We now hear Psalm 8.

Reading: Psalm 8

Sermon

St Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, verse 14 says this:

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

I wonder how many times you have said those words with or to others at the close of a service or meeting. For me, I think it must be literally thousands of times! These words have become very familiar within the Christian Church – so familiar, in fact, that many people who hear them, or say them regularly, have no idea that they were written by St Paul and wouldn’t be able to find them in their Bibles even if they thought they were. It is the regular prayer or blessing used by countless churches and Christian groups.

The reason why these words are so popular is that they sum up very elegantly and clearly so much of what being a Christian is all about. They draw attention to the full riches of God. When we say these words, we have our focus firmly on the God we know in and through the person of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

So let’s explore this wonderful verse from the end of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians.

i) The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ

In his wonderful book “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” Philip Yancey says that grace, a freely offered, undeserved gift of love, is there all around us if only we would notice it. He gives a number of examples of what is known as “common grace”. He tells of climbing a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain. It was a brutal and exhausting hike. By the end he was drained of almost every ounce of energy. As his car rounded a bend on the way back to town, he came upon a pristine alpine lake guarded by bright green aspen trees behind which arced the most vivid rainbow he had ever seen. He pulled to the side of the road and stared in silence. It was a moment of grace and it was God-given.

On a trip to Rome he entered the basilica of St Peter’s with his wife at just the time when a large group of German tourists (or so he supposed) entered. He was about to leave when they started to sing. He writes, “As their voices rose, reverberating around the dome and blending together in multi-part harmony, Michelangelo’s dome became not just a work of architectural grandeur, but a temple of celestial music. The sound set our cells vibrating.” It was a moment of grace and it was God-given.

Perhaps we can all identify such moments of “common grace” in our lives. For me, recently, while walking along a quiet lane early one morning, I stopped to listen to the birdsong - something I have far too rarely done. The songs filled my brain to overflowing. It was totally overwhelming in its beauty. It was pure gift. It was sheer grace. It was God-given.

Philip Yancey had actually grown away from the legalistic faith he was taught in his youth, a faith full of “oughts” and “do nots”, and a God who was quick to condemn and whose love and forgiveness had to be earned. Gradually, through these moments of grace, which he recognised as being God-given, and through Christians who loved him as he was and did not condemn, he came to discover the God of grace who is, in the words of the psalmist, “a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.”

Being a Christian starts with grace. The reason we are what we are at all is because the living God has reached down to us in sheer undeserved mercy. Grace describes the totally generous and self-giving love of God.

So why does Paul speak of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, rather than simply the grace of God? The reason is that the grace of God finds its focus and fulfilment in Jesus. The Lord Jesus Christ chose to leave the riches of his heavenly existence and chose to become poor and humble on our behalf. Jesus is the person the generous and self-giving God became. Jesus embodied the grace of God. In Jesus grace became human, because that’s what grace needed to do to be fully itself, to give itself for the world. The cross of Jesus was the moment of pure grace. There he gave himself completely for you and me. There is seen the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

ii) The love of God

One of the most powerful stories that Jesus told is about the love of God the Father. Known generally as the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is now subtitled in many Bibles as the parable of the Loving Father, putting the emphasis where it needs to be.

It is an outrageous story. It does not point to a God who forgives only reluctantly, after making the penitent sinner squirm; or a God who is a distant, thundering figure who prefers fear and respect to love. Jesus tells instead of a father publicly humiliating himself by rushing out to embrace a son who has squandered half the family fortune. There is no solemn lecture, “I hope you’ve learned your lesson!” Instead, Jesus tells of the father’s exhilaration. “This son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.” He then adds the buoyant phrase, “So they began to celebrate.”

There is no catch, no loophole, disqualifying us from God’s love. In the story of the Loving Father, the son returns home in despair. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him.” God’s arms are always extended. God never turns away, even if we do.

The Bible goes on to insist that love is not just one aspect of the character of God. Love is the very essence of who God is. John 3:16 is often quoted: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Later, John’s first epistle simply says, “God is love.” The theologian Karl Barth, after writing thousands of pages in his “Church Dogmatics”, arrived at this simple definition of God: “the One who loves.”

Many people struggle to believe in a God of love. This is hardly surprising, because the experience of life that most people have is hardly one of unmixed happiness; and, if there is one God who made the world, most people who think at all about the world will conclude that this God can hardly be loving. After all, we are now living through a pandemic that has led to countless personal tragedies, a deep financial crisis, and that is throwing into sharp relief the many injustices and inequalities that exist across the world.

However, our faith persistently declares that the one God who made the world is indeed a totally loving God. He demonstrated this love by acting in the world, at enormous cost to himself, in the person of Jesus who, on the cross, took upon himself the pain and suffering and sinfulness and despair of the world and out of them wrought resurrection. Those who gaze upon that loving God in the person of Jesus discover an intimacy of trust like that of children with a father, a warm security of knowing that they are loved with an everlasting love. That is what St Paul means by “the love of God.”

iii) The fellowship of the Holy Spirit

The first part of JRR Tolkien’s epic work, The Lord of the Rings, is entitled “The Fellowship of the Ring”. In it a small and disparate group of humans, hobbits, elves and dwarves are brought together with the shared and dangerous task of taking the one ring of power and casting it into the fires of Mount Doom in the heart of Mordor, the realm of Sauron, the Dark Lord, who is intent on capturing the ring for himself and thereby imposing his evil and tyrannical rule over Middle Earth. The fellowship has a common purpose that unites it. It experiences many terrifying adventures on the journey. And its unity is constantly threatened by internal rivalry and jealousy as well as external threats from powers who want to see the fellowship destroyed before its task can be completed. It is a powerful book about how different personalities can be brought together in a creative partnership, a fellowship with a common purpose that can overcome difficulties and triumph against adversity.

At the end of his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul is arguing that those who are grasped by the love of God and who have experienced the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, are thereby joined together by the Holy Spirit in a family which is not based on physical or ethnic descent and in which anyone and everyone is welcome. It is a family called to share a common life and the word which Paul uses to describe it, koinonia, and which is normally translated “fellowship”, can also be translated “partnership”, “association”, “participation”, “sharing” or “communion”.

This fellowship between Paul and the Corinthian church has been under some strain. They have struggled to work out their relationship through visits, letters, reports, rumours, sorrow, joy, despair and hope. It is because Paul believes passionately that God’s own Spirit is at work both in his own life and in that of the Corinthians that he cannot let them go. In spite of many differences, he cannot walk away, but must thrash things out; must let partnership, participation and fellowship have their full expression.

Christians know that the Spirit of God is at work in each of us. The Spirit creates true fellowship when, in spite of the differences and tensions that sometimes occur, we allow our varied gifts to be used in creative partnership for the glory of God; when we choose to stand by one another and support one another in times of illness, stress and difficulty; when we decide to trust one another rather than allow fear and suspicion to triumph; when we look for the best in each other and not the worst. Then we truly know the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

So Paul has given us a summary of the Christian life in which he and the Corinthian Christians shared and in which we can share too, knowing the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. But he has done more than this. He has given us an astonishingly brief yet complete picture of the God in whom Christians believe. Here is the one God seen in threefold form. However, it would be several centuries before the church began to use the word “Trinity” to express the truth about God and the riches of God which Paul has already begun to articulate.

Coming to know the one true God in and through Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen one, and coming to know this God, and this Jesus, in and through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, demands a change of heart and life so thorough and costly that many back away from it. But let us choose this way. Let us go forwards, even if at great cost, into that grace, love and fellowship that the living God so freely offers to us.

Blessing

The goodness of the Creator, the grace of the Saviour, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, be upon you and within you.

May the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, remain with us all evermore. Amen.