Embodied Grace

I want you to take a moment to remember a time you experienced grace. Remember a time that you knew and felt unqualified love and care just for being you. If it helps, you might close your eyes for a moment. As much as you can, take yourself back to that moment of grace. What led up to that moment? What were the sights and sounds and smells in that moment? What was it like to experience that moment of grace?

Now, notice where you feel that grace in your body. Does it wash over you like a warm summer rain? Does it embrace your middle like a familiar hug? Does it resonate deep in your gut? Does it feel like firmness under your feet? Wherever and however you feel it is right for you. Enjoy that feeling for a moment before you bring your attention back to the present.

I don’t know what all your moments of grace are, but one of those moments of experiencing grace for me was a turning point in my understanding of God’s love. I was sitting in the seminary chapel, almost a year into my seminary training. By some intersection of the preacher’s sermon that day and what was going on in my own life and the movement of the Holy Spirit, I really heard the words at the communion table “The body of Christ, given for you,” and actually believed in my body the “for you” part. I heard in a new way, really heard for the first time those words and believed that God’s grace was for me and not just for people in general or for others who were better or holier than I was. I felt that in my body, like a strong but gentle hug around my middle. It was an embodied experience, not just for the eating and drinking at the communion table, but a whole-body experience of grace. I hope and pray that you’ve had many of these kinds of moments to experience unconditional love in your life.

It’s those kind of experiences of grace that define what it means to be a saint. Too often we think of the famous saints who did famously pious or important things. Thanks be to God for their work. But today recognizes that there are literally billions of saints who live and die unnoticed by all but their immediate family and community. Some are just as faithful and do just as transformative work as the famous ones we remember. Many are just ordinary folks getting through the day. Others might even live lives of questionable character. All of us carry faults and failures in the midst of it.

But it’s not what we do with our lives that makes us saints – it’s the action of God who blesses us in baptism. It’s Christ’s action described in our second reading today: “In Christ, we also obtained an inheritance having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ…were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” We inherit sainthood through baptism. We experience grace by the power of the Holy Spirit. We have not earned it but it simply comes to us, unwarranted and unexpected by our having been adopted as children of God through baptism.

This inheritance isn’t just heaven or resurrection, but it’s the promise of the Holy Spirit in every moment of life and the promise that the grace we often only experience in small snippets and fleeting moments is our reality always from the moment we are sealed with the Holy Spirit at baptism.

That baptism happens with water poured on our bodies and the sign of the cross marked on our foreheads. Embodied action that communicates grace. Which gives us the chance to remember that feeling whenever the sign of the cross is again marked on our foreheads: at confirmation, and at anointing for healing, and at the time of our deaths. If we in the church could really claim this identity as saints sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ, we might well affirm our baptism at every major life turn, at every major moment. Moments of joy and blessing like marriage and the birth or adoption of children, at graduations and new careers and retirements and moves. And we could do it at moments of loss or sadness – at the diagnosis of illness, at the loss of loved ones, at the dissolution of relationships, at moments when our lives seem to be falling apart. All moments for us to affirm our inheritance as saints and return if only for a fleeting moment to that embodied experience of grace.

That is what some of us are doing when we make the sign of the cross – either on our foreheads or across our bodies. We pause in the midst of whatever it is we are experiencing to embody our sainthood – to feel on our bodies that sign of grace. Whether it’s tracing that invisible cross marked at baptism or remembering the cruciform shape of our own bodies, that can be a moment not just to remember in our heads but to feel in our whole beings the grace of God poured out for us.

Remember now that feeling of grace in your body from whatever moment you thought about as we began the sermon. Now if you feel comfortable, trace that sign of the cross on your forehead. What if tracing the sign of the cross reminded us not just of baptism and not just of an abstract idea of God’s love, but connected us to all those physical, embodied feelings of God’s grace? What if tracing that sign of the cross reconnected us not to grace in the abstract, but to the very particular moments we have experienced the lavish love of the divine?

That’s the life of a saint – the capacity to experience the profound connection to God’s always-certain promise no matter the circumstances and no matter the environment. In blessedness and struggle, God’s promise is there whether we are aware of it or not. When Jesus speaks of blessedness and woe in the gospel reading, it’s not a system of rewards and curses. It isn’t “If you are poor then God will bless you.” It’s not “If you are rich, God will make you unhappy.” It’s something more like a description of the capacity of God to bless with love and grace in the midst of poverty, hunger, and mourning. The capacity to remember love, grace, and the promised inheritance of God even in bodies that are experiencing trouble. And the woes are more like a list of things that can sometimes make us feel disconnected from that grace and that promise. The word “woe” isn’t God’s curse on those who have wealth and plenty and joy. But it’s a word of caution when we are rich or full or joyful, a reminder perhaps to trace that cross again on foreheads, to connect again to the feeling of grace in our bodies and remember the source of our life and joy. Now that action might, too, remind us that the baptismal life calls us to transformation, to generosity for the sake of others when we are the ones who are full. But that call is by way of that embodied feeling of grace that overflows through us and beyond us.

Today we honor that promise of love and grace expressed to us in baptism and all the moments of grace that abound in our lives at every turn. Whether for you it’s making the sign of the cross at the font, or it’s receiving communion, or if it’s singing your favorite hymn, or it’s passing the peace, or it’s something else that becomes a touchpoint for you, each of us has the opportunity to physically reach out and reconnect to those profound moments of grace even when we are in the midst of struggle or sadness or hardship. Because that grace is always there. God has promised that in the water and word that called us children of God and welcomed us into the great communion of saints, the family of God.

-Pastor Steven Wilco