"Grace is the Last Word"

Sermon by The Rev. Ranie Neislar

March 10, 2024

Our history with God is not linear. As a people of faith, we’ve had moments of doubt, questions, and wrong turns. Each one of us can look back on our own stories and see how we’ve made errors in judgement… we’ve stumbled along in the adventure of life. I’ve experienced quite a few of my own stumbling--seasons when it felt as if any goodness in my life had left me… and yet, great things, events that are born out of faith, continued to be made manifest in my life through a stubborn faith—the end of one marriage didn’t mark me as a failure in relationships forever, yes, I had doubts, but in time, through patience, prayer, and a lingering sense of hope, came a great, amazing love, more than I could have ever imagined in my husband, Worth. My path to ordination was not a simple, not an easy one step, two step, and done experience. I had plenty of zig-zags, moments of questioning, finally to culminate in ordination, a call to a wonderful parish in Huntsville, AL, and now, to another wonderful parish. Our lives are not linear, easy, simple consistent conversations with God, marked entirely with good ideas, faithfulness, and exemplary of good discipleship.

Yet, that doesn’t shake the surprise of God’s judgement of humanity, humans similar to us. On the face of it, in our sacred texts, God has judged the chosen people as sinful and in these Lenten texts, like the ones we hear this morning, that can leave an uncomfortable mark in our hearts, and a bad taste in our mouths, for we too also fall short of God’s hopes. But, of course there is good news for the chosen people, and for us, despite the truth of our fallen ways, God’s judgement of condemnation is not the final word in our stories. The good news is that despite the confusion, the hard conversations, our conversation with God doesn’t end with a condemnation to die and be slaves to sin, but to evolve through an ongoing conversation with God.

The people coming out of Egypt complain to God and Moses, they lose sight of God’s identity as a liberator and there are consequences to that… we have our own moments, when we lose sight of God’s identity and similarly experience consequences—perhaps not venomous snakes, but this is one of the truths of our story—when we lose sight of God’s identity, there will be consequences. It may be a loss of hope, and in our loss we make seek the easier paths or look to blame others for our lack, because when we forget the divine identity as the great Liberator, the faithful one, when we lose sight of that identity, we are tempted to act in ways that are not the ways of God. Again, I hope in your darkest seasons, when you have lost sight of the identity of God you have not had venomous snakes come after you, but at some point in our lives all of us have lost sight of God’s identity as the faithful one. As fallen creatures we experience the biting consequences of our inability to discern God as faithful, good, and loving. And even when we are beginning to sense our God again, the goodness, the faithfulness, it doesn’t always come easily… there are still stumbling blocks along the path, there are still events, temptations, on the adventure we are living out that draw our attentions.

Again, our individual, and our communal history as creations are not linear, but evolving… and in so many ways, that is a good thing… that is a good thing… because throughout that history, there has been a singular event that brings all these histories together, an event that marks all of our shortcomings, an event that surpasses our inability to maintain a sense of God’s identity, and is so succinctly put in our Gospel reading: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

There are moments throughout Lent when the conviction of loss, the conviction of our Sin, our need to alter our ways of living that the heaviness that accompanies conviction can be overwhelming: our postures slide towards the incorrect inclination that we are doomed to live sinful lives, lives that consistently return to doubting the goodness of God, questioning the faithfulness of God, and our own ability to be faithful… I want to remind you of one thing, one thing that I hope sustains you through these hard moments of conviction, moments when we feel we have ultimately failed and will continue to do so… if I could write myself, all of us one sentence to endure hard moments, moments when we feel we are forever lost in the wilderness it would be this: “Dear Reader, God has already had the last conversation with you and it ended with grace.” That’s all. Every moment, every conversation, every wilderness season, all our most sinful, strayed moments are brought to the light through this one event, the event of God’s saving act in Jesus’s death and resurrection. This event defies time, moments of the past, the future, all time, all events, every person is reflected like a prism through this one event in history and through it we are presented as redeemed creations.

The hardest part, of our ongoing conversation with God, for the people in the wilderness, or our children, our grandchildren, and generations we will never know, the hardest part for us is accepting this judgement of grace, accepting that as much as we lose our way during the adventure of our lives, the conversation with God continues even when no words are spoken. Through months, years, decades of ignoring or outright defying the identity of God, God awaits our words, our mumblings, God remains a faithful conversation partner by sustaining our relationship. God prepares a table for us, in anticipation that we pull back to the table, and even through the generations, even if we never turn back to the conversation, God has proclaimed the last word, and it is grace.