This month, millions of people around the world are missing their second birthday celebration in a row, including both my mother, whose birthday is in mid-March, and my wife, whose birthday is on the thirty-first. In fact, one of the last things that Alice and Murray and I did with other people last March before everything shut down was to go to a birthday celebration for our elementary-school-aged neighbor down the hall. Later in March, people didn’t feel much like celebrating, but we still tried to celebrate birthdays in our small ways. It was hard, though, to have a celebration, a real party where we could see the people we loved outside our own little family units.

Last Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was a day that the church sometimes calls “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from an old Latin introit, part of the liturgy for that days; it means, “Rejoice!” It’s a day of rejoicing in the midst of Lent, when some of the rigor of the season is relaxed. Even the purple on the altar will sometimes be changed out for pink or rose, as a sign of joy. It’s the same thing that we do in Advent, on the third Sunday, which is why there’s a pink candle in your Advent wreath. It’s a moment of joy in a penitential, somber season.

There’s a lesson for me in that, about all of life. We recognize that even in the midst of sorrow, there’s always joy; and in the midst of joy, there’s always sorrow. On any given day in any normal time of life, I may be feeling joy, I may be feeling happiness; but there’s inevitably someone else who’s suffering grief or loss. The same goes the other way around: I may be feeling sadness or frustration, and someone else is feeling relief or contentment.

It’s important for us as human beings to recognize that we don’t always experience the same things at the same time, and while many of us have been united emotionally by our experience of this pandemic, it’s become clearer over time that we’ve also been divided—not just politically, but emotionally. We’ve experienced different parts of this time in different ways over time, depending on our own circumstances and personalities.

But there’s another lesson, too, which is the importance of rejoicing, even in a serious time, the importance of celebrating those small moments even when things are hard. The lesson of a tragedy like this pandemic is not that we shouldn’t rejoice—it’s that we should! We should appreciate those moments, we should celebrate those birthdays. Not in an unsafe way, but with real and genuine joy. We should recognize and mark those things that are important to us, because even if the world is hard, even if the world is full of sorrow and struggle, it is also full of joy. They don’t cancel each other out. You can’t do the math and add the up to a positive or negative number. They just exist there, alongside each other, always.

So rejoice in your joy. And weep in your sadness. And know that they’re always there together.

Sermon — March 14, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)

Recently, Alice and I have been watching the Netflix original TV series Grace and Frankie. (And yes, I know this is two sermons in a row, but we really don’t watch that much TV. I promise.) The eponymous characters Grace and Frankie are two women who’ve never liked each other, pushed together in their 70s by a very 21^st-century sitcom plot: their two husbands have each left them after forty years of marriage… for each other. The first season or so mostly follows the action as Robert and Sol—played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston—build their new life together, and their soon-to-be-ex-wives Grace and Frankie move in as roommates in the beach house the two families have long shared, with a colorful cast of four adult children thrown into the mix.

Grace and Frankie are the stars of the show, and they couldn’t be more different. Grace Hanson, played by Jane Fonda, is a preppy, WASPy, waspy, put-together cosmetics mogul, a woman who founded her own company based on perfecting women’s outward appearance and rose to the top. Frankie Bergstein, played by Lily Tomlin, is a hippy, spiritual, eccentric Jewish artist, whose sage-burning, throat-singing spirituality exasperates Grace time and again. You might wonder why they’re friends, and it turns out they’re not; they’ve just been tolerating each other for years because their husbands are law partners and, it turns out, partner partners.

I can’t help but think that their names are a kind of symbol of their personalities. Frankie is… frank: she’s honest, sincere; she tells the truth even when it makes people uncomfortable. Some might say she over-shares about the most intimate parts of her life—Grace certainly would—but she would simply say she’s a liberated and open-minded adult. I think “Grace,” on the other hand, is supposed to be ironic, or at least the name captures a paradox in the word “grace” itself. Grace is always graceful, always elegant and composed; but she is rarely gracious. She doesn’t often extend grace or compassion to anyone else, and when they offer it, she pushes it away. At one point in the very first episode, after they’ve both fled to the beach house, expecting to be alone and finding on another there instead, they start bickering. After one rude exchange, Frankie apologizes, “You hurt my feelings, so I lashed out.” Grace ignores it and pushes her away: “Please, please go somewhere else.” The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with,” and who better to suffer with than someone in exactly the same situation? But in her deepest misery, she doesn’t want Frankie’s apology or her compassion—she just wants to be left alone.

Our two New Testament readings for today are classics of the theology of grace. (We’ll get to frankness a little later.) Five hundred years ago, as what we now call the Protestant Reformation began, the reformers heard these beautiful passages speaking directly to them and to their own spiritual lives. “By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul writes to the Ephesians, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works.” (Eph. 2:8) It is God’s “rich mercy” and “great love” that “make us alive together with Christ,” that “raise us up with him and seat us with him in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 2:4-6) Try as we might, we could not by our own efforts launch ourselves into the heavens and reach God, so God came down among us and gave us the gift of eternal and abundant life. “Indeed,” John writes, “God didn’t send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” but to save it. (John 3:17) “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

These words, which inspire many people today, in the context of late-medieval Christianity, when people like Martin Luther read them as the Reformation began. Medieval Western Christianity had a complex system of calculations of sin and penitence. Priests were trained to know exactly how many years each particular type of sin would add to your time in purgatory, and how many months each indulgence could knock off. If you asked a thoughtful medieval Catholic theologian, they would never tell you that you had to work hard to earn your way into God’s favor—but to many Christians, that’s exactly what it felt like.

The great reformers—Martin Luther and John Calvin, Martin Bucer and Thomas Cranmer, who created the first Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England—cut through all this complexity with the simple message they found in the New Testament, in Ephesians and John and many other books: the message of grace. You do not need to earn God’s love or your salvation; “it is the gift of God.” It’s not your hard work or your great virtue that saves you; it is God’s great love. Jesus didn’t come to “condemn the world”; he came to save you from condemnation, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life, not just a spiritual elite. This was the good news, in Greek the evangelion—the origin of words like “evangelical.”

To people like Luther, consumed with anxiety over every little sin, this came as a huge relief. But we live in different times, and it’s not always clear we feel the same. For one thing, in our secular corner of a religiously-diverse world, we may hear the exclusive and judgmental claim that “everyone who believes may have eternal life,” and not the inclusive and gracious one that “everyone who believes may have eternal life.” But even as Christians today our concerns are not those of the 16^th century. Most of us Episcopalians are not wracked with guilt and anxious about eternal judgment. Our anxieties are different. Most of us spend more time worrying about human judgment, about our worth in one another’s eyes, and so we build up our protective shells. Like graceful Grace the cosmetic tycoon, we try our hardest to make it seem like everything’s okay, at least one the surface.

Grace, though, requires frankness. What I mean is that to accept God’s grace, to accept grace from anyone else, we need to be frank about ourselves. You know this if you’ve ever had to apologize for something; to accept the gift of forgiveness, you need to admit that you need it. To accept the gift of compassion and love, we need to admit—as Grace Hanson will, over the episodes of the first season, learn to do—that we are not self-sufficient, that we cannot be perfectly put together at all times.

You probably noticed that our readings this morning, for all their beauty, are not exactly optimistic. Each one of our readings blends a powerful proclamation of God’s grace with a frank evaluation of the human condition. Before it gets to God’s rich mercy, the letter to the Ephesians makes some pretty stark claims about the congregation’s earlier lives: they were “dead through trespasses and sins,” “following the desires of flesh and senses,” “by nature children of wrath.” (Eph. 2:1-3) It’s grim, maybe even a little exaggerated; but rhetorically, at least, it’s the depth of this depravity that highlights the very richness of God’s mercy. If God loves those of us who are “children of wrath” who are “dead through sin” with such great love—how much more will God’s loving grace extend to all of us who are just muddling through?

It’s the same with this odd first reading about the fiery snakes. We read it just because John refers to it in the first few verses here of the gospel reading, but it has a point. We live in a world that often “loves darkness rather than light,” (John 3:19) a world filled with venom and poison, and world that more often drives us to impatient complaints than to grateful endurance. God’s grace is not the whipped cream on top of the already-delicious ice-cream sundae of our world. It’s an intervention, a gift of love to a world in need of healing. But if we don’t recognize that we need to be healed, we’re not likely to respond graciously to the offer, and so like Grace we push it away. So we need to be frank. We need to be able to look honestly at our lives and admit that we are not perfect.

And what a relief. Because if it’s true for the Israelites wandering in the desert, and it’s true for the church gathered in the city of Ephesus, and it’s true in a Netflix original series, then it’s possible—just possible!—that’s it true for all of us. It’s just possible that none of us is perfect. That all of us are struggling; more or less, at different points, but never as put-together as we seem. We all need grace, and what a gift; because to recognize that we need grace enables us to accept it, and maybe even to extend it to someone else.

Because that is where the story ends; not with God loving us, but with us loving one another. Not with God forgiving us and having compassion on us, but with us compassionately forgiving one another. Christ has been raised up from the earth on the cross, and raised up from the tomb to new life, and raised up from the earth into heaven, and we have been raised with him—week after week we “lift up our hearts” to the Lord to bask in his love. But we’re still here. We can still “come to the light,” (John 3:21) we can still live out those “good works, which God prepared” for us “to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2:10) Not because we need them to be saved. Not because we need them to be loved. But because we are loved, and the gift of that love overflows, inevitably, into our love for others.

“By grace you have been saved,” Paul writes, and not because you are graceful. Not because you are frank. Not even because you are gracious. It is simply “the gift of God.” (Eph. 2:8) Even in your darkest moment, even in your deepest wrath, even in your most evil deeds, God would love you, God would die for you—not to condemn you, but to save you from condemnation.

So give yourself a break.

And, at least as importantly, give the people around you a break.

For some of us, I think, it’s harder to be gentle with our own imperfections. For others, it’s harder to be patient with other people’s foibles. But all of us—if we’re being frank—know what it is to need forgiveness, what it is to need compassion, what it is to need someone to extend us a little grace. And all of us can choose, by the grace of God, to offer that grace to others—as hard, moment to moment, as it may be—so that just as God has shown “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us,” (Eph. 2:7) so also we might share the riches of that grace with one another. Amen.