Justification

Trinity Sunday
June 7, 2009

The Reverend Susan Flanders

On Trinity Sunday, which is today, it’s customary for preachers to bob and weave, or to have the seminarian preach, or perhaps go to Shrinemont! The doctrine of the Trinity is important, but for many today, it seems abstract and irrelevant, and I doubt I could change that in one sermon. So I’ll choose the first of the customary behaviors and bob and weave by preaching on something else. And that is Justification – Justification, by Grace, through Faith. This is the bedrock of Christianity; it is the core of Luther’s Reformation theology, and I would venture that justification, properly understood, has far more to do with how we live and experience God than the Trinity ever will.

So, for us today – how do we understand Justification by Grace through Faith? In my younger years these words seemed a meaningless slogan, and it took quite awhile for me to understand them as Christian language addressing a fundamental condition we all share, whether we’re religious or not. And that condition is our need to feel right about ourselves, and, if we believe in God, right with God. The way I was brought up, and what I heard in the churches of my childhood, and what is still taught in many churches, and what is a hallmark of our American secular faith is that we get to be right with ourselves, with others and with God by earning it. By doing the right thing, measuring up, deserving – this is life as a meritocracy, life as an assignment.

For me, as a girl, that meant striving to achieve, to get the best grades, to be good, to look and dress right and act in ways to gain my parents’ and teachers’ approval and popularity with friends. I didn’t use the word Justification, didn’t even know it, but what I wanted was basic justification – to feel right about myself. I needed the sense that I was of value, that I was worthy of love. Deep down, I knew I had my parents’ love, that I was fine in their eyes – but they were leery of expressing this except for praising achievements. I got approval by doing well.

This aching for acceptance is deep and human, and along with it comes fear, fear of rejection. So often, our strivings to justify ourselves, based on our own efforts, grow out of this fear, and it can be a powerful motivator. In some areas of life, it’s a good one. Fear of flunking out or getting fired does impel us to try harder, to do our best. But, existentially, self-justification is a bust! We can’t get there on our own. In religious terms, we can’t save ourselves from the wounds of existence.

This does not mean that we need God, as some believe, because we are hopelessly sinful, or that religion is a crutch for our weakness. I do not believe that we are impossibly alienated from God, and for me, religion based on trying to appease a wrathful God is bad religion. Guilt caused by such religion is probably more prevalent than the real guilt we should feel when we have caused needless hurt. I know – people come to me – feeling too guilty to come to communion, feeling guilty because they’ve left Roman Catholicism, feeling unworthy of God’s love even though they are struggling to live good lives. They fear it’s up to them, and that what they do is never enough. They feel they need to get it right, and they can’t, we can’t.

All of this kind of reliance on self-justification and guilty fear of God is a misunderstanding of Christianity and of Judaism as well. It took me at least a two-step process to even begin to get it – about justification by grace through faith. It was only through my own experience that those words began to mean something.

It took awhile, at least until my early twenties, for me to be really hit hard by the impossibility of making my life work out the way I wanted by just trying hard and doing the right thing. Despite what I thought was a bullet-proof credential that would guarantee success, I learned during the fall of 1963 that half of a Wellesley education was of little use with no job experience or office skills. I had married after my sophomore year and moved with my husband to Larson Air Force Base in Moses Lake, Washington State – the middle of nowhere. I needed a job, but the only one available, no kidding, was as a sales clerk in a W.T. Grant store – a five and dime chain selling low-end merchandise. My job was selling children’s clothes, counting and restacking little shirts and socks, dealing with the occasional, usually unfriendly customer. I felt terrible, bored, guilty for not being satisfied – and finally one Saturday morning I ended up weeping uncontrollably in the rest room – unable to continue my work. Other failures followed, despite my good intentions and continued efforts to be that nice, smart, accomplished girl that I thought I needed to be for people to love me. And I guess I thought I needed to be those things for God to love me too, although my then rejection of church kept God at a pretty safe distance.

The second step was more of a process. It began when I walked into St. John’s Episcopal Church in Fort Washington, Maryland in the spring of 1975. There I heard Christianity preached in a way that either I hadn’t or couldn’t hear before. It was as if Christianity was a whole new language, but one that now spoke to my deepest human concerns about being worthy and being loved. Slowly, Sunday after Sunday, through weeks of an adult Inquirers’ Class, talks with the Rector, I began to understand about Justification by Grace, through Faith. I began to get what Paul Tillich affirmed in his most famous sermon “You Are Accepted”. He says that acceptance is pure grace, in words that have been quoted from thousands of pulpits since: “Grace strikes when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much…Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!’ If that happens to us, we experience grace”.

For me this was a huge, life-changing possibility, this assurance that we already have God’s love, that we don’t have to do anything to get it. Believing in this grace, setting our hearts on it is, of course, a matter of faith – there is no proof. We do have the freedom to reject that grace, or act against it, and we do, but we don’t have to earn it in the first, or second, or third place. We are accepted, and I believe that the faith to respond to this – to live in this assurance is also a gift – needing from us, only the openness to embrace it.

My understanding of this grace and my real faith in this grace didn’t come from some dramatic conversion experience, but this understanding and faith have come. I didn’t happen way back then in the five and dime store, and it only began in the years of coming back to Christianity, but over the years, especially the early years of my ministry here at St. Marks, it has come and grown, and saved me. I do believe with all my heart in this grace, and that we are ultimately justified by it.

The immediate red flag in the face of all this talk of grace is this: Well, then why would anyone be good, especially in a sacrificial way, if God loves us no matter what? What happens to morality, and rules, and laws? The Biblical understanding about law, or Torah, is that it is a gift from God, an inspired code of behavior based on love of God and love of neighbor. The Law helped the community of Israel to thrive and maintain their identity. Law was a means to provide for health and justice, not the means of salvation, not an end in itself. And so for us – laws and morality are good for us, and we need them, but they don’t save us. They are a response to a gracious God, a response to the gift of life. We are called to behave well, to be good, not in order to get God’s love, but because we already have it. We are accepted!

Let me illustrate what I mean about behaving well as response, not as a means to earn favor. Here is a Tale of Two Teachers: In 4th grade, my gym teacher was Miss McGee, and I hated and feared her. She was like a drill sergeant, with a cold, angry face, leathery skin, ropey muscles. She spit when she talked. I didn’t think I was much of an athlete anyway, but with her, I felt I could never measure up, and I dreaded gym. I tried hard, but I would forget my uniform, be late, be out of step in one of our precision exercises – all of it was a nightmare. I was trying to behave well in order to gain acceptance and in fear of rebuke and punishment.

In 7th grade, I had an art teacher, Mrs. Quirk, and I knew from the beginning that she liked me and wanted me to succeed. Just as with gym, I didn’t think I was much of an artist, but I loved her class because she constantly encouraged me and pointed out good things in my paintings – opening up a new creative world for me. I tried really, really hard, not in order to gain her approval, but because I already had it and wanted to respond by doing my best work. To this day, a painting from that year hangs in my mother’s apartment.

We have it backwards if we think faith is what brings God into our lives and gets God to answer prayers and reveal God-self and love us. God already does all that. God’s love is in our world and in our lives. This is the grace that justifies us, and faith is our response. Faith is saying “yes” to grace because we’ve experienced it, and we are encouraged by others throughout history and in our own lives who have attested to this grace.

I believe that this grace which accepts us utterly has always been real. The story of God taking flesh in Jesus revealed this in a new and unique way. If God is willing to live in us and in the lives we live, bear the crosses we bear, suffer and die with us as God did with Jesus – then we’re good enough. We’re accepted and, to use St. Paul’s language, reckoned as righteous. It is this incredible grace, reaching towards us, and our faith in response, that can change and free us. It is by this grace that I do believe God can transform each of us and our whole hurting world – may our hearts be open to receive this grace and live in grateful response.

Amen.