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“Paul’s opponents had a point. If God’s grace is truly unceasing, unstoppable, available to every soul no matter what we do or fail to do, then their question was reasonable: Why not go on sinning if grace keeps coming? If grace is going to show up anyway, why not live however we want?
History is full of people who did exactly that. Constantine the Great, the first Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity, is the most famous example. He spent decades waging war, ordering political executions, having his own son killed, and his own wife suffocated – doing what he wanted, the way he wanted, when he wanted to. And he was a really bad guy.
But Constantine was also a believer. He believed what the church taught, that baptism would wash away every sin. So, he waited. He delayed his baptism until he was dying, and then in one fell swoop washed away all his sins, and with death inevitable he was able to avoid any new sins, and … Heaven, here comes Constantine!
Last Sunday I preached about the kingdom of God and how attention to the particular revealed the universal love of God. Today I want to continue talking about the kingdom of God, this time looking at grace and how it locates us in the presence of God right here right now.
The context is spurred by the Constantinian calculation provoked in Paul’s letter to the Romans: If grace is truly that generous, that unconditional, that unstoppable – why not pull a Constantine?
This context is further complicated by the Gospel reading: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matt 10:34)
So, the question we face in this sermon is how do we understand grace while standing looking at the sword set in our hand.
Let me start by sharing a scene from Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha. We find Siddhartha as a ferryman living by a river, now at the end of his long spiritual journey. Then one day his former lover, Kamala, shows up. She is dying of a snake bite, and in her arms is her young son. The child, it turns out, is Siddhartha’s.
Kamala dies, leaving Siddhartha with the boy, who is a handful. Spoiled, contemptuous, ungrateful, cruel. He resents the simple life of the ferryman. He mocks his father’s wisdom.
He eventually runs away, back to the city, to the life of comfort he came from.
And still Siddhartha cannot stop loving him even though he suffered more over this child than over anything else on his grueling spiritual journey. All his years of deprivation and meditation, all his hard-won detachment, none of it can extinguish this love. He can’t reason it away. He can’t diminish it. He can’t vaporize it with meditation. Finally, another old ferryman, Vasudeva, says: “let the boy go. The river will teach you the rest.” (Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922, Part Two, chapters “The Ferryman” and “The Son”)
What strikes me about this story is that while Hesse is writing from a Buddhist perspective, it captures something true about God: that love is particular, incarnational, relational, and inescapable.
Siddhartha’s love for his son cannot be diminished by the son’s worthlessness. It cannot be extinguished by rejection. Nor can it be earned back, because it was never earned in the first place. It’s simply grace, flowing like the unstoppable current of a river.
And that is a fundamental reality of the Kingdom of God – Grace is what God can’t stop doing. It is love without a shut-off valve. Grace is the pipeline through which God’s love flows into our souls perpetually, from birth to death and beyond.
God cannot withhold it any more than the sun can choose not to give light, because God’s nature is love, and love is expansive; it is generative; it is eternal; and it must flow like a river.
Which leads us to an intractable and uncomfortable truth: that God is absurdly attentive and present, all the time… to all people. This extravagant love is connected to everyone by grace; which means everyone – including Constantine; Siddhartha’s ungrateful son; and to the people we think God should smite.
Siddhartha could not stop loving his son who despised him. And God cannot stop loving all people, even the bad ones. That is not a comforting thought.
And in fact, it is this thought that leads to the question: “Why should I be good if grace is going to come anyway?” At its core, this question is about where heaven is, and how we get there, and who is “allowed” in.
Many theologians, then and now, think heaven is where you go when you die, and baptism is the golden passport.
And so, if that is the case, the Constantinian rationale is pretty reasonable, and transactional. I do what I want, when I want, the way I want to. “I,” the first person pronoun, “I” attend to “me” which is “this body.” And then slip into heaven with my baptism passport when this body goes out of business. Which means now this world, this realm, is the chaotic netherworld of winners and losers – transactional, combative, disruptive, disorienting: and it sort of seems that way sometimes.
Now on the other side of the argument is heaven – right here right now. This is heaven as contiguous, present in our mortality and our immortality. It is where God sits around and counts each hair on our head and is personal friends with all the sparrows.
This version of heaven is rooted in the transcendent; which means living as eternal beings right now, as if we are walking in the Garden of Eden with God. This is a soul-first lifestyle, which seeks to align our living with the patterns God so carefully wove into creation… like the one I taught last Sunday where the particular reveals the universal love of God.
Heaven right here right now is about equanimity and joy and steadiness, and an indomitable sense of grace even in the midst of the disorienting trauma of other people’s transactional lives.
Which brings us to the clarifying point of today’s Gospel: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” (Matt 10:28) Fear, the Greek word phobos, means reverence and awe. Not fear as paralysis like when someone jumps out of a closet and scares you; but as orientation, like in the seventh verse of the first chapter of Proverbs: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Prov 1:7); Awe as in how the lesser responds to the greater, us to God, properly ordered, reverently respectful.
Paul explains the rightness of this orientation in Romans chapter 8: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39)
With that in mind let’s return to Jesus and his soliloquy on the sword. Because it turns out the sword is not given to create division, it is given to establish clarity of identity; to cut through the things that we take on, or the things that have been put upon us that become who we claim to be whether we want to be or not. Things like our role in the family as father or mother or brother or sister or brother-in-law or sister-in-law. These are good; and yet, they are insufficient, taking a back seat to our more fundamental identity as souls connected to God by grace.
Jesus did not come to establish peace on earth… he came to clarify our identity as souls connected to God. To punctuate the point Jesus says:
“Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” (Matt 10:28) Our souls are indestructible, indomitable, perfectly and eternally connected to God by grace… God’s grace is God’s unstoppable love coming upon us all the time like a river.
And the sword is set in our hand to pair back those things which supersede this primary identity as souls connected to God.
But the sword has also been wielded by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, doing bypass surgery to give humanity, all humanity, a new heart, a soft heart. Siddartha had a soft heart, and so did his son, and so did Constantine. And freedom allowed them to choose different sides of the “where is heaven and how do I get in” question: transaction or transcendence, body or soul, chaos or equanimity.
God’s grace flows despite our decision, but to choose the soul is to live in unity, in harmony, with who we are, and with where God is right here, right now. The soul-first life is to float upon the river of grace.
Which is better than rowing against the current. The kingdom of God, this world, is not designed for peace. Jesus is pretty clear about that and the evidence indicates that he is right.
This world, however, is designed for love and there is no love if there is no freedom, which means we can choose transaction or we can choose transcendence; we can choose to prioritize the body or we can choose to prioritize the soul. Either way there will be suffering. Either way there will be division and confrontation.
But to choose to live right here right now, with God in heaven; with the God of love is to choose to climb upon the raft of grace, to ride the river with all its rapids and eddies and long stretches of serenity.
It is to own our identity not as little Constantine’s, but as children of the God who loves us, who really really loves us, right here right now in heaven where we are and where God’s grace is an unstoppable river of love flowing into our souls.”