October 15, 2016 SOLAS 2: Sola Gratia, Sola Fide Rev. Dr. John Ross Bible Reference: Mark 5:21-24, 35-43 Sola Scriptura Sola Fide Sola Gratia Solus Christus Soli Deo Gloria In the west entry of this building, there s a stair case that comes up, splits both ways and goes the rest of the way. It s the west stair case. On the large wall facing west are two huge paintings. They re paintings that were commissioned by Betty Johnson, about 5,6 years ago, that were to be painted by her daughter Krista, and she did, and she did a beautiful job. But the task fell on the clergy to pick the content of those paintings. Betty came to us and said, We d love to have these two done, and we love to have you pick passages of scripture to be painted that reflect sort of the heart and the soul of Wayzata Community Church as you, our current clergy leaders, perceive it to be. So, we got together, the ministers. We talked about it. We prayed about it. We landed on two passages as requested. One represents grace, and one of the best examples of grace in all of scripture the woman caught in the act of adultery, brought before the people, and in the moment before she s to be stoned to death, Jesus steps in and says, Hey, look, fine, but the one among you who is without sin, you go ahead and throw the first stone. Of course, they dropped the stones and walked away. A free gift of grace, bestowed upon this woman with the invitation to go and live her life differently as a result. That s the first painting. The second one portrays faith, the kind of faith that you re going to hear Carolyn read right now from the fifth chapter of Mark s Gospel. It s the faith not only seated in one person for himself, but faith seated in God and in Christ and in Jesus ability to heal somebody else altogether. These two paintings together really capture the essence of today s worship theme, being grace and faith. You ll note in the bulletin that there s a part of the passage in Mark 5 that s skipped over. There s eleven verses. The story you re going to hear all hangs together, but if you open your Bible when you get home or during the sermon, you ll see there s a story within the story, and that s a good reminder that for all of us. There s always a story within God s story, and that story is ours. So, listen up to Mark 5, and listen for your story in the midst of this one. (Carolyn Riley reads Mark 5:21-24, 35-43.) As you likely know by now, it was 500 years ago this very month that a portly, beer guzzling monk by the name of Martin posted 95 ideas about what was wrong with his church. That s right. It was his church, the church that he served, the church that he was part of. On October 31, 1517, that posting became a protest, and the Protestant Reformation was launched, a Reformation in the Church that continues very much to this day. We thought it was worth taking this occasion in time, and this moment in history to just pause, to reflect on the heart of
what was happening in Christianity at that time, to ponder and pray over what it could mean to us today, always and forever with an eye to the future. So, last week, we began the series. We were talking about what it means to be reformed and reforming, that we are a reformed congregation in that we are part of the Protestant Reformation, but we are also reforming, that we are continually reforming, that we are part of a tradition, especially in the United Church of Christ that says God is still speaking. Today, we re going to begin to unpack the five SOLAS. Now, there were five doctrinal Solas statements that really formed the core of the Protestant Reformation. If you don t have a good handle on these, I m not sure you ll be able to go too far into what the whole Reformation was about. But the word Solas or Sola is Latin, and it means alone. So, when you say something like Sola Gratia, in Latin it means grace alone or sola fide faith alone. Or Sola Scriptura scripture alone, and so on. Solus Christus and Soli Deo Gloria, the other two. We re taking these over the next few weeks leading up to All-Saints Sunday when we ll celebrate the priesthood of all believers. Now, scripture tells us, and brings us to the point of last week, that at the heart of the Reformation is this idea that we are saved by grace and faith alone. That s where it begins. That s where we re going to be today - Sola Gratia, Sola Fide - but first let s pray. Indeed, God, be in our heads and in our eyes and in our mouths and in our hearts. Dear God, as a gift of your Spirit, be in our understanding. We pray in Christs name. Amen. Jonas Nightingale was the character played by Steve Martin in a 1992 film entitle Leap of Faith. Anybody immediately remember this movie? It s worth seeing. Jonas Nightingale is a traveling tent revivalist in like in its most imaginable form right? Jonas Nightingale. Even his name right? - calls forth images of what you might expect to happen under the big top, donning his bedazzled sport coat that on cue transfers Nightingale into a character that would appear on a mountaintop, as in scripture. He dances his way around the stage, putting on a big show that is kind of one part circus and one part magic act. Is anything but authentic. He s a total fake, a total fraud. He knows it, and he admits it. Confronted by the local sheriff, played by Liam Neeson, who s a little bothered that he s taking money from people of this town that s in a state of depression, but speaking to a teen age boy, whom he was unable to heal of his physical disability, Nightingale says this, Look, kid. I run a show here. It s a lot of smoke and noise, and it s strictly for the suckers. I ve been pulling one kind of scan or another since I was your age, and if there s one thing I know it s how to spot the genuine article, because that s what I ve got to watch out for. Not the cops. You can always get around the cops, but the one thing you can never ever get around is the genuine article, and you, kid, you are the genuine article. Of all the lines in that movie, that is probably the most true, that in our faith pursuit, it is impossible to get around the genuine article. It s impossible to get around a sincere expression of truth that we experience in another person. Now, as I said, this is a great fun and funny film, but it s also a poignant portrayal of a real perversion of Christianity that existed particularly in our country late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that was these travelling shows that were intended to trick people with false testimony and fake healing, tricking people into some false sense of conversion that would happen in an instant and then be gone as the caravan rolled out of town. By their very design, these tent revivals were traveling shows. They weren t routed in relationship as was the ministry of Jesus. Their primary purpose was a conversion that culminated in something that would happen then and there after death, going against the very grain of what Jesus spent so
much time preaching about, that the kingdom of God is here and now, that the kingdom of God is right here on earth as it is in heaven, the prayer you just prayed, the prayer of Jesus. Now, as a result of these sort of ongoing shows that really lasted for decades but sort of then stopped happening with the same frequency, there were some interesting phrases that come out of these, some that are still repeated today, like Walk the aisle. Pray the prayer. One time faith. It gets you there. You like that? Nice little slogan. Or, Cry out once, and do not worry, God accepts you in a hurry. That one s okay. I could kind of live with that one. Here s another one, Here s all you do, just one quick prayer. So, grace is cheap. What do you care? I care a lot, and even though we laugh, we know at our core that, while grace is free, grace is anything but cheap, and when we cheapen it, we do violence to the Gospel. We know that to follow Jesus is anything but a one-and-done proposition, no matter when it happens. It s intended to be an ongoing way of life. We can be sure that salvation is not dispensed by the hand of any human, a pastor, or a priest, a prophet or a Pope. At the very heart and soul of the reformed, and at the very heart and soul of the reforming is the conviction that by grace, we have been saved, through faith. By grace, we have been saved, through faith. Sola Gratia. Sola Fide. By grace alone we have been saved through faith alone. Now, it that s a little confusing, it s okay. It s understandable because here we are talking about five Solas, and Sola means only and alone. If it s only or alone, how can there be five of them? Which is it right? Is it saved by grace alone or saved by faith alone? My answer to that question is, Yes. Yes it is. Both and. Let me explain. First, Sola Gratia. Sola Gratia of Grace Alone. Grace is intended to be experienced. It s not something you can put into some nice little cliché that s a memorable phrase for church growth. Grace is to be experienced, and like I once heard that if we hear something, we forget it. I hear or I heard, and I forgot. I saw, and I remembered, but I experienced, and I understood. That s was grace is like. We hear lots of things and we forget them. We see some things, and we might remember, but it s not until we experience it that we fully understand it. That s the very essence of grace. It is to be experienced, to be experienced as a free and unmerited gift, a generosity of spirit. Now, if we put forth grace as one of the three G s of Wayzata Community Church when people come into the church and want to become a member, we talk about grace and growth and generosity. It s important enough to us that it s the first thing that we talk to people about. Grace with a capital G. We just experienced grace in these baptisms, knowing full well that we re not doing anything for these children. Even as the water trickles off their forehead, we know that the God of the universe loved them long before this day and will love them long after this day no matter where they go, no matter what they do. That s grace. And to help those who have southern heritage in the room, let me offer this image. Grace is like grits served with breakfast in Alabama. You don t ask for it. It just comes. Grace it just comes to us as a gift, and there s no expiration date on this grace of which I speak. It s not like a perishable food item that will go bad or sour someday, or like a lottery ticket that a guy found in his pocket this week. Did you hear this story on the news? Guy found a lottery ticket in his shirt pocket. He looked at it, and the expiration date was the very next day. So, he dashed over to find out what it was worth. Just twenty-four million dollars. True story. He almost missed it because a lottery ticket will expire, but God s grace never will.
I had the lovely, yet difficult experience, of bringing communion to a family in their home this week, a family that s facing the reality of a diagnosis of cancer, and in our time together, it became so abundantly clear to me again that when we re faced with the prospect of our own death - that we will not, in fact, live forever, it brings to the surface questions really worth asking, puzzles really worth pondering. So, before we broke the bread and before we poured out the cup, we talked about what it means to be saved by grace, specifically that it means that by grace we are not only saved from something but for something, that we re not only saved from something that may or may not happen to us after we die then and there, but by grace we are saved for something right here, right now. Today, and until you ve stared death in the face with your husband seated next to you and your two young adult children seated across from you, you can t fully understand the prospect of what it means to be saved by grace, not only from something, but for something all of us, each and every one of us. Time and again in scripture, Jesus saves people, not only from an unknown future but saves them for a specific purpose here and now. The whole chapter of Mark 5 just the one story here. There are several others. In every case, Jesus is saving people from ailments for something else, saving them from emotional, spiritual, physical ailments for all kinds of purposes that have to do with life here and now. Jairus daughter, the twelve year old girl, already in the grips of some kind of afterlife Jesus saves her from that for something, and it seems to be important enough to him that she gets started right away because Mark includes the detail that Jesus says, Get her something to eat, as if to say, She s got work to do. Get this little girl something to eat. Paul wrote, By grace we have been saved from something and for something, but Sola Gratia grace alone wasn t the end of it for him, and it wasn t the end of it for the reformers, either. Sola Fide, through faith - through faith - with the exclamation mark on the Protestant Reformation. Saved by grace through faith. If there s only a few words that you take with you today and talk it out over lunch, those are them. What does it mean to be saved by grace through faith? We ve heard a little about grace. Let me unpack faith for a minute, and then we ll be done. Sola Fide, faith alone. Can you remember a time when someone did something totally unexpected for you? Think about it for a minute. It might be something really big or, even better, something really small. Someone did something completely unexpected for you, something you didn t deserve, something you didn t even ask for. Can you remember how that made you feel? Do you remember what you did in response to that gift? If grace is God s gift to us, then faith is our response to it. It s our gift back to God, and I gotta tell you, in all my reading, it seems to me that the biggest misunderstanding of the Protestant Reformation, the biggest misunderstanding of the faithful work of these reformers has been that Sola Gratia and Sola Fide mean that we don t have to do anything anymore. It s all free! It s all grace. Who cares? It s like a free for all now. It doesn t matter how we live or who we serve or how we love, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Grace is, indeed, free, but it s not cheap. Faith alone is what brings value to grace alone. Faith alone. Sola Fide. Faith alone, but I m here to tell you that faith is never alone. Those aren t my words. Those are the words of the reformer Philip Melanchthon, a sort of right hand man to Luther s, sort of made famous by this idea, yes, faith alone, but faith is never alone. What he
meant is faith is never absent from action, that faith, true faith in response to God s grace, is never without works. It is, in fact, our response to it. By grace we ve been saved through faith. Grace alone, grace all by itself just kind of left there is cheap. It s like the cheap faith of Jonas Nightingale. It s a one and done proposition, a selfishness, but faith, faith as a response to grace, is a never ending promise of selflessness that leads to life, the abundant life that Jesus spoke of so often. The Gospels are littered with examples of faith, the active response of those saved by grace, from Peter, sinking in the water that day because he stepped outside the boat, sinking like the rock that he was, to a nameless paralytic by the pool who waited thirty-eight years to dance his way home. From a woman who needed only to touch the hem of Jesus cloak to a shrimpy little tax collector named Zacchaeus, who gave back everything he had ever stolen. By grace, we have been saved, through faith. By grace we have been saved from something for something, through faith that leaves us no choice but to respond in kind to an unexpected gift. You know, grace and faith are not competitors. I ll just close with this. They re not competitors. They re not at odds with one another in any way, shape or form. In fact, I would submit that they are two sides of the same coin, and one side without the other makes it a counterfeit coin, like grace without faith or like Jonas Nightingale. It s a counterfeit, and one without the other is impossible. Faith without grace will only get you so far. Faith without grace reminds me of every self-made man I ve ever met. So, if you haven t been to the west entrance, lately, if you haven t come up that west stair case, leave the building that way. It s a beautiful day. If you parked on the east, just walk around. Take a minute. Go over there. Look at those beautiful paintings. Ponder the beauty of the two stories captured from scripture in the eyes of an artist. Ponder the grace of Jesus freely extended to a woman who needed it, and consider the faith of a father that healed his daughter and find yourself, then finally find yourself in that on-going story of God s amazing grace and our faithful response. Sola Gratia? Grace alone? Sola Fide? Faith alone? Which is it? Yes. To the Glory of God. Amen.