a more gracious grace
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Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
July 6, 2025—Proper 9C
Isaiah 66:10-16; Galatians 6:1-18; Luke 10:1-12,16-20
Hear the words of the prophet Isaiah: “You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice; your bodies shall flourish like the grass; and it shall be known that the hand of the Lord is with his servants…” (Isa 66:14)
What if we started THERE?
Or perhaps Psalm 66: “Bless our God, you peoples; make the voice of his praise to be heard; Who holds our souls in life, and will not allow our feet to slip” (Ps 66: 7-8).
That will do too. Or any of the many passages of scripture that express God’s abiding love for us; that assure us that we are held, we are longed for, we are claimed. This is an excellent place to ground our theology, and few would argue against it.
But what if I were to go another step, and assert not only that God loves you, but that you deserve to be loved by God? That you are, in fact, worthy of that love!
It almost feels heretical. As former Episcopal priest Kerlin Richter puts it, “So much Christian theology teaches that grace is beautiful only because we are wretched. Grace is amazing because we are depraved. Grace is necessary because we are, at our core, broken, sinful, wrong.” (from “my problem with grace,” In the flesh substack post, June 30, 2025). We are, as they say, miserable offenders.
And look, this understanding of Grace might well come from a good place. Grace is this huge, miraculous gift from God, and surely it makes it huger and more miraculous if we imagine ourselves to be a long way down. If we imagine the task of accepting us (loving us) to be almost monumentally difficult.
At its best, the enormity of this particular model of Grace can produce an ecstatic sense of gratitude. But at its most ironic, it can also make it harder to accept the gift in the first place (who could really believe that it extends as far as our miserable offensiveness?). Beyond both, there’s the fact that making wretchedness our core narrative about ourselves has a gravitational pull to it, a weight that threatens to drag us into a pit of undeserving. We are not deserving of love, not deserving of forgiveness, not deserving of inclusion in the chosen ones. Which will not only affect our understanding of God’s love, but our understanding of love in general.
In contrast, what we see in the Bible is not the story of a God who loved the people of Israel, even though they were entirely undeserving. What we see is a God who chose a people, and sometimes they were amazing and brave and hospitable and faithful, and sometimes they were awful and ungrateful and selfish and cruel. And God nurtured them, taught them, accompanied them; and God sometimes raged at them, berated them, and despaired of them. But none of that negated the choosing. All of that, in fact, was part of the choosing. Part of the love.
We too, clearly, are a whole mixed bag. Some of it amazing, some of it awful, most of it some other category of stuff. No two ways about it, that’s what’s on offer when it comes to human beings. And if we are chosen, if we are loved, that whole mixed bag is what’s been chosen. Is what’s being loved.
And yes, when it happens, that really IS grace. And it really does kind of take your breath away.
At the risk of losing all the non-Millennials and Xers in the room, all this talk about the miracle of being loved for your whole self has me thinking about a scene from the tv show Felicity. If you’re not familiar, all you really need to know is college students learning about life and love etc etc. But there was this scene, in which Felicity was with her boss, Javier, helping him get ready for his wedding. And he asked her, “On a scale of 1 to 10, if 10 is me: how do I look?”
And on the one hand, this could be vanity, assuming that he is a 10. On the other hand, it could be humility, acknowledging that he’s clearly not the world’s 10, so he wants to be graded on a curve. But on the hand I’d like to put up in the air here, it’s a recognition that the only scale we can really measure ourselves on is, in fact, ourself.
We express this truth in a lot of different ways. How true to myself am I being? Am I being my best self? Am I the person God created me to be?
And also … am I aware of the person I actually am, or am I blinded by the person I wish I were, or that someone else wants me to be?
Paul is talking about this in Galatians today, when he says, “All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbor’s work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own loads” (Gal: 6:4-5). We have to work on our own stuff, not whatever someone else needs to work on in themself. Stop looking at them and what they’re doing, and look to yourself. Invite Jesus to come along. Show him everything, even the stuff you’re ashamed to let him see. See how he reacts. You’ve read enough Jesus stories to have a sense of this. You might discover he’s actually fine with the messy bits you were trying to hide, but maybe he’s worried about that nice shiny place you’ve placed out front. The thing you were so very proud of.
You get the picture. Get to know who you really are. And allow yourself to admit where you aren’t living out those Baptismal vows of service, humility and kindness; of justice and peace; of respecting the dignity of every human being. Those gaps, between who you are and who God calls you be, they are the load Paul tells you need to carry.
(Quick side note: anyone who might read the phrase, “everyone must carry their own load” as some kind of justification for dismantling the social safety net, should look no further than verse 3, which exhorts us to bear each other’s burdens, in order to obey the law of Christ)
We all have work to do. We all have a load to carry. Mine will be different from yours, and not just because I have different things for which I need to atone, different ways in which I am running from what God calls me to be. Even if both of us completed the entire assignment, we would look different. As I said last week, we all have different gifts that God longs for us to maximize, different sins we might well work on curbing. And the goal isn’t some perfect completion of a giant checklist of good and bad.
That, in fact, is the point of Grace. That the pursuit of perfection will only drive us mad. That pursuit of a perfect scorecard will only lead us to compare ourselves to other people, whose work is different from ours. Grace is there to remind us, not only that we cannot achieve that perfection, but that we never needed to in the first place.
Grace isn’t about God reaching down to (miraculously, heroically) accept the un-deserving. It’s about God assuring us that we do not need to spend our whole life trying to earn God’s love. We are simply free to live into it. To grow into it. To grow into ourselves. And maybe, and this is the truly heroic thing, not just to accept God’s Grace, but to live God’s Grace: to learn how to extend that miraculous acceptance of a whole, messy human person, not just to others, but to ourselves. May it be so, Amen.