The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
December 30, 2001

Grace Upon Grace
John 1:1-18

One of the cool things about being a priest is that you get to say those words that make things happen. In the wedding service, I get to say, “I pronounce that they are husband and wife.” In the baptism service, I get to say, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” These words are sometimes called performative language because the words themselves perform the deed. God does the real work, but I get to pronounce the words that announce to all what is being done.  

This is like the performative words the Bishop spoke as he laid his hands on my head in ordination. Bishop Louttit said, “Therefore, Father, through Jesus Christ your Son, give your Holy Spirit to Frank; fill him with grace and power, and make him a priest in your church.” The Bishop prayed for God to give me the grace I need to be a priest and it was so.  

Words can convey great power. The ancient idea is that a word carries with it the force of a thing. There was a connection between the word and the thing signified by that word that cannot be broken. Metaphors had  great power because the essence of one thing could be conveyed to another.  

But in our culture today, we are bombarded with so many words that the words we say have be drained of power. The words of an advertisement can only trick you so many times before you start to doubt the meaning of words. Sure, the new Crest will make your teeth whiter or the new Tide will make your clothes whiter, but what does whiter mean? Your definition may be different from the person who wrote the ad. The products are all new, improved, faster, better, bigger, smaller, whatever it is that will sell. In time, all words become tainted. How can we believe any of them? 

As a counterpoint to a world awash with words. The Gospel reading for today returns us to the time before words, to the time of the Word. John begins his Gospel where the book of Genesis began, in the moment before creation. Genesis said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 

John writes of that time saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

Genesis tells us that God spoke the world into existence. By saying light, God created light. Speaking a word brought the word spoken into existence. John tells us that the Word, the creative power of naming something into existence, was Jesus. Jesus is the word of God made real. When God speaks, the clearest picture of what God says, is Jesus. Therefore, John writes of Jesus not as a word, but The Word.  

These words from the start of John’s Gospel are most likely the words of an ancient hymn, perhaps written by the John the Apostle, perhaps known in the community where he led the church. The hymn itself is verses one through five, ten, eleven, fourteen and sixteen. A closer look at those verses shows that each verse contains a keyword picked up in the next verse. To introduce us to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, John weaves together a tightly written hymn of praise of Jesus as the eternal word of God, with John the Baptist’s affirmation that this eternal word has come among us as the light of the world. 

John carefully and beautifully shows us how the two great ages—our time bound world and eternity—coexist in the person of Jesus. By weaving the story of the eternal Word with the story of that Word being made flesh, we see that those two ages can are not mutually exclusive. In the person Jesus, we can meet eternity in the here and now. Through Jesus’ life, his words, his actions, we see the will of God lived out in the flesh. Jesus is the fullest expression of what it means to live a life before God. Jesus was and is the fullness of God’s grace.  

The thrust of our Gospel reading for today is that in Jesus we can see God made known. Jesus is the grace and truth of God made human. Furthermore through Jesus we all receive grace upon grace. Jesus is grace and truth and through Jesus we receive grace upon grace. The end result of the Word being made flesh is grace. That’s just great, what’s grace? We know that we can sing about Amazing Grace. We can say grace before a meal. We can name a child grace, or say that a dancer or gymnast is graceful. So what is this grace? 

I want to show a short video clip that will help define what “grace” means. [Show video. The minute and a half video shows a film crew on the streets of Dayton, Ohio interviewing people at random to find out what grace means to them. They get a variety of answers from Grace Kelly to grace at meals, but few people really know what grace means.] 

If you are not sure what grace means, then you are not alone, certainly not in Dayton, Ohio, where those interviews were conducted. Grace is one of the words that has been so overused as to lose the power it once held. So, what is grace? And, what’s so amazing about it anyway? 

Simply put, Grace is God’s unmerited favor and love. You cannot earn grace. You cannot do anything to get grace or to get more grace. This is seen in the Latin word for grace, gratis. Gratis as in something you get without paying for it. Grace is a free gift.  

The hard part of accepting this definition is that we have heard the offer of a free gift before. You know, buy the Ginzu steak knives and receive a cutting board as your free gift. Or buy this rotisserie cooker and receive the oven mitt as a free gift to you. We don’t kid ourselves. There is no free gift in a television offer like that. The price of the so called free gift has been calculated into the price we are to pay. The so called free gift is free because we have already paid for it in the price of the main item we are buying. 

But the idea that God’s love and favor toward you are unearned is central to Christianity. God’s love, the favor God shows you have to be unearned, what exactly could you do for God anyway? As John told us earlier in the prologue, not one thing came into being that he did not make. As John the Baptist puts it, saying that you are a son of Abraham is no special way to earn God’s favor. God could make more children for Abraham out of the rocks if God wanted to do so.  

You are powerless to give anything to God. Instead of giving, you are to receive. Receive God’s grace, God’s unearned love. 

But receiving an unearned gift is hard to do. For us, receiving a gift creates indebtedness. If I get a Christmas gift from someone, I must give him or her a gift as well. Even if the gift is just a Christmas card, I need to make sure that I reciprocate. If God loves me completely, totally without my doing anything, then what will I owe in return. The answer is grace. You repay grace by passing grace on. 

Passing along grace is the church’s very reason for being. We as a church are to share God’s undeserved love with others. The church is to reach out to folks who feel like they are beyond God’s love, let them know that God loves them, and cares for them. This is a hard truth to grasp as many times it seems like church is the last place you wan to go when you are down on your luck. But a church is to be the place you can come no matter what. No matter how bad things get, you can always go to church and find love. If this is not true of churches, this is not God’s fault but ours. God does love us undeservedly, passing that love along so that others may share in it is our job. 

Here’s one way I have seen grace passed along in my own life. When I was growing up, I was always in scouting. I started out in Cub Scouts by attending my brother’s meetings as my Mom was the den mother. When I was finally old enough to be a Cub Scout, I joined and did not unjoin all through elementary school, junior high, high school and my first year of college. Scouting was good to me. I got to see the world, backpacking our west, traveling to England and Sweden for the World Jamboree and more. But most importantly, I was in troop that considered itself to be a ministry. The leaders were passing along the grace they received. They had been given undeserved favor from God and they were passing it along to us. 

My Scoutmaster was Gene McCord. Well north of six feet tall, Mr. McCord was imposing for a young scout. Mr. McCord was at times a rigid taskmaster who demanded your best of you. But over time, I came to see how Mr. McCord loved us. When I was 16, I had a couple of incidents Mr. McCord found out about. One time, I was driving a car while Mark, another buddy of mine from scouts, was throwing bottles at signs and mailboxes, just to hear them smash. Another time, I got mad at Mark and dropped him off in the middle of no where. Now, no one but me and God and Mark knew about these incidents and I know for a fact that Mark didn’t tell.  

In each case, Mark and I were seen and someone reported it back to Mr. McCord. He pulled me aside at a meeting and layed it all on the line. Mr. McCord reminded me that I was not that kind of boy and would not be that kind of man. Mr. McCord had given me lots of unmerited favor and love already and right when I was least deserving of love he showed me tough love. In no uncertain terms, Mr. McCord made it clear that I would not continue down the new path I had set for myself. There were no threats. There were no ultimatums. By force of will, he was blocking the way. I had no choice but to stay on the straight and narrow path. 

Many years later and just a few years ago, I was asked to speak at a dinner given for Mr. McCord’s retirement as a scoutmaster after something like 30 years. I looked around at Mark, and all my fellow scouts from years before. I recounted this story and then I said, “How can we possibly thank Gene McCord for all he did for us.” The answer was clear. Paying him back is not possible or even the right idea. Saying thank you is not enough. The way to thank Mr. McCord is to pass along the love he showed us to another generation. Mr. McCord always connected his leadership in Scouting to his faith in God. He knew that he could not earn or deserve God’s love. Instead of trying to pay back God, he passed God’s grace along to others. 

Who has loved you at a time when you were unlovable? While no one has loved you undeservedly more than God has, most of us have had persons of grace in our lives. Each of us can be that person of grace for someone else. Jesus showed with crystal clarity what it means to live a life before God. If you want to know how to live out God’s will in our fallen world, look to Jesus’ life. Jesus lived out God’s unmerited favor and love for this world.  

It is appropriate to respond to that unearned favor and love, not because we can then deserve it. We can never do enough to deserve the love that God has shown for us. But we can try to live out the love God has for us in our own lives. As we share the grace God has given to us with others, we help to make the Word of God real in the world around us. We have already received grace upon grace from God, let us share that grace with all we meet. 

Amen.