Jeremiah 28:5-9
Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42
Sermon by Pastor Joel
In 1990, a study looked at what happened when children and adults were taught to consider alternative explanations for rude behaviour – to work against what psychologists call Hostile Attribution Bias. What happened? To no surprise, all ages reported better friendships and less aggression during conflicts.
In 2010, researchers tried a different version of the study, this time calling it “compassionate reappraisal.” They asked people to reinterpret a story about how someone had hurt them – but imagining the offender’s pain or trauma. What did the results find? People felt less angry, they obsessed less often about the offense, and they even saw health benefits, when their blood pressure fell.
In 2013, researchers published a study looking at what happened when couples were taught to interpret their partner’s rude or hurtful behaviour as the result of stress, weariness, and outside experience – and not ill will towards them. They called it “assuming the best.” What happened? To no one’s surprise, conflict was reduced, relationship satisfaction increased – and what’s more, this training lasted the full year that the couples were studied.
Just this past week, a reel popped up in my Facebook feed – the face of a young man with a thoughtful expression, speaking as if he had just had an epiphany: “Imagine,” he said, “if we all went through the world assuming that anyone who wronged us was having a bad day or dealing with their own problems, that they didn’t mean it personally.”
Just imagine.
Compassionate reappraisal. Anti-hostile Attribution Bias. Assuming the Best. What are all these studies about?
Each one of them is really talking about Grace.
Grace is one of the richest, most layered words in Christian theology — and especially in the Lutheran tradition. It’s meaning for us, as Lutherans, is right there in our second lesson: “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under the law but under grace.”
We recite that tenet of the Lutheran understanding of our relationship to God so easily: Justified by grace through faith.
But just like those researchers in all those studies – then and since – we need to know what we really mean – for ourselves and the world - when we use the word Grace. Otherwise, it’s just a jingle we’ve memorized by rote that has no guiding purpose in our lives.
Grace has been the subject of much contemplation and scholarship, not least because of the question posed in our second lesson. If we are to live by grace and not law, does that mean we may sin recklessly with no consequence? This is what theologians have long debated – if the law is irrelevant in our lives, if we don’t have to strive to receive grace, does it have any value at all?
First, those who argue for that have cheapened grace, in my opinion, making the mistake of connecting grace to one subject matter – the forgiveness of sin. Grace is not linked to sin, like one side of a set of handcuffs. Grace appears in our lives in many ways, with many definitions.
Grace is one of those beautiful concepts that can encapsulate so many qualities and definitions, containing many truths together under one underlying value. Grace is the presence of God. Grace is the sense that we are enough. Grace is community – the gifts we receive from one another. Grace is courage – the strength we find within ourselves to act when we are afraid. When you experience Grace in those moments, even as flawed and hurting human beings, does it feel cheap to you? Or does it feel, in fact, like a powerful gift, freely given?
Secondly, those who argue that by not sticking to the law we cheapen grace, have made grace the very transaction that Jesus preaches against for his entire ministry. Life is not a zero-sum game: You did this for me; I do this for you. I do this for God; God does this for me. Life is about giving when we have no chance of receiving, about sharing when we feel poor, about making time when we have little to spare, about helping those who may never return the favour.
Law unhindered by grace is entirely transactional: “do this” equals “getting this.” And yet we know that life doesn’t work this way, Life is never a simple step of always following the rules. At one time in our lives, every single one of us has encountered a sensible, logical rule that did not fit the scenario we were presented with, that seemed insufficient to what was required morally in the moment. Grace allows us that moral autonomy; to choose to follow the gospel even when it means breaking the rules.
Finally, grace gives us the power to see ourselves and one another as individuals, the most gospel-fed view of people we can practice. The law is a useful framework, a big picture rulebook: don’t butt into line, don’t cut someone off at the lights. But grace is the way that we interpret the law.
When we respond with grace, when someone cuts us off at traffic lights, or butts into the line in the grocery store, we are saying that person might be rushing to the hospital to see a sick loved one, that person might be late to pick up their child at daycare after a long work shift. And in that moment that driver is not just a driver, the line-butter is not just a line-butter, they are a person. They have a unique life, full of right and wrong choices and good and bad moments. They are human. They are just like us. This is the gift of grace that we are given: the power to truly see one another and ourselves. The ability to feel God’s presence working through us and in the world.
Grace is not about receiving a “get-out-of-sin-free” card. The true power of Grace is not that it releases us from the consequences of wrongdoing, but that it steers us away from becoming embroiled in it. And when this happens, polarization gets worse and sin wins.
A life spent trying not to mess up is suffocating, and doomed to fail. But a life spent finding the grace to be courageous, the grace to be alert to God’s presence, the grace to see the humanness in the stranger, the grace to see the humanness in ourselves – now that is a meaningful life. A liberated life. A solution-focused life.
With grace, we have moved beyond our own wrongdoings – and beyond the wrongdoings of others - to focus on a life that turns polarization into cooperation and brings meaning and hope and healing.
Grace is God’s unconditional, liberating, world‑healing love — given freely, experienced communally, and expressed through justice, compassion, and solidarity.
Because nobody ever made the world better simply by following the rules. But everyone who made the world better used grace to break them.
Amen