Jul 30th: Grace First, with Rev. Dr. Sam Adams.
From his Bio… Sam Adams [enter beer or founding father joke here] is an ordained minister with the Mennonite Church. With a PhD in systematic theology from Saint Andrews University in Scotland, he has amassed various other accolades of which he doesn’t talk about much. He will be the only rock climber/carpenter/preacher you know. He claims to be more of a teacher than a preacher, but he has waived an exuberant hand or two. His wife Andrea and three kids, Owen, Everett, and Eleni make up the Adams Family [again, too many jokes].
A Part of the Series:
Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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Grace First with Rev. Dr. Sam Adams. Series: One Thing A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Romans 5:8.
You are invited to join us this Sunday with Rev. Dr. Sam Adams from the Bend Mennonite Church. Dr Adams reminds us to reflect on God’s grace that comes to us while we are still sinners. Come and be reminded of the love that transforms us.
From his Bio… Sam Adams [enter beer or founding father joke here] is an ordained minister with the Mennonite Church. With a PhD in systematic theology from Saint Andrews University in Scotland, he has amassed various other accolades of which he doesn’t talk about much. He will be the only rock climber/carpenter/preacher you know. He claims to be more of a teacher than a preacher, but he has waived an exuberant hand or two. His wife Andrea and three kids, Owen, Everett, and Eleni make up the Adams Family [again, too many jokes].
Transcript:
Hi, my name is Sam Adams, I’m the pastor at bend Mennonite Church bend Mennonite meets in Heritage Hall in the Presbyterian Church, and we meet on Saturday afternoons. And so when Steven was gonna be gone on sabbatical, he asked me to fill in one Sunday for him. So bringing you the message today. And I thought I’d just start by letting you know that the, the prompt for this morning’s message is one, of course that you should all buy now be familiar. One thing I think you need to hear, to live creatively, courageously and compassionately. Unfortunately, I don’t know you as a congregation. And so I’m not sure that I can, in any significant way tell you what that one thing is for you. Now, this is not a criticism of the prompt given to those of us who are taking the pulpit this summer. But it is an honest acknowledgement that we really don’t know each other. So here’s what I’ve done. I thought about the one thing that has transformed my own understanding of the Christian faith, so that what I believe and how I understand the way I ought to live flows from that one significant place. So this is that one thing I would preach to myself. For me, this is a more honest place to start. And by doing this, you at least will know me better. And then that way, I might offer to you the very best response to the prompt that I can. So what is the one thing I have come to understand, as that which I need to hear in order to live creatively, courageously and compassionately? So I’ve chosen in response to this, the phrase that comes from Paul in his letter to the Roman church. In chapter five, he writes, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Now, I will get to the heart of this text in a moment, that is what I think to be the major takeaway that I, and maybe you need to hear. But as I began working on the message, for today, I realized quite early, that I would have to deal with a couple of things that might seem a bit challenging for us in our time. So these are the notions of sin, that we are sinners. And the fact that at the heart of the Christian faith is the cross, Christ died for us. I didn’t choose this text for these points. But here they are. I know that these are basic notions for our faith. And yet, I also know that for me, and for many people I know who have grown up in the church, this language is getting more and more difficult to use. In an increasingly secular culture like ours here in the Northwest, sin and sacrifice, keep sounding stranger, and stranger, but they are there, and we need to confront them. So first, let’s talk about the cross. Christ died for us. And here’s where my mind go goes. When I hear this phrase today, in the midst of our banned lifestyle, this phrase catches me as odd and out of place, whether it’s winter, and I’m skiing a bachelor or it’s summer and I’m paddling on the river, or just sitting outside in the late afternoon at any number of patios of any number of restaurants here in Central Oregon. To say Christ died for us, catches me as a as a little out of place. I joke with my own congregation that there’s always something better to do than go to church and bend. But if we can clear our calendars enough to meet together for worship, the message of the cross still seems especially hard sell easier might be spirituality, or vague notions of the divine in nature. Now, I think we do a really good job of cultivating a gorgeous lifestyle here. And the times, I wouldn’t want it any other way. But in some sense, I think we’re dealing with a situation that was aptly described by Jesus, when he told a wealthy person contemplating discipleship. It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. When I taught theology, I used to tell my students that if our faith was to have any hope of making sense, we would have to find a way to articulate it as good news to the most broken in our world. When we think of Jesus dying for us, we need to be in a place where we have found some solidarity with the suffering that makes up so much of our world. Bend today represents precisely the opposite of that. Those who are chasing wholeheartedly the beautiful lifestyle that we all imagined as the central Oregon ideal, cannot hear the good news of the gospel. Now remember, I’m preaching this to myself. Only those who have some experience of or solidarity with the oppressed and suffering in our world can truly hear the news that Christ died for us as something good. Those who sit at the bedside of a dying family member who experienced the Justice of systemic racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, who suffered abuse who have been alienated, abandoned and forgotten. All of these are in a place where a God who has suffered with them can be heard as good news. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer scratched on a slip of paper in prison, only a suffering God can help. To hear that Christ has died for us, is to hear that God has entered our brokenness, taken up the fallenness of human nature, stumbled with it to the cross, and there bore it, judged it, ended it and opened the door to the hope of a new humanity, a new redeemed humanity of which he is the pioneer and perfecter, and of which the Church is the imperfect witness. But things are more complicated than that. We are at the same time, both those who suffer and those who cause suffering. We are all of us caught up in the fallenness of this broken world, as beautiful as it is, as magical and as mysterious and wonderful as it may be, we are complicit indirectly and directly in the suffering that surrounds us. Indeed, we are sinners, the death of Christ without here going into all the theology that makes up the doctrine of the Atonement reconciles us to God, even as we are in our sin. And here is where the beauty and the power of this passage from Paul takes hold. In the preceding verses, Paul says, and I like this translation, rarely will one die on behalf of an upright person, or no, perhaps on behalf of a good person. One does indeed risk dying. But God shows God’s own love for us in that while we were yet sinners, the Anointed died on our behalf. This is the good news. Even in our sin, even as Paul writes a few verses later, when we are God’s enemies, God acts to reconcile us the death of Jesus. The word we could focus on for this entire message is the word while it makes all the difference. Grace comes first. I don’t know about you. But the way I learned the gospel was that first I had to learn how sinful I was. I had to learn to despair and find my hopelessness. In my situation. I was lost and a cinder and a wretch. Then, and only then, when I can recognize my need, does the news of Jesus come to me? The bad news first, then the good news. But Paul turns this around. While we were still sinners, while we were God’s enemies, Christ dies for us. Salvation doesn’t wait for us to recognize our sin, our brokenness, salvation, is what God does, while we are God’s enemies. For Paul, this theology was biography. zealous in his love for God and for God’s righteousness, Paul set out to persecute and destroy the early church, the disciples of Jesus, Paul didn’t conclude that he was doing the wrong thing, and then cry out to Jesus. Instead, Jesus reached out to him on the road to Damascus, while he was God’s enemy. This is what this was the grace of God that came to Paul, when Paul was actively pursuing his murderous and righteous rampage against the church. Grace came first. And in the context of that grace, Paul learns that he has a center. This is why I wanted to save talking about our sin until we could talk about grace. Only in the context of God’s grace in the embrace of God’s love, in the loud and affirming yes, that God says to us, do we learn the smaller but serious? No, that asks us to give up our sin and follow Jesus. And here’s the challenge that if we can embrace it, will open us to live creatively, courageously and compassionately in this world, as followers of Jesus, to be embraced by the grace of God and to learn of our sin in that light is to be set on the path to love others. In the same way, the way God has loved us is the way we are to love our neighbors. This means that we love and extend grace to our neighbor, and even or especially our enemy, before they have figured out their own sin, the deed it is unique to the Christian identity that we are a people who forgive others, extending grace, whether it’s not yet repentance, loving even our enemies. To live this way requires creativity, because the normal patterns of retribution, that make up the logic of so much in our culture, from the narratives that fill our media, to personal advice from our friends, just Last will not do. To live in such a way requires the same creativity found in such social movements as the civil rights movement, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, or the Christian Peacemaker teams in Israel and Palestine. It requires courage because it is difficult to love those who might wish you harm. Whether it’s someone who cut you off in a roundabout, the aggressor who threatens violence, or the tyrant who invades a neighboring country, it takes profound courage to love your enemy. Now, several things must be said here for clarity. Loving your enemy is not something we are given to do on our own. We are called to it as a community. The church is also not a calling to be abused or remain in abusive relationships, that would be a gross misinterpretation and application of what I’m saying. But it is something we do that demonstrates the way in which God loves the world. God extends grace, even as we are God’s enemies. And at the heart of this message of grace first, then, is a fundamental humility, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. This Humility is the fundamental insight there, but for the grace of God, go i It is the acknowledgement of our own brokenness, the log in our own eye, our fallenness, and our own complicity, the ground the humility of the Christian faith, but it is a humility that we learn in the context of the loving and open embrace of the God who first loved us. And so the compassion that extends to the world around us, is a compassion that has its grounding. In the humility we learn through the extraordinary reconciling love of God. This is, as I stated at the outset, the message that I need to hear over and over again, it is the fundamental logic of the Christian faith, and why I continue to be a Christian, even as the world around me seems further and further from wanting anything to do with the claims of Jesus. Grounded in grace, the way of Jesus is the only way that breaks us free from the cycles of violence, confront suffering, and finds a way through the brokenness of our world, with a vision of a new way of being human. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
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