Okay, I have tattoos and earrings. And one of my two undergraduate majors was art, I’m a painter. So I guess this makes me a pretty funky guy. But even by my standards English comedian Eddie Izzard is strange. Yet I find him to be very funny. I especially enjoy his description of the Italians. Izzard, in one of his stand-up routines, takes on that brief ugly moment in Italian history, the rise of Mussolini and the Fascists. He wonders about this anomaly, claiming that his experience of Italians is not really like that. As Izzard describes the Italians, they are all on scooters, no helmet, hair flowing, all cool, suave… ciao, bella!! He says it’s true, it’s just like the film “Roman Holiday.†Sadly, most of you will not have seen that film… Gregory Peck at his most dashing… Audrey Hepburn embodying elegance and charm…
Izzard’s description matches my own experience of Northern Italy. I’ve been from the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily to Milan and Venice, I love Italy! But it is Tuscany that captures me. The region is a singular example of God’s amazing creativity, it is the region that gave birth to the Renaissance, and with good reason. From the towers of San Gimignano to the ancient fresco spotted down an alley way, the region is beautiful. And the land, the lush land, the canvas of sky. But there’s more! The people of Tuscany, the people of Florence, are beautiful too. From the lowest street-sweeper to the most elegant grand dame, when they walk out the doors of their homes, they look marvelous. The woman comes out to wash the windows on her shop… “Look at me. I’m beautiful!†Even the smallest child, running out the door with the ball… “Look at me. I kick the football. I’m beautiful!†It’s true… from Audrey Hepburn on a “Roman Holiday†to the runways of Milan to the average Florentine, there is a certain grace about Italy, despite the moments of collective insanity like Fascism, like Savanarola and the Bonfire of the Vanities.
This is one sort of grace, it is a beauty, a coming together of things in a way that seems effortless. It is not completely unlike the grace we refer to in the church, though the seemingly effortless coming together in the case of Christian grace is the result of divine action, is the result of effort, just not ours…
Today’s scripture readings are filled with grace. Grace upon grace, God’s glorious grace, grace and truth… what does this mean? What is this term we sprinkle liberally about? Can our youth, after years in the church, provide a definition of the term? And is it important? Is there room for God’s grace when you are at the parent-teacher conference? On the phone, on hold, arguing with a customer service representative, not feeling particularly served as a customer, your temper about to break through? What of this grace we claim?
In its simplest form, we can define grace, at least the grace we refer to in Christianity, as God’s move towards us, as the Creator’s embrace of the created. And we can expand that definition to include the gifts that come with God’s attention. God attends to us, loves us, and provides the gifts necessary for us to live life in full, for this is what Jesus offers, life in full now, and life that never ends. To be graceful is to exhibit the signs of being loved by the divine, being the recipient of divine love.
But the subject of grace has been the cause of countless theological battles since the beginning of the church. You see, the living dynamic God of the Hebrew scriptures, the God of Abraham and of Moses, the God of Jesus, was a relational God, was a God that allowed for human free-will. Even though the new covenant shifts the emphasis from works of the Law to faith, it was still your choice to believe. God invites, we respond. Jesus tells the rich young man to give it all up and follow… it is the rich young man who declines, who turns away.
But then Christianity met Hellenism, met neoplatonism. The neoplatonists reduced their philosophical definition of God to near abstraction. This is where you get what I like to call the “omnis.†God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent… God is timeless… these are logical ideas, and they may well be true on some level beyond the realm of human knowing, but they reduced God to this giant neoplatonic monolith… an unresponsive ideal with which we could have no real relation. And then early Christian theologians tried to blend this neoplatonic concept of God with the God of Judaism and Christianity and draw conclusions from this train wreck, from this monstrosity. The disputed theology of grace is one result.
The first big fight, and the one that gives this sermon its title, was the battle between Pelagius and Augustine. Pelagius argued in favor of free-will, arguing that God calls us to redemption, but it is our choice whether to answer that call. For Pelagius the redemptive act started with the human acting freely. Augustine argued that evil was so powerful that God had to force us into salvation, the first articulation of what would come to be called irresistible grace. Pelagius accused Augustine, who had converted to Christianity from Manicheanism, of bringing that religion’s personified evil with him. In turn, Augustine accused Pelagius of heresy, and won. Augustine always won, though I am not certain that has been such a good thing. The term Pelagian came to mean a theology in which salvation was achieved by human will, by human action, even though this was arguably never Pelagius’ position. Semi-Pelagianism was an attempt at a middle ground… the human moved towards God, and God, in love and mercy, responded, providing salvation. This was also denounced, rejected as heresy…
The battle would be fought again and again, most notably during the reformation. At one extreme, we had certain reformation Christians who believed that God, the God of all those “omnis,†must already know who will be saved and who will be damned, because God exists outside of time. I’d love to see a theology where Calvinism meets Quantum Physics! But according to this reformation theology, God must have predestined some humans for salvation and some for damnation. This was a God that would create a human predestined to suffer, to fail, to be damned. And this God created some humans who were predestined for salvation, they were the elect. Our own UCC heritage contains a goodly amount of this thinking, the Puritans and Pilgrims for example had a strong theology of the elect. It lead to a sense of superiority among Christians, they became the new self-righteous, the new Pharisees. If neoplatonic ideas held, then predestination, of the single or double variety, held true, and if predestination held true, then grace was irresistible. When it comes to predestination, you can have your double, with sprinkles on top… I’ll stick to the pie.
Of course, there were dissenters from this theology of irresistible grace. The Universalists, still a Christian movement at the time, rejected any notion of an elect, choosing instead to believe that salvation was open to all, was universally available, that God called all humans. The Methodists, under John Wesley, adopted a notion of free grace. It was not human effort that effected salvation, no, no no!, it was God who moved towards us, but it was up to us to respond, we could reject God’s call. This was not the semi-Pelagianism of John Cassian, is was not Augustinian orthodoxy, it was a new thing altogether… God moved, but we still had a choice, still had free will.
And though I was raised as a good reformation Christian, not like those heretics over at the Methodist church, I must admit that I prefer the Wesleyan theology. I could not worship a God that would create beings, would grant them sentience and feelings, only to condemn them to suffering and damnation. And like the Universalists of old, I have to believe that God, if God is loving, invites all to fullness of life, that the salvation Jesus promises, that Paul preaches to Jew and Gentile, really is available to all, not just to some smug-elect sitting in their fortresses of holiness.
What does this make me? Maybe I’m not a semi-Pelagianist. Maybe I’m a semi-hemi-demi-Pelagianist. In any case, it makes me a heretic, for some of the definitions of our relationship to God and to Christ that made sense to others centuries ago make no sense to me now. I prefer a living God, a relational God… and as much as I love the church, as much as I love the saints who have gone before, I am willing to see the church change. It is time to throw off the shackles and to be a dynamic living church!
What does this mean for you and me today? Think about those churches of old, self-righteous, aloof. Do we ever fall into those patterns? Do we ever take that neoplatonic easy way out, do we ever claim that “it is just God’s will, some folks are always going to be poor…†or “some people are just bad…â€
God is calling. God is moving towards us, offering salvation, offering life in full to every single human. How could a God who loved, a God who created such amazing beauty, who created this miracle day and every miracle tomorrow, how could this God will anything other than fullness and salvation? It is up to the human to respond, it is up to us to respond. But when we do, the Holy Spirit is with us.
We are instruments in the hand of God. We are the body of Christ in the world. There are tens of thousands of people in this city alone who do not know Christ. People who are being sucked into corruptions of Christianity, feel good churches with easy answers. We are called to be witnesses to the hard and joyous and miraculous and frightening path of Christ. We are called to make disciples of all nations. That’s a lot easier than making disciples out of our neighbors, isn’t it?
God is calling, is moving towards you. That is grace, that is miracle, that is love. And that grace is with you when you do, truly do, the work of Christ. It will seem effortless, beautiful. You will be Audrey Hepburn, you will be Northern Italian… Ciao, bella! It is beautiful. You are beautiful! We are beautiful! Grace upon grace! Amen.