Sermon prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA

by Gregory S. Kaurin, associate pastor

Morning Promise services, 03/30/03

 

Texts: Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-22

Sermon:

Brazen Grace

 

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Grace is a two-edged sword.  One edge saves you and fills you with joy.  The other edge can frighten, embarrass, or even judge you. 

Close your eyes for a moment.  I want you to imagine a person or a group of people that really annoy you, make you angry, gross you out.  Imagine a person or people that you kind of hope will get their just deserts in the end. 

Now, imagine that you arrive at the pearly fence of heaven, and that very person or those people are exactly the ones who open the gates for you. —They’re even there ahead of you, to welcome you… Open your eyes.  Grace is a two-edge sword.  It can lift us up and humble us at the very same time. 

“It’s a free gift,” we call it, “available to anyone, even to thieves and murderers at the last moment.”  But often, in our heart of hearts, we really don’t want it to be that free.  Those are the times we think we’ve somehow earned a piece of it, at least more than certain other people, but grace is free, always will be, otherwise it would not be grace, and you and I couldn’t get it.

 

There are six things I want to say about this brazen grace today. 

First, it is BOLD.  The children of Israel were whining and dying in the wilderness.  Our passage says that God sent fiery serpents, but really, their wandering and suffering was a product of their own indecisions, fears and inability to trust God, even after he saved them, again and again. 

Just listen to them.  They’d been starving.  God sent them water out of rocks and miraculous manna from heaven.  Even this became old hat, and they were whining about it, this miracle bread provided right from God’s hand.  “We’re sick of this manna!” they whined.  “Back in Egypt we had meat stews and cucumbers.”  So, they whined and meandered and wandered their way into a nest-bed of poisonous snakes.

Finally, when things were at their worst, when they were desperate, they acted just like we so often do.  After ignoring their faith and their prayers and God, finally in desperation they cried out.

God had Moses make an image of one of the fiery serpents on a pole, a giant brass snake-sickle.  After all this fuss, their whining, wandering and fears—all this effort to stray from and fight against God—all God asked them to do was to move their eyeballs—and glance at the brass snake.  In that moment, they were filled with life.  Face the object of your fears and death, and yet you will live.

God’s grace overpowers all diseases, poisons, darkness and death.  It is bold.  In the face of our fickleness and selfishness, and our desire to hoard it to ourselves, God’s grace is brazen.

The words for fiery, brass, brazen, and bronze are all synonymous in the Bible.  It refers to the shiny brightness of polished bronze or brass. 

The grace and life that came from the wooden cross has the same brassy boldness.  It was there that God lifted himself up, faced death for us, and beat it—no less than an ocean tearing down a small sandcastle. 

This past weekend, I was sitting on the Pacific beach relaxing and watching the waves.  I quietly prayed and asked God for one more image of his grace, and there I was staring at his ocean.

If that wasn’t enough, there was a little boy right at the edge of the shore.  He was bent over, frantically digging and digging at the sand, but his hole was obviously filling in as fast as he dug.  All he had, after frenzied effort, was a slight, rounded mound, and then a wave came up over it, and it was gone. 

Standing beside him…this whole time…was a girl that I assume was his sister.  She wasn’t helping or watching him.  She was just staring out at the waves and the ocean, mesmerized by its power, its sound, and its unrelenting constantness.

That is all like grace.  It is bold.  Whether you try to battle it, or accept it, it is.

 

Grace is also REAL.  The Bible convinces me.  St. Paul warned us that, even if they quote scriptures or other teachings, if anyone tries to preach a different message than the one that says you are saved by grace, they are preaching against God.  They are false teachers.  False.  Not true, not real.

What saves you is God’s grace, God’s free gift.  What allows you to live in it, now and forever, is acceptance.  Stand in it, and trust God when he promises that it is free and given.  Believe that it’s real. 

This is not just one idea, or one slant on the truth.  It is not an opinion.  It is a fact.  God loves you and wants a relationship with you and all his created people.  And to do that, he is willing to simply give it to you and to others, already and always holding it out. 

It’s like the ocean, unrelenting and real.  There it is in front of you.  You can’t hold it or own it, but you can stand in it, feel it, see it, and let it wash over you.  You can even share it with others.  In fact, you don’t have a choice.  You have to share it with others.

 

Grace is AWESOME because it’s God’s grace, not yours.  That’s what makes it unlimited, and overpowering.  It’s everything.  Grace really is everything you can see around you, and everything you haven’t seen yet.

Grace is a gift that we have just started to unwrap, and look how big it already is!  For instance, you woke up this morning…breathing…just as you have since the day you were born.  Every single breath is a miracle.  And that’s just the start.

Things get hard, sometimes.  I know.  I’ve been there.  I’ve been depressed, and said those horrible self-pitying words, hating life, sure that there’s nothing here for me, sounding so much like those Israelites.  “Why am I out here?  Where’s the feast?  Why don’t I have enough friends?  Why’s my family so hard on me?  Why do I look like this?  Talk like this?  Say such stupid things, make such stupid mistakes?  What’s the point?  All I have is this manna, this stupid miraculous life and breath from heaven!”

Look around you, every grain of sand, every far flung, unreachable star on the edges of space, and you!  You’re a part of all this, all because God said, “Let there be!”  Isn’t that enough?

This is grace.  This is all grace.  You are grace.  Schmaltzy and romantic, I know, and I don’t care.  My God is a romantic God to an awesome degree.  Deal with him.  His grace is awesome, and we’ve just begun to unwrap it!

 

Grace is ZEALOUS.  Webster says that “zeal” is “a persistent, fervent devotion to a cause.”  I would add that zeal is trust, faith and joy which inspire you to change the way you live.  The sister at the beach—stood staring—mezmerized.  Sometimes that’s action enough, but I guarantee that she left the beach like I did yesterday, changed, more at peace—relaxed—but even more sure of my faith and God…and of grace.

I’d like all of us to become more zealous about grace!  There are plenty of people, faiths and churches who are zealots about law and morals, but it’s the gospel of God’s grace that truly changes people’s lives for the better, instead of changing one set of shackles for another.  I’ve met these preachers and these people that constantly talk the five or seven steps to good clean Christian living.  Their teeth gleam, their lives look orderly and successful, but can’t you feel the contagious meanness, the lack of grace—the lack of love, replaced by suits and a seductive attitude of superiority, that we’d all like to have, but it’s false.

Grace cuts both ways.  It brings us down to each other’s level before God’s throne, but at the same time, it is lifting us all up to his throne.  And it is the only power, the one and only power, that will carry us into eternity.

It is the grace of God that you and I are called to preach the loudest and with zeal.  We have something different to say.  Music, contemporary or traditional, is beautiful and wonderful.  Services, whether they are held in someone’s living room or in a huge ampitheater can be simple or intricate, full of incense, or techno-gadgets.  Guitars, drums, flutes, pianos, organs, accordions or kazoos are all fun and can even add to the message.  But take it all away—it’s useless and distracting—unless we gather, first and foremost and centrally, around the grace of God.

If you’re not zealous for the grace of God first, then you are not zealous for God.  God is first and foremost grace.  A zealous, unrelenting grace that will one day claim the world and all of creation.

 

Grace was EXPENSIVE.  Now, you’ll think I’ve lost it!  First, I said grace is a free gift.  Now, I say it was expensive.  It is free to you.  I only ask you to remember that it cost God everything to love and forgive us.  It cost him Jesus’ life in a humiliating death on the cross.  It costs God everything, in order to make it free to you.

 

Lastly, grace is NEVER ENDING, starting now, not someday; it’s now, in your life.  You and I need to act like it!  We need to start acting like we are in God’s hands and that he loves us.  We need to start acting like God loves the people around us.  We need to start acting like we’re alive, not dying; and rejoicing, not flailing in despair!

That means practice, because we have all developed habits that say that opposite messages in traffic, in line at the store, in long boring meetings, in our own families and marriages.  Instead of cursing the idiot who cuts us off, we pray that God will get him safely where he needs to go, and give him the peace he’s obviously lacking in his life.  Instead of staring at our watch during the meeting, we can pray for each person there, especially the one who is droning on and on.

Grace is now.  Grace is the life and the eternally huge creation that surround you.  That’s just the start.  —Next is eternal life with God.  Death is going to stop.  Diseases, illness, wars and selfish, grumpy attitudes will all end.  Salvation will not end, and not God’s love and not his grace.  Neither will you end.  Place your life in his grace; just turn your eyeballs this way—to the cross, to the love and grace of God.

 

Don’t worry about anything else in your Christianity until you have this one thing firmly entrenched.  God’s BRAZEN grace, is the Bold, Real, Awesome, Zealous, Expensive (but free), and Never-ending gift of eternal salvation that starts now.  Start believing.  Start now.  Amen.

 

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