St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Sue preached this sermon on Sunday 20 June, the second of trinity. Here it is for you again:

I wonder how many passwords you have to remember? You need a passcode to unlock your phone, and then passwords to access your email, buy a book or check your bank accounts. Even if you don’t use the internet much, you have to remember the pin for your bank account and your burglar alarm code. Helen will tell you about the day when I wasn’t well and asked my husband to take the 8 o’clock service. He needed the alarm code to get in, but unfortunately, in my dazed state, I gave him my credit card pin number. Helen wasn’t too pleased at having to answer the door at 7.45 to give him the right code!

So many ways that we have to find the right password to give us access. Paul lived in a world where all sorts of people were desperately looking for ways to access God. Some tried to obey the laws in the Old Testament word for word. Some studied philosophy, thinking that if only they kept learning, the answer was there. Others tried to live good lives.

Many centuries later there was a monk who prayed day and night, but the more he prayed the further he felt from God. He was desperately sad, because he felt that God demanded so much from him and that he was a complete failure — so much so that he didn’t feel loving towards God. Indeed he hated him for making him feel so small. One day he went up into a tower to pray, and he suddenly realised that the whole of the universe is a gift. His life was a gift, and life beyond death was an unbelievably wonderful gift. His life was changed forever. His name was Martin Luther, and his realisation changed history as people began to approach God in a new way.

Paul had had a similar experience on the road to Damascus, where his hatred of Christians turned into love for Christ. It’s all here in the first verse of our reading from Romans — we are justified by faith. We only need to remember one password: Jesus Christ. We can stop striving to reach God, because God is striving to reach us. We have access to grace — that free gift from God which declares that we are loved and acceptable. We are beautiful in his sight. And this is not just a single profound experience — it is living surrounded by that grace, knowing that God is with us, wants only our good, and is there to support and uphold us.

Paul says that “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God.” Peace is often represented as an absence of stress, something we can achieve through mindfulness or listening to whale music, but for Paul it is much more than a temporary state of mind. It is more like a peace treaty signed between us and God. We no longer have that feeling of enmity towards a stern judge who finds us wanting; instead we can live in harmony with God and therefore with each other. It’s the peace of knowing that we are loved and cared for, and that nothing can separate us from God.

Paul goes on to say that the next result is that we can “boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” Paul comes across as very much the extrovert, and we can imagine that before his conversion he would let people know how educated he was, his status as a Roman citizen, and his Jewish pedigree. He remains the same person — but his itch to brag has been replaced by a need to tell others how wonderful God is. His confidence has become not about himself, but about Jesus Christ and his power to save us. Paul has simply exchanged one set of credentials for another — his own impressive CV for the single name of Christ. Earlier in Romans he has explained that all humanity has fallen short of the glory of God, but now through the redemption of Christ we can all share in that glory.

But the gospel turns everything upside down. The experience of grace and peace does not mean that life will be easy — far from it. We can still expect our share of suffering. But Paul argues that there is a chain reaction where one thing sets off a whole series of processes. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. God does not send us suffering because it is good for us — he transforms the suffering we are afflicted with. Julian of Norwich wrote: “All his actions unfold from this love, and through this love he makes everything that happens of value to us.” The context of our lives is love, and whatever happens it is of value to us, not destructive. When we are caught up in suffering we often can’t see this clearly, and although we trust that the suffering will be used by God, it often doesn’t feel that way.

So we have hope — not the wishy -washy hope of “I hope it will be good weather tomorrow,” but the certain hope that knows that one day things will be not just better, but perfect. To quote Mother Julian again: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” She was given these words at a time when, aged thirty, she was bedridden and paralysed and the priest had been summoned to give her the last rites. To everyone’s surprise she lived another fifteen years, and spent the rest of her life meditating on and writing about her revelation.

On my computer I probably have over a hundred passwords, but I only need to remember one — the key to the password manager that keeps all the others safe. In the same way, we have acceptance before God, peace and hope, and all of it is accessed through the one password: the grace of Jesus Christ. Amen.