In his day Luther found a Church in which this grace was being obscured, even as it is often today in churches that celebrate his Reformation. It was, and is, obscured in two ways. First, there is the notion that grace is some kind of religious medicine dispensed by the Church. The impression is given that there is a kind of reservoir in the institution that is drawn on by its members, and that through the pipelines of its ordinances and activities we can get enough “religion” to keep us going. Luther, in his search for “a merciful God” made the great discovery that grace is supremely personal, the gift of a God who cares for each one of us. The grace that saves us is as personal—and as powerful—as the love of a mother for her child, as the communion of two close friends. The love that moves among a group of caring people is not something to be measured or rationed out; it is a free, spontaneous, accepting, forgiving, and delivering power that comes from the heart. So, I would say, grace comes not from the plans and programs of a religious organization, but from the heart of God. The services, the sacraments, the activities of a church are properly described as “the means of grace.” They are not grace itself.
The second way in which grace is obscured is the persistent notion that somehow it has to be earned or deserved. The music exploded in the heart of Luther when he finally knew that nothing whatever was required of him to merit the grace of God: no penances, no mortifications—yes, and no smug sense that he had made the grade as a moral and respectable citizen. If there ever was a character who seemed able to rely on his own interior strength it was Luther who, when warned of the danger that awaited him at Worms, remarked: “If I had heard that as many devils would set on me in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I should none the less have ridden there.” Yet this was the man who sang: “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing, Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing.” It was this “right Man” whose grace alone forgave his sins, set him right with God, and nerved him for every struggle.
It is still a surprise for many people, even within the Church, when they really hear that the grace of God means that his love accepts them just as they are, that there is no scale of religious virtue to be climbed before they can know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. So long as we retain one trace of self-justification, one little desire to earn our own salvation, we are at the mercy of these fears and victims of our pride. Grace is the great leveller—never more needed than in times when we tend to range ourselves with the good guys and blame all our troubles on the bad. “All have sinned,” said Paul, “and come short of the glory of God.” But all can be “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” “By grace are you saved . . . ”
How then if there is nothing we can do, can we be really linked to this amazing grace? That’s the big question today as at the time of the Reformation. There can be no quarrel among Christians any more about the answer. “By grace you are saved through faith.” Catholic and Protestant may still have different ways of expressing what this means, but increasingly we converge on the ultimate truth. Faith is our total trust in this grace that meets us in the person of Jesus Christ. Every one of us knows that it takes two to be friends. I can offer you my friendship, my understanding, my sympathy, my love, but if this evokes no flicker of a response then nothing happens. Grace is the hand of God stretched out—and it waits to be grasped by our hand in faith. This faith can be expressed in a silent prayer of commitment and trust, in a common affirmation in creed or hymn, in an inward yielding to the Spirit of God. But it is also expressed by the direction of our lives, our concern for other people, our reflection of the love of Christ, our readiness to follow where he leads.
Here we come to the question that always arises when the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith is preached. Do you mean, it has been asked since the days of the apostles, that since there is nothing I can do to earn my salvation, I can just trust in this grace—and carry on in my own sweet way, caring nothing about the commandments of the Lord? Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to call this misunderstanding of the Gospel “cheap grace.” The answer of the Bible is that the test of our faith is whether it issues in a real discipleship. If it doesn’t it is not faith, and grace is not there. Listen again to the words of the epistle. “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works lest any man should boast.” Our Christian activities in this devil-filled world are not the cause, or the price, of our salvation. They must follow genuine faith as the thankful answer of the forgiven sinner. “For we are his workmanship,” the passage goes on, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” In a new translation: “We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to devote ourselves to the good deeds for which God has designed us.”
So we come down from forty thousand to six feet above the ground. We go out again to face a world with devils filled. There is work to do. And we are called to do it with the joy of those who are being saved by grace through faith. In our anthem this morning you will hear the sounds of the devils: but through it you will hear the clear notes of the grace and the love that casts out fear. “Be of good cheer,” said Jesus, “I have overcome the world.”
The Resurrection of the Body
Editor’s Introduction
“We see through a glass darkly,” said St. Paul. And that glass is so dark that even Jesus could not describe the conditions of life on the far side of death. All the Lord was prepared to do, Read reminds us in this Commemoration Day sermon, “is to give the absolute assurance that there is a resurrection, there is a heaven where God’s will is done.”
Still, most of us would like to know something about the nature of life in that heavenly sphere. Read for his part encourages us to follow the lead of the Bible in speaking at least about the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul. “Body” is the biblical word for the whole person. That whole person, the Gospel assures us, “is sown in humiliation but raised in glory . . . sown in the earth as an animal body but raised as a spiritual body.”
But what does that mean? It certainly doesn’t mean, Read hastens to say, “that these same bodies we have now are going to be put together again.” It would, however, seem to mean that “in the new life beyond the grave we shall be the real people we are now, not phantom spirits identical in our invisibility; we shall be transformed but recognizably the same.” This in turn would seem to imply that “we shall know others and be known by them in the life to come.”
The Resurrection Of The Body
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on All Saints Commemoration Day, November 3, 1985
Text: “What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.” 1 Corinthians 15:42–44 (NEB)
Readings: 1 Corinthians 15:35–49 (NEB); Luke 20:27–38
When approaching a topic like the resurrection of the body or any other that has to do with the nature of life after death, I try to keep in mind the admonition of the great sixteenth-century Anglican Richard Hooker: “Dangerous were it for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High . . . our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence . . . He is above and we upon earth; therefore it behooveth our words to be wary and few.” Therefore in speaking about the resurrection of the body, my words will indeed be wary—and, within Presbyterian limits,