“By the grace of God, I am what I am”
“Standing on the promises” is an old evangelical hymn composed by Russell Kelso Carter, professor of chemistry, natural science, civil engineering and mathematics at the Pennsylvania Military Academy in 1886, just four years after the building of this Church. Some of you may know it. “Standing, standing/ standing on the promises of Christ my Saviour,/ Standing, standing,/ I’m standing on the promises of God.” It refers to the promises of God and signals the sure, rock-fast nature of those promises even in the face of “the howling storms of doubt and fear.” How? “By the living word of God.” It belongs, I think, to Paul’s message in today’s epistle.
But how do we stand? There are the things which God wants and promises for us and then there is our relation to such things. Paul talks about our standing on the gospel which has been preached to us and which has been received by us “by which also ye are saved,” he says. But he adds a conditional clause; “if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” At issue is the living word of God in us.
The promises are not to be taken for granted. They are given, to be sure. Paul goes on to talk about the Faith in more-or-less creedal terms and about his own early relation to the proclamation of the gospel – “I persecuted the Church of God,” he says in an honest and confessional way. How then does he now stand in relation to the gospel? As “the least of the Apostles,” he suggests, but nonetheless an Apostle – one who is sent. Such a standing and such a sending are nothing less than acts of grace: for it is “such a measure of thy grace” that allows us to “run the way of thy commandments” so that we “may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure” as today’s Collect puts it. Something is required on our part, to be sure, and yet, what is wanted has its source solely, utterly, and completely in God. Grace is what comes from God to us, but we are not merely the passive recipients of God’s grace; we have to run with it that it may define and shape us. “By the grace of God, I am what I am,” Paul states, aware of the transition and transformation from persecutor to follower and even more, to being an Apostle, to being who he is solely by the grace of God.
God’s grace stands over and against the spirit of self-presumption as illustrated in the Gospel parable of the Pharisee and the Publican which complements the Epistle. The Pharisee is a member of a strict religious sect within the Judaism of Jesus’ time; the Publican here is not the owner of a pub but a Jewish tax-collector in the service of the Roman state, despised, no doubt, by all. But both are in the temple, the place of prayer and praise. Both are there to pray. Yet only one is praying. Only one, we might say, is “standing on the promises,” attentive we may assume to the “living word of God.” The other stands only upon the ground of his own self-assertion and the empty pride of presumption.
Thus, the Pharisee shows us the nature of false prayer while the Publican shows us the nature of true prayer. The Publican illustrates the meaning of the grace of God by which we are what we are and without which we are nothing – a nothing which is actually nothing more than just ourselves. This “nothing more than just ourselves” is what we see in the Pharisee. How? Because “he prayed thus with himself.” His prayer is essentially self-congratulatory and self-referential. He thanks God for who he thinks he is, but by way of contrast between himself, in his sense of superiority, and those whom he calls “others”, described judgmentally as “extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”
His prayer is no prayer. Why? Because he is not standing on the true ground of God’s promises. He is standing on the barren ground of human presumption, himself. His prayer is vain and empty. In his prayer, God is nothing more than a reflection of himself, the very reverse of the spiritual insight of ancient Judaism that we are made in the image of God and not God in our image. To be sure, he is in the temple. To be sure, he is there with the intention to pray. But his prayer is no prayer at all because he is not open to the truth of God, to what the Collect calls the “mercy and pity” of God.
The contrast could not be greater than between the Pharisee and the Publican. The Publican’s prayer is anything but presumptuous. He stands “afar off”. He “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven”. Rather than patting himself on the back, which, metaphorically, is what the Pharisee is doing, he literally “smote upon his breast.” Rather than puffing himself up at the expense of putting others down, he says, simply and humbly, “God be merciful to me a sinner”. It echoes and mirrors the epistle that “by the grace of God I am what I am”. But what is he, really? Is it a matter of self-definition and self-assertion? Is he “gay”, “straight”, “traditional”, “radical”, “reactionary”, “alt-right”, “alt-left”, or any number of the postures of identity politics in contemporary culture? No. He is simply and profoundly a repentant sinner seeking the transforming grace of God. Can any of us really say anything more than that? He who stands afar off is the one who is truly near the heart of God.
Yet, we must be careful not to despise and condemn the Pharisee simply but to recognise in the Pharisee a problem for us all – the problem of too much self-regard and the sense of self-righteousness which profoundly alienates us from God in the very places that would recall us to God and to his truth and grace for us. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus praises the righteousness of the Pharisees because true righteousness is about the grace of the Law, about the divine love which seeks our good and our perfection. But it is not found in praying with ourselves; it is found in our humbly seeking God’s will.
Prayer stands upon faith and faith is strengthened by prayer. Both are activities by which the grace of God is active and alive in us. We do not know how or always what to pray for. But in prayer we seek the articulation of our desires, learning from God what to pray for. We seek God’s will and not our own self-affirmation. That requires our total openness to God without which our prayers are no prayers, whether we are standing or kneeling or jumping up and down in ecstasy in the holy places in the attitudes of prayer. There is the matter of our hearts and our minds, not just the postures of our bodies.
Even more, there is the sole matter of the grace of God and our engagement with that grace as it is mediated to us through the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated. “By the grace of God”, and not otherwise, we are what we are, something precious in the sight of God who has revealed himself to us both in himself and what he is for us. Such is his mercy. Such are his promises. But only by the mercy of God can we stand upon the promises and begin to become who we are in the mercies of Christ. Perhaps, as Robert Frost suggests, “I have promises to keep/ and miles to go before I sleep,/ and miles to go before I sleep,” but let us pray that we stand faithfully upon the promises of God, trusting in his mercy and seeking his grace through the power of his living word.
“By the grace of God, I am what I am”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 11, 2019