The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
May 2, 2010

From the Letter of the Law to Costly Grace
Acts 11:1-18 

Christianity is profoundly Jewish. Most of our scripture is Jewish scripture. Our worship is greatly influenced by Jewish worship. And certainly we worship the same God, known most fully we believe through the Messiah, Jesus. And yet, there are significant differences, most importantly in our not keeping the many commandments central to Jewish life, such as keeping to kosher foods. This change occurred in the earliest days of Christianity. How we came to follow the Jewish Messiah, without having to keep the letter of the Jewish law comes with a story, which I will share and then consider what difference this makes for you and I for our lives and how we live the coming week. 

As the story of this transformation begins, the Apostle Peter is in trouble. In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the great disciple and church leader is being called to account for his actions while away from Jerusalem preaching and teaching. Word has gotten back to the other apostles and believers that Peter lowered his standards while on the road. Peter ate with uncircumcised men. And as good Jews, the first Christians are appalled that Peter would drop the requirements of keeping Kosher. To eat with such uncircumcised people makes you profane, unclean. 

It is probably worth stopping to appreciate the irony. This is the very group that traveled with Jesus and saw time and again how Jesus got in trouble for eating with the wrong sort of people. They heard Jesus explain to those who rigidly kept the Law of Moses how he had come not for those who had a relationship with God, but he came for the lost, the hurting, the outcast, those in need. But those folk Jesus shared table with were Jews. Yes, he might talk to the Samaritan woman at the well and heal the daughter of a Syro-Phoenecian woman or a Roman Centurion, but when he got in trouble for eating with the wrong sort, it was the wrong sort of Jew. They might be tax collecting Jews or other notoriously sinful Jews, but they were still children of Abraham. Peter now stands before his fellow believers to answer for eating with Gentiles who had not converted to Judaism. 

Peter patiently explains how God has had him on a journey. He doesn’t recount it all. But through reading earlier in Acts we know how Peter came be in the home of the centurion Cornelius, a God-fearing Roman. God-fearer was a special term used for those Gentiles who respected Judaism, and had begun following some Jewish practices, but had not yet converted fully and been initiated as a Jew. We are told that this military leader of 100 soldiers gave alms generously and prayed constantly to God.  

Cornelius felt compelled by God through a message from an angel to seek out Peter who was staying in Joppa. Here is a deeper biblical connection that shows how God had long been reaching out to those who were not Jewish. In the Book of Jonah, the prophet Jonah jumped on a ship in Joppa to head west away from Nineveh, in order to avoid preaching to the non-Jewish folk in that sinful capital city. Now we are back in Joppa centuries later and God remains on a mission to reach out to the whole world. This time, God has Peter rather than Jonah. And God gives Peter a vision of heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down by its four corners. It contained all kids of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Peter hears a voice say, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” 

But Peter is a faithful Jew. He answers, “Surely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice said, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” The vision was repeated three times. When Peter was wondering about the meaning of the vision, three men arrived from Cornelius, asking him to come to the centurion’s house with them. The Holy Spirit led Peter to go with the men.  

Peter found Cornelius house full of Gentiles eager to hear the Good News of Jesus. Peter came to see that the vision of impure food being pure extended to people called profane being clean as well. Peter comes to see as he puts it, “God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.” The Gentiles heard Peter preach, put their faith in God as revealed through his son Jesus and received the power of the Holy Spirit. When Peter and the Christians who had come with him saw that God’s spirit rested on the people, he asked, “Can anyone keep those people from being baptized in water?” This is how the first uncircumcised Jews became fully-initiated-through-baptism members of the Body of Christ.  

That’s all in the background now in our reading. And this idea of naming profane uncircumcised Gentiles as being .one with the other Christians presents a crisis. So Peter patiently recounts the story of his vision of the sheet coming down from heaven and his visit to Cornelius. He asks that if God gave the uncircumcised gentiles the gift of the Holy Spirit, who was he to hinder God? Their objections were silenced. In this one scene in today’s reading from Acts, Christianity is set on a very different course. Up until this point, being a follower of Jesus meant being a Jew. Christians were Jews, exclusively. 

Now with the acceptance of Peter’s mission to the Gentiles and later with another incident with Paul and the council in Jerusalem, the shape of Christianity will be forever altered. No longer will someone have to keep the 613 commandments from the Hebrew scripture governing everything from the food you eat to the clothes you wear and how you deal with one another. Being Christian was no longer synonymous with being Jewish. Though many early Christians continued to be faithful Jews who believed Jesus to be the Messiah, it had become possible to be a Gentile Christian. 

This is, of course, not news to us. We have been raised centuries later and the issues between Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians are gone. From this side of church history, it would seem like life was made easier. Following God meant keeping two commandments only: Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. This was a move from the law to grace and grace is free. The only requirement is faith in God as revealed by Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit.  

Yet if we believe that coming into a relationship with God entails no expectations, we fall for cheap grace, a lesser imitation of the real grace of God. Remember Peter said that God shows no favoritism, and one can be from any nation and come into relationship with God. But he went on to say that God accepts those who fear him and do what is right. To give your life to Jesus and then live unchanged is cheap grace. 

Cheap grace is an idea well taught by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian during the rise of National Socialism in Germany. He became a part of the Confessing Church that refused to join the German National Church. While other churches welcomed swastikas into their worship space, Bonhoeffer and fellow confessing Christians refused to allow the cross to be wrapped in the German flag as it were.  

Bonhoeffer would later play a role in a plot to kill Hitler. It’s the attempted assassination retold in the recent movie Valkyrie. The pastor would be hung to death on Hitler’s orders nine days before his concentration camp was liberated. Seven years earlier, in 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book on the Sermon of the Mount called The Cost of Discipleship. Here he wrote,  

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it call us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God. 

Dietrich wrote these words as a pastor and teacher. He came to live them as a martyr, put to death as his faith in Jesus was at odds with Nazism. Bonhoeffer counted the cost and paid it. He had come to faith freely, with no cost but belief. But in the process of living into the Christian faith he came to give his whole life to God. Bonhoeffer leaves us these words on costly grace as a challenge. Given that following Peter’s vision and the subsequent change in church teaching, we were cut loose from the letter of the law to follow the law of love. We are justified, meaning seen as just before God due to that faith alone. But then we are called to the ongoing task of sanctification, being made more and more Christ-like over time. 

How this costly grace connects to the transformation from law to grace is to see that Jesus freed us from the law, not from the need to live holy lives. Jesus spiritualized the commandments, stripping away the letter of the law to more fully keeping its spirit. For example, Jesus took the command “Thou shalt not murder” and spiritualized it, not making it easier, but harder as he taught that we are liable for judgment when we are angry at a brother or sister. He took the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and spiritualized it as “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” 

Jesus taught that your actions matter as it shows what pours forth from your heart. The heart is what God sees. It is in the secret of your heart of hearts that God is present and it is that place which is to be an altar to God. Yet our hearts are profane. They are not ready for God’s presence. We know that we sometimes do the right thing for wrong reasons. We know that we can smile to someone’s face and spread gossip behind his or her back. We know that our actions are not always right and our thoughts are even further from the truth. 

Jesus comes willingly into our hearts when they are impure, but he doesn’t want to leave us like that. Rather than settling for the cheap grace of sinning with no desire to change our lives and returning to worship knowing how far we are from the truth, we need to open ourselves up to real repentance. This means a change of life, of behavior. Pray for the Holy Spirit to lead you further into the truth by showing you some area of your life that needs to change.  

Sin is anything that separates us from God. So when we confess our sins in just a moment, offer the sin God reveals to you and leave this place ready to change. This is how the walk of faith occurs again and again as we offer more of our lives to God, seeing something in our lives as needing change, we take the steps to amend our lives. The change need not be drastic. More often the change in our hearts is gradual. Yet the journey is worth the cost, for in the process we make more room for God’s presence in our hearts and lives.  

Amen.