The Fullness of His Grace by Rev. Dr. Jay Marshall Groat – January 5, 2025, at Mount Vernon, Ohio, based on John 1: 1-18

Unlike our words of meditation this morning, these words that Ian just read for us are part of our lectionary readings this morning, which means we share the reading and hearing of these words with Christian communities all over the world. The longer I’m in ministry – it happened fairly early for me – every year on the first Sunday of the calendar year I get excited. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, that’s not where I’m going with this. You do New Year’s resolutions, good for you. I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions. There’s something deep, even anthropological, that I can feel inside of me on this first Sunday of the year. I get excited about new beginnings. The great Protestant theologian of the 20^th century – anybody remember the 20^th century? I remember the 20^thcentury – Paul Tillich from the 20^th century, a newspaper reporter was asking him questions at one point and Tillich sort of leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I think I can boil down the entire Christian message in one word.” And the reporter said, “Really?” And Tillich said, “Yes, I can boil it down to one word and that word is ‘new.’” In Christ. He said there is something new. New beginnings.

I’m proud to tell you, and many of you know this, I make reference to it from time to time – I’m proud to tell you that I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, and I’m a proud Presbyterian pastor’s son. I’m a preacher’s kid, Presbyterian, those are my roots. I was serving, as I’ve shared with you, as an associate pastor in my first job in suburban Chicago. One of the first – I won’t say it was a controversy, but one of the first challenges that congregation faced, a long time ago in the 20^thcentury, at that time those Presbyterian churches followed the rule – and it was a rule – that you weren’t allowed to take communion in a worship service until you were confirmed. In that particular church we confirmed, we had a confirmation class, we confirmed students, as I recall I think it was seventh grade – anyway, whenever you’re 13. There were a handful of us in the church and I was one of them who said, “What if we opened it up to everyone regardless of background, regardless of age?” And we asked the rhetorical question, “Who would Jesus keep away from this table?” I was very young and very naive at the time, and I said to myself, “Surely everyone will get behind this.”

Seriously, I never preach sermons that tell stories about me being a hero. There are preachers who do that, that’s fine, I’m sure they’re nice people. I don’t do that. But I am going to tell you, there was this one moment, and I don’t know if I said the right thing for that congregation. I think I did. But I know I said the right thing for me. Anyone here ever serve on a session in the Presbyterian Church? A session is the ruling body of the local congregation. We were at a session meeting and one of our – every church I’ve ever served, all the people were wonderful, right? So, there were wonderful people on that session and one of those wonderful people said, “We can’t give communion to children. How can they begin to understand this sacrament? How can a child possibly begin to understand this sacrament?”

Before I tell you what the great gift to me in that moment was, I’m going to ask you a question about the scripture that you just heard. This is the very famous prologue to the Gospel of John. On this first Sunday of the new calendar year this is how John begins his gospel. It is very clear, everyone agrees that when he sat down at his workstation and he opened up his laptop to begin his gospel, everybody agrees that sitting on his worktable, and he was looking at it, was Genesis 1. He was using that as his jumping-off point. Genesis 1 talks about the beginning of time, and John said, “I’m going to write about more than that. I’m going to write about this concept that we call Christ existing even before time.” As our friend Saint Augustine said – I’ve just decided that I’m not going to read it to you again, I’ll paraphrase it – you can sense him wrestling with this. There’s something about this Christ that exists outside of time, before time, in time, after time, something beyond time. And so, as John began that gospel he said, “I’m going to try to clearly communicate what I’ve experienced and what I’m feeling here.” He was very specific. Remember, my friend in the session asked the question, “How can a child, how can a young person begin to understand the power of the gift of this sacrament?” John’s sitting there at his laptop and he’s writing and he essentially says this: “The light of the world is coming into the world, the light of the world is in the world” – paraphrasing – “and to those who believe” – and who remembers this, because Ian just read it for us – “to those who believe in the power of his name, this light of the world, this Christ, to them he gives the power to become” – what? – “children of God.”

Now this is paradoxical, this is contradictory. John says the whole point of it all when you sign up to be part of the Christ experience, to you comes the power to become a child. So after the session meeting, it came to me, I said it in a soft voice, I couldn’t believe it, that it came. It was such a gift to me, it came out of nowhere, and as Saint Augustine said – I’m paraphrasing once again – the God experience comes to us primarily out of nothing, ex nihilo, all of a sudden it comes. The wonderful person said, “How can a child come to understand the power of the sacrament?” And I said, “Hey, I don’t understand it either. It’s not based on my understanding.” I didn’t say the next part, they already knew it. “I’m a seminary graduate. I don’t understand it. It’s not based on my understanding.” How can the living spirit of Christ, time and time and time again, feed us in spite of our failures, in spite of our limitations, in spite of our humanity? See, we get it, we receive it, and it’s not based on understanding.

Here’s another seminary moment that was pivotal. Dr. Bruce Rigdon was my professor at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago in the early ‘80s – 1980s, not 1880s – and the last time I checked online he, God bless him, was still with us, retired but still teaching, and he was one of the people on the seminary staff who was also an ordained Presbyterian minister. This particular class we were learning about this sacrament, and he literally wrote at that time the book for the Presbyterians about the meaning of the sacrament of communion and the sacrament of baptism, he wrote the book. I’ll never forget it, I bet my classmates won’t either, but we walked into class that day and we were going to take communion. Before we took communion he was going to teach us about communion. Up on the table were the elements prepared and over here was the auxiliary table that had about 25 books on it, textbooks.

Dr. Rigdon began teaching us and he would walk over to these 25 or so books about the meaning of the sacraments, and he would pick up the books and he would make reference to them, and then he said, “Oh, here’s one. I wrote this one.” And he read to us from the book, and this is what it means, and then he turned to me, he looked at me. He said, “Groat, someday you’re going to be the interim pastor at the First Congregational Church in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and here’s what I want you to tell them.” Well, that didn’t really happen, but in a place beyond time and inside time it’s about to happen now. Here’s what he actually said. He said, “Wherever and whenever you serve a church” – we were starting to become ordained – “when they come forward down this aisle they’re going to get a little piece of bread and they’re going to put the bread in their mouth, they’re going to take it, and they’re going to take a cup, and then since they’re good people and they’re neat they’ll throw their little cup away in this trash can. Make sure you tell the people” – and he pointed to those 25 books, one of which he wrote – “when they take that bread, and they take that cup something happens that cannot be explained in those books.” 

The whole gist of Christianity is not based on understanding. It’s based on a miracle, that there’s something inside of us and there’s something outside of us. There’s something in time and there’s something outside of time. There’s something before time and there’s something after time. We just had a service for one of the saints of this congregation, Steve Mullendore. There’s something outside of time that will feed us. That’s what happens on the first Sunday of the calendar year. Amen?