A Chosen People
Ephesians 1:3-14
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a video featuring Jon Stewart of the Daily Show on Comedy Central, where in a piece about the wedding of Chelsea Clinton, who is a Methodist, Stewart said this:
JON STEWART
“Methodists are like the University of Phoenix of religions. Just send them 50 bucks and click ‘agree’ and you’re saved.” Now whether you love or hate Jon Stewart, the fact is that his critique is pretty poignant about what Methodism has become. In a lot of ways, our denomination has forgotten who we are called to be as Christians and Methodists. As our t-shirts suggest this morning, it’s time we did some “rethinking” of church. To do that, we don’t need to focus first on something new, but rather pay attention to our core identity.
If you were to ask me to use one word to describe what Methodism is about, I would tell you that word is “grace.” If you look up “grace” in the dictionary, you see it defined as “elegance” or “politeness” or “a pleasing quality.” We think of dancers and skaters being “graceful,” for example. But in theological terms, grace has a much more powerful meaning when it is applied to what God is and does. Biblically and theologically speaking, “grace” means God’s unmerited favor—the fact that God loves us even when we don’t deserve it. Grace is God’s greatest gift to us—God’s love offered to us without any prerequisites or hoops to jump through. To put it another way, grace is God’s movement toward us at God’s initiative.
John Wesley believed, as did many of the theologians of the Reformation, that our salvation is only possible because God moves toward us by offering grace. When we receive God’s offer of grace, we are “saved.” Now, in a lot of Christian traditions, salvation is mainly about being saved from something—going to hell when you die. I’ve been around a lot of Christians who seem to be fixated on hell as much as, if not more than, heaven. Their idea of grace is a theology of “turn or burn,” and salvation acts as a kind of “get out of hell free” card.
Wesley would say, however, that while we do need saving from sin and its consequences, we are perhaps even more so saved for something as well—that God’s grace works in us to shape us into people who are holy and set apart as people who reflect God’s own image. God’s grace enables us to become the people we were created to be from the beginning—a people who can walk with God and know the power of God in our own lives in the present. Wesley was concerned as much about how we live as about how we die, and his theology was less about a formula for getting people into heaven than it was about a way to get heaven into people—the way of grace.
Using Scripture as his primary source, Wesley thus understood grace as the means by which God works a change in us, transforming us into God’s own image, making us fully whole and fully human in the way God meant for us to be from the beginning. Wesley would say that God’s grace comes to us in three movements, which he called prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace. Everything that Methodist Christians do and believe flows forth from this understanding of grace.
So, today we’re going to look at the first movement – prevenient grace. Now, here’s a word you have probably never seen before. “Prevenient.” It comes from the Latin praevenire, which means to “come before, precede, or anticipate.” Prevenient grace is thus the grace that “comes before” our conscious knowledge and love of God. It is the grace that God offers to us even before we know who God is or what God is up to.
Prevenient grace recognizes that God has known us and cared for us from the very beginning of our lives. Think back to our Call to Worship this morning, which comes from Psalm 139 – one of the great psalms that remind us who we are in God’s eyes. Listen again to the Psalmist’s words – “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up…where can I go from your spirit?...verse 13 – “For it was you who formed my inward parts ; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.” That reminds me, too, of the word God gives to Jeremiah when he calls the young man to be a prophet: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” God’s grace, God’s love, knows us intimately before we are even aware of it (Jer. 1).
The apostle Paul understood this and reminds the church at Ephesus that they, like Paul himself, were chosen in Christ “before the foundations of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love…” that they were “destined for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:4-5). We were created for relationship with God, to be God’s own children through adoption, made possible by grace. We are all “destined” for a relationship with God, but Wesley would say that we have a choice whether or not we embrace it. Grace is freely offered to everyone, regardless of their past—as Paul will say to the Ephesians in chapter 2, “You were once dead through your sins, all of us were, but God made us alive through grace.” God chose us first, and invites us to choose him, too.
Now, as many of you know, I am an adopted child. My adoptive mom used to tell me all the time that I was “chosen.” But like a lot of adopted children, I have also understood the other side of that equation. Studies have shown that a lot of adoptees struggle to define their identity because, often, they come into the world as the byproduct of a mistake and can come to believe that they themselves are a mistake. The result can be either a sense of despair and low self-esteem, or a driven-ness that seeks to prove one’s worth to those who gave them up, even if it was for a good reason.
A couple of years ago, I learned some information about my birth parents, whose names I still don’t know. I was born in a Salvation Army hospital in Pittsburgh to a 24 year-old unmarried woman. My father, according to the caseworker, was an officer in the Salvation Army—a pastor. I am the product of a scandal, a mistake. But when I read Scripture, I realize that I am not a mistake—I have been chosen by God. All of us have been chosen from the foundations of the world, from the time we were born, no matter the circumstances—to be children of God.
We are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” God does not make junk, and God does not make mistakes. God has formed us and created us for a purpose, to be loved and to love, and to reflect God’s own image. We are all adopted children. We are all chosen!
Problem is that we may begin to believe another script about ourselves. Our understanding of our worth, our chosen-ness, our reflection of God’s image, is distorted by what the Bible calls sin. When we don’t know or understand God’s grace and God’s plan for us, we can begin to believe that we are something else altogether. We can begin to believe that our worth is bound up in things like success, wealth, power, and control. We start to search for meaning in material things and medicate the pain of our loss of identity with addiction, anger, and despair. Sin moves us farther and farther away from who God has called us to be.
And yet, God still does not give up on us. Even when we don’t know God or have walked away from God, God still pursues us. Prevenient grace is God’s way of calling us back to himself. It’s a reminder of the truth that God is always moving toward us.
Well, think about this. How did you “woo” your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend? Let me talk to the guys for a minute, because I’ve been there. Did you approach her like a lawyer, building a case for yourself? Did you present her with a four-point plan and a Powerpoint presentation outlining your good qualities and how dating you would offer a wonderful plan for her life? No! (well, maybe did…I’d love to know how that turned out!). If you were really wooing her, you’d want to be close to her, get to know her story, tell her your own story. You’d enlist mutual friends to tell her about your good qualities (most people get introduced to each other via mutual friends). You would know that you can’t force her into a relationship with you, you want her to choose you freely.
It’s an imperfect metaphor, so work with me here, but I would argue that God pursues us in the same way. God does not come at us with four-point plans, arguments, and flip charts—God comes at us with a story, his story, and with an unconditional love. God reveals his love for us through the beauty of creation, a love letter designed for everyone. God comes to us through the witness of others who love him, who tell us about his love for us. God never forces us into a relationship with himself—it is always offered as an invitation.
God chooses us, leads us, calls to us. I find it interesting that the Greek word that is translated as “chosen” literally means “spoken forth.” God has spoken us forth and has spoken for us. We are “spoken for” to use the old language of betrothal!
But the invitation is not enough to save us and make us whole. We have to accept it in order for that new relationship to begin. Prevenient grace, when we become aware of it, convicts us of the reality that we are not what we were meant to be. Prevenient grace makes us aware of the God who is inviting us and reminds us that we are not worthy of that relationship because of the sin that separates us from God. Prevenient grace can begin to turn us toward God, however, and prepare us to accept God’s invitation. Next week we’ll talk about justifying grace—the grace that we experience when we say “yes” to God.
Another important thing to remember, too, is that our salvation isn’t for us only. God wants us to be whole so that we can participate with him in the salvation and redemption of the whole creation. God’s grace comes to us always on its way to someone else.
John Wesley used the metaphor of a house to describe God’s movement of grace. In that model, prevenient grace is the porch. When we were buying our new home, one of the criteria for me was that it had to have a porch. When I was a boy, my grandparents had a wonderful screened porch on their old farmhouse, and I used to love to sit out there reading a book or listening to the Pirates game on the radio, watching the cars and the people go by on the road out front. From the porch you could see people coming, you know who is pulling into the driveway by the barn. I could hear my cousins calling me out to play ball from the porch.
It’s on the porch that we greet people for the first time, it’s there that we observe the world going by in front of us. It’s on the porch where hands are shaken, conversations held, and lemonade shared. A porch invites a new relationship.
One of the reasons I love being a Methodist pastor is that we have a theology of God’s grace that meets people where they are. As we talked about last week, we celebrate an open communion, which extends the invitation of God to everyone. We want everyone to be invited into a new relationship with God, to step on to the porch and get to know that God who loved them enough to die for them. We extend an open invitation because we believe that God will meet anyone who will respond to his offer of grace and love.
In the same way, we not only baptize those who are old enough to confess their faith in Jesus Christ, but also infants. Infant baptism is a sign of God’s prevenient grace – a reminder that God is at work in the life of this child even before the child knows who God is. Parents take vows, promising to love this child and raise them so that he or she will know how much Christ loves them and respond to his grace. Confirmation is the time when we invite those baptized young people then to step through the door of justifying grace and accept the relationship that God has been offering them all along. For Methodists, baptism is always more about what God is doing through his perfect grace, than it is about our often inadequate and halting response. We don’t claim our baptism as a sign of how righteous we are, but as a mark of a grace and love that we cannot possibly earn, only receive.
No matter if you’ve been a Christian (or even a Methodist) your whole life, or whether you are coming here for the first time and wondering what all this about, I want you to hear today the good news that God is extending an invitation to you – an invitation to a new life. You have been chosen. You are spoken for. You are not a mistake. You are beloved.
This is the message we Methodists should be taking to those around us, particularly those whose image of God has become distorted. We have been called to approach people with grace, not judgment, with invitation and not condemnation. Prevenient grace is a doctrine that teaches us that God is always and everywhere pouring out his grace on people, even to those who don’t yet acknowledge or love him. If God is doing that, we must be doing the same. If we have experienced God’s grace, we are always looked for ways to share it with others.
Methodists have nothing to boast about or feel superior about, because we are all about grace. Grace is what defines us. We are chosen people—Christians are a chosen people--not because we are pious and perfect, but because of God’s unconditional, unmerited, and unbounded grace. We don’t burn Korans to protest 9/11, we don’t hate people who aren’t like us, we don’t see faith as a formula, and we don’t assign people to heaven or hell. We trust instead in God’s grace for us and for the world, because God is the one who chooses God’s people. We proclaim that grace through our worship and our service, and we join God in offering it to the world, praying that the world will respond to God’s invitation to be whole again.
My prayer is that we are no longer a people who are defined by a lack of identity, but a people whose identity is all about grace!
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