we have not
embraced the future either. We have done the human thing; we are
clinging to the known past in fear of the unknown future..." (p. 249)

“There are giants up ahead", the Israelite spies reported. "They're
so big, we felt like grasshoppers." The story, in the 13th and 14th chapters —

of the Book of Numbers is marvelous. The tribes of Israel had Finished ¢_ ny ys
three decades of wandering through the wilderness. Now they stood on the 1 UL, awe
very border of Canaan, the promised land. Moses sent out a party of spies pea

to survey this new place. They returned, after 40 days, having done their
intelligence assignment thoroughly. They brought back samples of grapes

and pomegranites and figs. They reported that the land was flowing with
milk and honey. But there was something else inthe land a: well: some
fortified cities and some very fierce-looking people. A. the end of the
initial report, Caleb, their spokesman, suggested that they get on with

it; that they conquer the land. But the other spies offer a dissenting
opinion. Now, the people of the land are not simply sturdy - “they are
stronger than we are“, besides “that country wil! swallow up anybody whe
tries to conquer it." And then, working up a real head of steam, “as a
matter of fact, those peaple up there are giants - compared to them we're
nothing but a bunch of grasshoppers." And the whale company spent the night
worrying and wringing their hands and weeping. And they complained to Moses
and Aaron, and said that, given a choice, they would rather die of old age
in their beds in Egypt, even as slaves, than in this god-forsaken place.

And they even started to talk about replacing Moses and Aaron with a leader-
ship team which was a little more conservative, more realistic, one that
knew that grasshoppers are no match for giants.

William Sloane Coffin, commenting on this story, says: "While love
seeks truth, fear seeks safety. and fear distorts the truth, not by exaggera-
ting the ills of the world (which would be difficult} but by underestimating
our ability to deal with them." (p. 60, Courage to Love)

Well, there are obstacles up ahead and sometimes tney look like giants.
The lead article in the recent Futurist Magazine is "Do We Owe Anything
to Future Generations?" It lists the issues with which this present generation
of Americans must deal, if there is to be a future for our children's children:
you know them by heart: energy, population, environment, etc. etc. Naisbitt
asks ~- Do we have the courage - the innovative ability to venture forward
into the future?

The President of Alma College told me recently that the new survey
of freshman attitudes reveals general cynicism about the future. Unlike
their predecessors, what freshmen want - this survey reveals - is not peace,
an end to hunger, racial justice, or a better world - but a bigger piece
of the financial pie. But the most disturbing thing of all, the President
said, is that their parents are welcoming this general lowering of expecta-
tions, this end of idealism - with sighs of relief. The worst thing of
all, he said, is that their parents regard the end of idealism as a good idea.

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But the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction is not much better.
Religion which paints the human condition a rosy hue; which simply refuses
to deal with evil and offers cheerful smiles and admonitions to think
positively, may be a pleasant way to spend an hour a week but it is dis-
honest and irrelevant and silly. University of Chicago scholar Martin
Marty has written a remarkable Lenten piece in which he suggests "Guilt
or nameless, faceless, i11-focussed sorts has never fallen in short supply.
People in whole industries, equipped with couches and staffed by professionals
with medical credentials, minister to those who feel guilt. Some of those
people are religious...some are not. The results in both cases are similar.
They both live lives haunted by yesterday, under the lengthened shadow
of parents whose demands they never met or could meet. These victims are
torn apart by words snapped cruelly at spouses, promises too easily made
in love and too readily broken in hatred..." (Christianity and Crisis,
2/21/83, "Of Winter in the Heart")

Sigmund Freud taught that guilt is born in the mind of the child whose
parents scold him and it continues throughout a life-time of anxiety about
losing that parental approval. We all know a little bit about that.

Alfred Adler taught that guilt is rooted in deception which all people
engage in. We know we aren't what we pretend to be and we experience
guilt because we deceive others. We learn about that gradually, I think.
We spend the first half of our lives feeling like we are more than we
appear. And about half way through reality sets in and humility. And
we know - hopefully with a grain of good humor - that we are Tess than
we appear, sometimes, if not all the time. What a lesson in humanity
to know that you can never be as wise and strong as you used to think
and as your youngsters persist in thinking you are.

Karl Jung said we experience guilt because we can't acknowledge our
“shadow selves", and Paul Tournier wrote that "numerous ilInesses, and
even accidents are a form of punishment which the sufferer administers
to himself." (Guilt and Grace, page 174)

But it was Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber who was most helpful by
differentiating between neurotic guilt which can be treated therapeutically
and reduced by understanding, and real guilt which can only he_acknowledged
and forgiven. Real guilt, Buber said, is a problem of religion, not medicine.

| eee oa

The Bible isn't embarrassed at all to relate guilt to sin, not sin as a
laundry list of small mistakes but sin as the human condition, the lostness,
the missing of the mark which is simply a part of our humanity. There was
a time when progressive people looked forward to the end of all that business,
when educated people would be free of primitive notions of sin and the guilt
which derives from them. It has not happened. in fact, the modern era has
documented without question, the lostness of our humanity. Enlightenment
not only didn't eliminate sin, it made efficient operations out of Auschwitz
and Hiroshima.
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The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the assertion that human need is met by
God's love. Christianity is the assertion that the worst of our humanity
is met, not by tight rules, but by the love of God, poured out in the life
of one who died on a cross.

~ Gu

potential includes appliances that are wearing out, children growing up

and away from us, jobs that Took @ Tittle less permanent and a tot less
satisfying than they used to, the loss of a good overhead smash and the
universal dynamic described gently as "the aging process". Sometimes the
litany of the future sounds so frightening that we reach, intentionally

into the past to hold on a bit longer. Sometimes we try to parent too Tong,
or hit the ball too hard, or drink too much, or have an affair which will
help us recover what we think we must be to affirm that we are alive.

The future is, for all of us, only partially unknown. Some of us will
have to cope with major life crises. Some of us will have to change our
life styles: all of us must live through whatever future is given to us.

The good news is that God's own son has come among us and lived through
his own future with determination and faithfulness and hope. The good news
of Jesus Christ is that the very worst the future could de, did not end
his father's fove: for him, nor even his own life. The gaod news of the
gospel is always, incredibly - a word of hope about the future.

Because of the incarnation - God loving this world co mich that he
camé to live in it: and because of resurrection ~ the life of God so strong
that death does not defeat it, Christianity is always hopelessty in love
with the present and hopelessly optimistic about the future.

The Christ of the New Testament wil! not allow his disciples to build
a monument on the mountain side: wil) not attow Peter to slay up there
away from the crowd; will not, that is to say, 2: low his people to cling
to the past.

The Christ whose name we claim - calls us - as church - as peaple ~
to follow him down into the future.

My favorite metaphor for God uses the future tense. God is not only Ged
of the past, but the God of the future. God is not only the father of Abraham
and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus ~ he is father of my children and their children
and their children and of countless generations ahead, God creates, I Tove to
remind myself - not as a push from behind, but as a pul] from ahead.

Of course there are obstacles. Of course they look like giants sometimes.
But what a mistake to try to return to the safety of the past. hat a mistake
to conclude that compared to those problems up there, we're nothing mere than
grasshoppers. God is up there, too - in that future, He calls us into it -
as nation - as church ~ as men and women: to live with joyful obedience -
which means hope. AMEN.