The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

2 Corinthians 13:13

One of the most important features of our Lutheran worship service is that it is all based on Scripture. We call our order of worship the liturgy, a word which literally means “work of the people,” to remind us that we all have a part to play in our worship life together. It is not a performance. It invites our participation. That is important. But so is the fact that all of our worship service is biblically-based. And today’s second reading (2 Corinthians 13:11-13) offers us a great example of that. It is one of the closing lines from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, when he writes words that should sound very familiar, because we hear them at the beginning of every Lutheran worship service: 

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

These words are chosen to be included in the readings because they teach us something about the Holy Trinity. And I thought they would be a good focus for my sermon today. They are not just words, of course. They remind us of very important gifts that our triune God gives to us – gifts of grace, and of love, and of communion. Gifts that we need now as much as we ever have. 

Grace

The first of these gifts is the gift of grace. If I had to describe the gospel in just one word, it might just be: grace. If I had to share why I became Lutheran in just one word, it would definitely be grace. And if I had to explain what makes Christianity different from all the other religions of the world, I would also use this one word: grace. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, Paul writes. Grace means many things, of course, but mostly what it means is that we don’t have to get it all right to be loved by God. In fact, we can’t get it all right. We never will. We can’t earn our salvation. We can’t achieve eternal life. We can only be given it. And that is Jesus’ gift to us. That is grace. 

Grace is unconditional love. It is God saying to us: you are exactly right, because you are exactly as I created you. You don’t always act exactly right, that’s true. But you are forgiven. And you are loved. No matter what. I love this description of grace given by the theologian, Paul Tillich, in a famous sermon entitled “You Are Accepted”:

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness … when the old compulsions 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, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!’ 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. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”

That is grace. It requires nothing of us. It invites us simply to accept the fact that we are accepted. And that is God’s gift to us in Jesus. 

Love

It is not so different from love, I suppose, which is the second gift mentioned by Paul: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God. What is different about love? Why is it mentioned in addition to grace? And why is Paul attributing love to God the Father, and not to Jesus the Son? I think it goes back to the very reason we were created. Love comes before grace, because we were created to be loved by God, and to love God in return. All of creation is good. But we alone have been created in God’s image. Every child of this earth is created in the image of God, and is loved by God. We were created by God, to be loved by God, and to love God in return. 

Before there was grace – before there was a need for grace – there was love. Grace was only needed when we humans turned from that love. When we rejected God’s love by sinning. The moment Adam and Eve did that, grace became a necessary addition to God’s love. But first, there was love. Love is first, and in a way, love is last, too. As Paul reminds us in First Corinthians, faith and hope are amazing gifts, but love, he says, is the greatest of them all, because love never ends. When the end comes, and Jesus returns, we won’t need faith or hope anymore. We will see the subject of our faith and our hope. When Jesus returns, only love will still be needed: God’s love, shown to us in Jesus. 

Communion

Jesus reminds us that we were created to be loved by God, and commanded to love God in return. It is the greatest commandment, Jesus teaches us: to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. But the second, he says, is like it: to love your neighbor as yourself. And that brings us to the third of the gifts mentioned in today’s second reading: the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit calls into a community, with God and with one another. And this community is also an important gift from God, along with God’s grace and love. Because this is where we experience that love most tangibly as we await Jesus’ return. 

In her autobiography, Dorothy Day offers a beautiful description of this communion, this Christian community:

“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

That is communion, with God and with each other. And that is the only solution to the long loneliness that we have all known. And that is the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who calls us into communion with God, and into community with each other. It is a community built on grace, and love. It is a community made possible because of the grace of the Lord Jesus, and the love of God. And it is a community that we are blessed to be part of. 

But it is also a community with a mission, with a purpose. And our purpose is not simply to enjoy that grace and that love, and to share that grace and love with each other. It is also to share that grace and love with the world. 

The Great Commission 

Today’s gospel reading (Matthew 28:16-20) reminds us, in a very powerful way, of our mission. This reading is the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus gathers his disciples around him one last time, before his ascension into heaven. And when he does, he gives them one last command, known as the great commission: to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and to teach them everything that he has commanded. 

That is our mission as a community. To go, and share God’s grace and love all the world. To make disciples of Jesus, to baptize, and to teach. And to do this wherever we find ourselves, and wherever we are sent, until all the world knows of the grace of the Lord Jesus and of the love of God, and until all the world is brought into the communion of the Holy Spirit. And our work is not complete until this is accomplished. And we are not the community that Jesus created if we are not doing this, all of us, in our own way, with our own gifts, in the places where God calls us. It is what gives life to this thing called the church – when we all are seeking ways to share the grace of the Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and when we are all inviting others into the communion of the Holy Spirit. 

The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee

There is an image for this that I have always found fascinating, and it involves the two major bodies of water in the land where Jesus walked. One is the Sea of Galilee, a beautiful lake that is filled with fish and surrounded by lush foliage. And the other is the Dead Sea, the shoreline of which is 1300 feet below sea level. Seven million tons of water evaporate from the Dead Sea every day. This makes the salt content about 10 times that of our oceans. Which makes for a harsh environment in which seaweed, plants, and even fish cannot flourish. Which, of course, is how it got its name. Both the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are fed by the same river, the Jordan River. The only difference between these two bodies of water, and the reason the Sea of Galilee is beautiful and alive while the Dead Sea is so barren and lifeless, is that the Sea of Galilee has an outlet; the Dead Sea does not! Water flows through the Sea of Galilee. Water flows into the Dead Sea but not out! And that is what happens to a community that receives the grace of Jesus and the love of God, but does not share it. It dies. 

A community, on the other hand, that allows this grace and this love to flow through it, is a community that is very much alive, and a place where Christians can grow and thrive. It is a community where grace can be found, because that same grace is shared. It is a community where love flows freely, out into the world around it. And it is a community that is truly in communion with God the Father, and God the Son, through God the Holy Spirit. And may that always describe the community that we call First Lutheran Church. Amen.