Sermon Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21

People work so hard. They don’t feel appreciated, or fear their work doesn’t add up to much. They work hard, and the benefits don’t seem to add up to the amount of effort expended. That’s one reason we so want a world of grace. It s word that is hard to get a religious handle for, even as it shows up in all sorts of ways in other places.

Grace could be defined with the line from John: “Not to condemn the world, but that the world could be saved.” made alive through grace We are God’s workmanship, a gift of God. We have so many phrases with grace: grace under fire/under pressure-grace period-grace notes-state of grace -graced v. graceless. They all have a sense of almost effortless charm, beauty in form (Astaire).-After all these years we prize, amazing grace The phrase has a sense of how life can be or should be, not a struggle, but the sheer joy of living in the world. Life itself is a gift of grace. Grace can have the sense of an unexpected favor granted from on high, like the Publisher’s Clearinghouse van actually stopping at your house, when your number does come in.Jesus is the emblem of grace in our own lives. The life of Jesus is a gift to us. The death of Jesus was transformed into a free gift for us. The resurrection announces an upcoming gift for all of us. Grace comes to us without strings, fee and clear, a pure gift.

When do we prefer darkness to light? In ignorance, in fear of what we will see-sometimes we prefer what we know to what we do not know

Serene Jones speaks of us a envelopes of grace, containers of grace, and the church as graced communities-map of grace over the contours of our lives. Now there’s a good spiritual practice. Go over some of your own life story and overlay some of the moments and people of grace that touched your life. Grace is love. The life of Jesus emerges from God’s kindly, graceful disposition. In accepting that gift we are made acceptable to God. God has the grace to accept us for who we are. To live in a state of grace is to see oneself as whole and complete, our undiminished selves, stripped of our defenses, such as pride, envy, or the other deadly sins to relationship. Sin could be called the fall from grace. What gets us about grace is that the seemingly undeserving get rewarded. God does not run a meritocracy. Eugene O’Neil wrote that “we all are born broken. We live in mending. The grace of God is the glue.” Since we are just after St. Patrick’s Day, let me tell you a story from Brennan Manning. “ A priest is walking down a road to see a farmer praying by a rock near a field. He tells the farmer that he must be close to God. The farmer replies, why yes, God is very fond of me.”

The world is a grace-filled table, if we only perceive it. The library has been showing some movies, and I suggested that they try some classics, as we tried some time ago. Babette’s Feast. A general rises and says ”We have all of us been told that grace is in the universe. In our shortsightedness, we imagine divine grace to be finite…when the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.” In the story Babette spends all her lottery winnings on a fancy diner for 12. The math of grace is not that of the ledger book.It is the Cinderella story of finding the princess beneath the smudges. It is where God rejoices over the one found, not the 99 safe, where the laborer who works and hour get the same as those who put in a long, backbreaking day,