“What’s so
Amazing About Grace?
by Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Church
Des Moines, Washington
November 20, 2005
We Unitarian Universalists don’t talk about grace a lot. My bet is that if we were asked, many of us might struggle to say exactly what grace is. Or we might be able to give a definition of grace that we learned in Sunday school growing up in a different religious tradition that no longer fits with what we believe now as adults. My bet is that if we were asked, “Is your life grace filled,” many of us might struggle to answer.
And that’s too bad.
Because I believe that each one of us in this room, whether we know it or not, leads a grace-filled life, but I also believe that it makes a difference in how we live our lives whether we know our lives are grace filled. It makes a difference in how we face the day when the alarm clock goes off in the morning.
So this morning, on this Sunday before Thanksgiving, I want to talk about what grace means from a liberal religious perspective.
And let me say from the beginning, I don’t think you have to be a Christian to believe in grace, and I don’t think you have to believe in God, at least as God is traditionally understood, to believe in grace.
But exactly what is grace?
In traditional Christian theology, grace is understood as “the unmerited, undeserved, unearned favor of God.” According to this understanding, we human beings are so sinful, we don’t merit salvation. No matter how hard we try to be good, and no matter how much good we do in life, it will never be enough to guarantee our salvation. If existence were truly just, according to this understanding, we would all suffer damnation for our sins, and it is only because God is merciful that those who have faith - - and only those who have faith - - are saved by God’s grace.
Now this is not my theology. My understanding of God is not that of an anthropomorphic God - - “the big guy in the sky.” My understanding of human nature is that we are all imperfect, but that most of us are more good than bad. My understanding of heaven and hell is that if they exist at all, they exist in the here and now and not in some hereafter.
However, I do find something salvageable in this more traditional theology, and that is the idea of grace being an unmerited, undeserved, unearned favor, or an unmerited, undeserved, unearned gift.
And this is why I said that I believe that our lives are grace filled, because I believe that so much of the goodness in our lives is unmerited, undeserved, and unearned, though I don’t think it matters how we understand where this comes from.
But what do I mean that so much of the goodness in our lives is unmerited, undeserved, and unearned?
I’d like to talk about three kinds of grace that we experience in our lives. The first kind of grace that I want to talk about is what you might call the grace of existence itself.
And here I have a question to help all of us think about this. Have you ever thought about your own conception?
(No, you don’t have to think about it so graphically. You can think about it more abstractly.)
For most of us there was only one ovum - - one tiny egg - - but there were probably at least 20 million spermatozoa. The fact that each of us exists uniquely as we do means that each of us already have been winners in a lottery where we only had a one in 20 million chance. The odds were stacked against us, 20 million to one that we wouldn’t turn out to be exactly who we are but would turn out to be something like a brother or a sister.
(And as much as I like my three siblings, I’m glad that I’m me and not one of them.)
Life sometimes seems like its all about playing the odds, and we think we’re lucky when we beat the odds and we’re unlucky when the odds beat us.
Last month, a family in Oregon spent $40 on lottery tickets and won more than $300 million. I couldn’t help but wondering, “Why couldn’t it have been me?”
(Hiromi reminds me that I have to actually buy a ticket if I want a chance of winning at all.)
But if I’ve done my math right, each of us has already beaten greater odds to be here today.
And the prize we’ve won is the gift of life itself.
When I think of my own life like this, I feel very lucky just to be here.
And even more importantly, I did absolutely nothing to deserve this gift of life, and neither did any of you.
Yes, it’s true that many of us have worked hard to achieve in life what we have achieved, and we’ve worked hard to enjoy in life what we enjoy, but on the other hand, we haven’t done anything to merit or earn or deserve the life that makes our lives possible.
(And never mind that I have a job, that I have a roof over my head, that I have food to eat, that I can go to a doctor when I’m sick and have a much better life than so many other people in this world. In talking about grace this morning, I don’t want to make the all-too-common mistake of conflating unearned grace with unearned privilege. Our response to unearned grace should be gratitude. Our response to unearned privilege should be justice making.)
I know when bad things happen to us, sometimes we can’t help asking ourselves, “What did I do to deserve this?” “Why is this happening to me?” It’s a terrible question for us to ask ourselves because it implies that when bad things happen, either we’re somehow being punished or life is sometimes terribly unfair.
What helps me to keep my head on straight is to remember that I didn’t do anything to deserve many of the bad things that sometime happen to me, but I also didn’t do anything to deserve the greater gif of the life I’ve already been given.
This way of thinking helps me with other things too. When I read the newspaper, I often read the obituaries in the local section. Part of the reason I do this is to make sure that there’s not a memorial service that I’m suppose to be officiating at that I’ve forgotten about.
(When I was preparing for ministry, an older minister once told me, “At least once in your career you’ll probably forget either a memorial service or a wedding. You should hope it’s a memorial service because then they’ll be one less person who’s really mad at you.”)
But sometimes while reading those obituaries in the newspaper, I can’t help but feel very sad, even if the person who has died has lived a long and good life. What I try to tell myself is, “How sad it is that person died, and how good it is that person had the opportunity to live.”
If one kind of grace we experience in our lives is the grace of existences itself, I want to suggest a second kind of grace we experience might be called the grace of second chances.
What do I mean?
I remember when I was growing up and playing games with friends, if somebody made some kind of mistake - - missed a basketball shot or got a third strike - - occasionally that kid would say, “Gimme a do-over.” In other words, “Give me a second shot,” or “Give me a second chance.” Of course, this wasn’t completely fair, to give somebody a do-over, but if everybody else was feeling nice, we would.
I think life is a lot like this. One of the things I love about life is that life offers us a lot of second chances. Each new day, each new week, each new month, and each new year is another opportunity to try to get things right in our lives.
A while ago, one of the youth in our youth group said that every time we lit our chalice together on Sunday mornings, it reminded him that it was the fresh start of a new week. I hadn’t thought of thinking of the chalice in that way before, but now I do, and it’s a good reminder.
And for me, this too is a kind of grace, because it seems to me, that if life were completely fair, we wouldn’t get so many undeserved second chances.
I don’t mean to suggest that our actions have no consequences and that we don’t have to live with the mistakes that we make because we often do.
It seems that we are sometimes punished too harshly for trivial mistakes. I remember reading last month about a pastor a church down in Texas who was electrocuted in front of his entire congregation while he was standing in a tank of water about to perform a baptism and reached for a microphone. The irony is the whole congregation had just recited a prayer aloud called, “Surprise Me God.”
But for the most part, it seems like life is more forgiving of our mistakes than unforgiving, and even when life is unforgiving, we’re often given the chance to try to make things right.
Do you remember the name of the church our guest speaker mentioned last week in Anne Tyler’s novel St. Maybe? It was “The Church of the Second Chance.” It’s been several years since I read that novel, and since our speaker last week mentioned it, I went back and took a look it.
In the novel, the main character is in the midst of grief and despair. He’s a young man who feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. In just a few short weeks, he has lost his brother, who he idolized, in a car accident and his brother’s wife, who died of her grief. What is weighing him down is this: he sees himself as being responsible for both their deaths. He’d never really liked his sister-in-law. He’d suspected that she was cheating on her brother. When he tells his brother of his suspicion, his brother gets in his car, drives recklessly to find his wife, and ends up dying in a car accident. The younger brother later finds out he was all wrong about his sister-in-law. Because she’d always been in fragile health, she soon falls sick and dies, and we suspect it is from grief. These two deaths are bad enough for the young man, but worse is his brother and sister-in-law left behind two young children. What will become of them? It’s that question that haunts him as he stumbles through the doors of the “Church of the Second Chance.” He tells the pastor of the church his story and asks for advice. The pastor gives him the advice he doesn’t want to hear: He caused the problem, so he must fix it. He must give up his plans to go to college and take the responsibility of raising his niece and nephew. The young man thinks that’s so unfair to him, but then he decides to do it. He gets a job, takes in his niece and nephew and raises them by himself.
Life did give him a second chance, as it often gives to all of us.
If one kind of grace we experience in our lives is the grace of existence itself, and another kind of grace is the grace of second chances, I want to suggest a third kind of grace that we experience is the kind of grace described in the hymn “Amazing Grace,” especially right there in the third verse: “Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come; ‘tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” This is a more active kind of grace.
What do I mean?
Have you ever heard the story about how the hymn “Amazing Grace” came to be written?
According to this story, it was written by John Newton, an English slave ship captain turned minister. The story tells us that Newton was the captain of slave ship, and on one particular voyage from Africa to North America, his ship encountered a violent storm that Newton was sure would sink the ship.
Desperate to save his own life, Newton stood on the deck of his ship in the midst of the raging storm, pleaded with God to save him and his ship, and promised to repent of the evil in which he had participated as a slave trader if God would do so.
According to the story, the storm passed, the ship did not sink, and in joyful gratitude, Newton quit slave trading, wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” and became a minister and an abolitionist.
While it’s a good story, like so many good stories, it’s not quite true. John Newton was the captain of a slave ship and did become a Christian after surviving a violent storm at sea, but it was escaping with his own life than inspired him to get religion, not guilt over enslaving others. He continued as the captain of a slave ship for several years after that. It was until much later in his life that he became a minister and wasn’t until even later that wrote “Amazing Grace.” He didn’t begin to express regrets about his role in the slave trade until even later, thirty years after his conversion, and eight years after he wrote “Amazing Grace.” I guess the real story shows that real change can happen in people’s lives, but only very slowly.
Yet there’s still something I like about the apocryphal version of the story. I don’t mean to say that I believe in a God who stills raging storms in response to desperate prayer.
And yet, I mean that sometimes I think many of us find ourselves in situations similar to Newton’s - - no, not standing on the deck of a slave ship during a raging storm, but we find ourselves in situations totally beyond our control, situations of suffering, struggle, failure, rejection, guilt, unpredictable happenings or encounters with death, isolation, or apparent meaninglessness.
From my own experience and from listening to the experiences of others, I know that it is not uncommon in such situations to experience something - - not necessarily a transformation of the situation, not necessarily a calming of the outer storm, but a transformation within oneself, a calming of the inner storm. In my experience, this is not a feeling that “everything will turn out okay,” but a feeling that “however things turn out, I will somehow be okay,” and it seems that the most appropriate word for this inner transformation is “grace.”
The theologian Paul Tillich wrote: “Grace strikes us 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 we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when year, after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsion 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…if that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed.”
There are no magical words I know to utter to experience such grace. There is nothing that I know of that anyone say or do to make it happen. In fact, I think we are most likely to experience this kind of grace when we stop trying to do anything about the things we can’t do anything about and simply open our hearts to what is.
For me, it is comforting to know that when we have said all we can and done all we can in any situation, there is the possibility that this kind of grace will be there for us to carry us through.
As we sit down at our Thanksgiving tables on Thursday, may we be thankful for all the grace that fills our lives - - the grace of the gift of life itself, the grace of all the second chances we receive, and the grace that carries us through the most difficult times of our lives.
So may it be. Amen.