Sermon: Amazing Grace

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
June 17, 2007

Third Sunday after Pentecost
Baccalaureate Sunday

Amazing Grace

Galatians 2:15-21

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

The problem with Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is that it answers a question practically no one today is still asking:  “How shall I justify myself?”  Discussion of the theological merit of justification by works versus justification by faith is the sort of thing that would have drawn a crowd in Jean Calvin’s Geneva, or just about anywhere during the Protestant Reformation – even in Colonial times.  Preachers like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley got pretty worked up about these doctrines.  But today, a better way to frame the question, especially for our young people who are graduating this spring, might be:  “What is the meaning of life?” or “How shall I know if my life is successful?”

I hope no one goes off to college and measures success the way we did in the board game “Life.” Have you ever played?  I played it a lot as a kid.  At start, you get a tiny plastic station wagon and a peg to sit in the driver’s seat, pink if you’re a girl, blue if you’re a boy.  Along the way you get more pegs – your spouse and babies. The fork in the road offers you the choice between going straight to work and going to college, which takes longer but earns you a higher paycheck.  Everybody I knew took the college route – because the object of the game was “whoever has the most money at retirement wins.” We’d usually also buy every kind of insurance available too, so when an unlucky spin would land you on “flood” or “car accident” spaces, you wouldn’t have to pay big fines. 

Now I, and all my closest friends were good Christian kids – three of us went to a Congregational church like ours. And none of us ever questioned the rules of the game.  We were used to it, so it made sense: in the end, whoever has the most money wins.  Same object as Monopoly, except it’s more fun because it doesn’t keep going on and on, as people’s financial reserves ebb and flow.  You just go in a straight line from high school to retirement – it’s over in about an hour and you can play something else.  So I never questioned the object of Life until I was playing it for the first time with my kids.

“What do you think about this?” I asked.  “Do we really thing the whole purpose of Life is just to make money?”  And it led to a great “What Would Jesus Do” kind of discussion – about how the game might be different for Christians, more like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (my grandfather’s favorite book), where you’d accumulate points for good choices, or lose points by succumbing to temptations.  The winner would be the one who had survived the most tests of character and shown the strongest morals.  Well, it turns out, that was what the original maker of the game had intended.

The New Yorker back in May had a fascinating story about Milton Bradley and how he invented the board game “Life” just before the Civil War.  Bradley came from an old New England family which had survived incredible hardships (like Indian massacres and kidnappings, and various financial disasters) through strong character and solid faith.  So his game, which he called “The Checkered Game of Life,” involved some terrible twists of fate that could be mediated if you made good moral choices.  It was played on a kind of checkerboard, and it became a big hit in its day – Civil War soldiers were known to carry the pocket edition.  Whoever collects 100 points first wins.  Choose the path of Perseverance and you’ll head for Success, worth 5 points.  If you land on Honesty, you go directly to Happiness, also worth 5 points.  Like the 20^th century game I played, more education usually earns you more points – although the search for Truth neither costs points nor wins any!  The path to Ruin runs dangerously close to something called “Fat Office,” and is likely to land you on Suicide and instant death.  My favorite was the way into Politics – if you win your Congressional race, you earn 5 points, but you increase your chances of landing on Crime and going to Prison, where you lose a turn!

In either version – the original from 1859 or the 100^th anniversary edition that I played in the 1960s, the game of Life is a competition where points are accumulated. Either you win material happiness and a cushy retirement at Millionaire Acres in the 20^th century version, or in the 19^th century original, you enter a Happy Old Age knowing you lived your life as a good person.  Both versions, I think, would annoy the apostle Paul.

You see, in the Letter to the Galatians, for a largely Jewish audience, Paul was proclaiming freedom from the need to follow the laws of the Torah, as Paul and other Pharisees had been trying to do.  They probably would have enjoyed Milton Bradley’s original morality-based game.  Paul’s letter was addressed primarily to converted Jews like him who were reaching out to convert pagans who had no knowledge of Jewish law. Leaders of the Galatian church were thinking that this rowdy and unclean bunch needed to first convert to Judaism, and be circumcised, before they could be Christian.  You can understand their instinct, as pagans were known to be big and boisterous lovers of life – wine, recreational sex, and song – and of course, the coin of the Empire.  They would have enjoyed the Life of the 1960s where money, property, and family were accumulated. 

I think that if Paul were to develop a board game to teach the 1^st century Galatians about justification by faith, it would go like this: you’d spin the spinner (or dreidel, I suppose) and advance to some square or another. Your object would be to try to tell others the story of Jesus Christ and spread the Good News of God’s love.  But probably you’d land on some form of Roman torture – Stoning, maybe, or Imprisonment.  If you were lucky, you’d land on Martyrdom – because although it would involve some nasty punishment, like being crucified, or burned alive, or maybe both at the same time – you’d be an instant winner.  You’d be able to not only offer a very spectacular public witness to your faith; you’d go straight from the Martyrdom square to the Pearly Gates. 

But here’s the rub:  you could also land on something very UNsaintly, like “deny Jesus three times,” like Peter, or “help stone a Christian to death,” like Paul, and still end up in Heaven.  How could that happen?  It would be because you chose to play your “Faith” card, which would trump any number of great “Works,” including Martyrdom.  But it’s even MORE unfair than it appears:  unlike a kind of spiritual “Get Out of Jail Free” card, God’s Grace is not something you might have collected by chance, and saved for the moment you need it.  God’s Grace is free for the asking – and you can receive it at any point in the game.  Any loser can be a winner – you just have to believe.

So the question is:  What version of Life are you playing?  Or, dear graduates, what version do you plan to play in the future?  Will you go with the flow of mainstream American culture and count “whoever has the most toys in the end” as the winner?  Or will you take the strict moral track of Pharisees and Puritans – and try to accumulate a lifetime of good works, whatever that means to you?  Or will you take what Paul is saying here in the Letter the Galatians seriously and accept the abundant life and amazing grace that Christ offers each of us?  I hope you’ll take path number 3, because I know you will find Jesus there, who’ll lead you Home.   Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.