CPCBA Sermon: Grace-Full
What happens when grace is something we receive rather than something we earn?
Rev. Heather Schoenewolf
October 11, 2026 — Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
Scripture: Exodus 20:1–18 and Ephesians 2:4–10
Most of life teaches us to expect a transaction.
We work and receive a paycheck. We study and earn a grade. We pay a penalty and satisfy a debt. Even relationships can begin to feel conditional: we give something, and we expect something in return.
Then along comes grace.
In her sermon “Grace-Full,” Rev. Heather Schoenewolf begins with one of Christianity’s enduring questions: How are we saved?
Drawing on Paul’s words to the Ephesians, she offers the answer familiar to generations of Christians: we are justified by grace through faith.
But knowing the words is easier than living as though we really believe them.
Grace Is Not a Transaction
The idea that salvation is a gift rather than an achievement sits at the heart of Heather’s message.
She recalls Martin Luther’s opposition to the sale of indulgences—the idea that forgiveness or assurance of salvation could somehow be purchased. That practice, she explains, distorted the nature of God by turning salvation into a human transaction.
Paul offers something radically different.
“There is nothing we can do to earn our salvation. It is a gift, a gift of grace offered to us by God. Not because we are worthy, but because God is love.”
That can be difficult to absorb in a culture where so much seems tied to what we accomplish, contribute, pay, or deserve. Grace works according to an entirely different economy.
God acts not because of what we have done, Heather says, but because of who God is.
Grace Comes Before the Rules
The reading from Exodus offers another way of seeing that pattern.
Before God gives Israel the commandments, God has already acted on the people’s behalf—freeing them from captivity, sustaining them in the wilderness, and providing for their needs.
The commandments, then, are not a price Israel pays for liberation. They are guidance for people who have already experienced God’s grace: practices intended to help them live well together, avoid harm, and move toward abundant life.
Heather sees the same pattern in Jesus.
God comes to humanity in Christ not simply to condemn what has gone wrong, but to free people from sin’s hold and offer new, abundant, and everlasting life.
Grace comes first.
What follows is our response.
Grace Sends Us Somewhere
Ephesians does not stop with receiving grace.
Paul writes that we are created in Christ Jesus for good works. For Heather, that means grace gives us both an identity and a purpose.
We do not perform good works to convince God to love us. We do them because grace is already at work within us.
We are sent into the world, she says, to become “God’s hands and feet and heart.”
That distinction matters. Christian living is not about accumulating enough good deeds to balance an account. Compassion, service, generosity, and love grow from what God has already given.
The Unfairness of Grace
And that can make grace uncomfortable.
Heather draws on theologian and author Barbara Brown Taylor:
“Grace is alarming and grace isn’t fair.”
As Heather observes, most of us are quite comfortable receiving grace ourselves while still expecting justice for everybody else.
Grace refuses to operate that way.
“Grace challenges our assumptions and stretches our ability to love.”
Heather also turns to Lutheran pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber, who describes grace in wonderfully ordinary terms as a freight train delivering the beautiful things we could never earn: second chances, holding a baby, puppies, or the experience of eating a perfect summer peach.
The question becomes wonderfully simple:
What does grace look like for you?
Grace in the Everyday
Heather brings the question home with a story from her teenage years.
Trying to avoid traffic while driving to visit a friend, she took a narrow shortcut, moved over for an approaching car—and blew a tire.
This was before cell phones. She walked to a nearby Giant Eagle, made a collect call to her parents from a pay phone, and waited unhappily by the car until her father and sister arrived.
They changed the tire. Her father explained that it would not be safe to continue on the highway using the small spare and told her to go home.
That might have been the end of the evening.
Instead, when Heather’s friend came to meet her, her father handed them some money.
“Why don’t you two go get some ice cream? It’s been a long evening.”
For Heather, that is a picture of grace.
God meets us in messes—whether they are of our own making or simply part of being human. God helps get us back on the road and points us toward life.
And then:
“When we get there, God gives us ice cream. Not because we’ve earned it or deserve it, but because sometimes we just could use some ice cream.”
Grace gives more than the bare minimum.
Grace restores.
Grace surprises.
And grace invites us to extend to others the love we ourselves have received.
Questions for Reflection
Where in your life are you most tempted to think of God’s grace as something that must be earned?
What are some of the beautiful, “unearnable” gifts you have received?
How might receiving grace make it easier to offer compassion to someone else?
What good work might you undertake not to earn God’s love, but as a response to having already received it?
What would it mean for God’s grace to “make a dent” in the way you live this week?
Read the Sermon
From some denominational backgrounds, the question might be, “Are you saved?” But others might say this: “How is it that we are saved?”
We ask this question of one another and of ourselves. We ask this question of our churches and of Scripture. And we ask this question of our God, who we know has come to us in Christ Jesus as our Savior.
And as we raise this question, let’s face it, we don’t always get the same answer, do we?
Now, if you attended confirmation class in the Presbyterian Church or seminary at a Presbyterian seminary, you probably learned the answer that Paul gave us in our passage today.
How are we saved? We are justified by grace through faith.
Let’s say it together: We are justified by grace through faith.
The phrase at the heart of our epistle lesson has anchored Protestant thought about salvation for centuries, if not longer.
Many of us have heard that story of Martin Luther, the Reformation theologian, being horrified by the church’s sale of indulgences. This was where folks were invited to purchase an indulgence in order to guarantee their forgiveness from sin and to make them certain of their salvation.
Now Luther pushed back against any transactional route to heaven. The church’s practice of profiting from human sin and fear was itself a sin. He said first it turned the work of salvation into a money-making scheme of the church, which, let’s face it, is not so faithful. It commercialized the industry of forgiveness, and it reinforced the oppressive ways of a world that ensured the security of the haves while abusing the have-nots.
But even more, Luther saw this as a distortion of belief. It was a distorted view of how God works in our world. While mercy begets gratitude, the practice of purchasing an indulgence puts the onus for salvation on people and diminished the efficacy of God’s saving work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Clear as mud, right?
Now, Paul’s teaching to the church in Ephesus is a teaching for the church of Luther’s time and of our own, too.
Paul’s words are clear. Salvation comes through Christ alone. Salvation is offered as a free gift, completely unmerited.
In fact, there is nothing that any one of us can do to earn our salvation. There is no form of obedience or righteous work or debt to pay that is sufficient enough to merit it. And there is no dollar amount high enough to purchase it.
There is nothing we can do to earn our salvation. It is a gift, a gift of grace offered to us by God. Not because we are worthy, but because God is love.
Now, let’s face it. This is a hard concept for us to grasp, especially if we continue to push those limits of grace and try to fit grace into a mold of human making.
We have so little frame of reference for grace in our own world today, where even our most intimate or longstanding relationships often feel conditional, provisional, or transactional.
We win hearts. We earn promotions. We do our homework and earn our A’s. We do our time or pay our penalty in order to earn our own freedom. Anything we yield in life, from affection to daily bread, can be directly traced to our own investment of time or labor or money.
Yet Paul, and also the Hebrew lesson for today, remind us again and again that this just is not how God rolls.
God continually reaches into humanity with wisdom and action in order to work on behalf of the people God has made.
God does this not because of what we’ve done, but because of who God is.
God is gracious.
God’s loving care and compassion and mercy is extended consistently and continually so that we and all of creation might have new life.
Now, this is the same God who in grace freed Israel from captivity in Egypt, fed them manna and quail in the desert, and quenched their thirst through water in the rock.
This same God is the one who provided rules to live by—commandments not to admonish their bad behavior or condemn God’s people, but to guide them so that they might live well with one another, so that they might choose practices that will free them from harm and position them for new and abundant life.
And this same God came into humanity in Christ Jesus, not to condemn us for our sins, but, as John wrote in his Gospel, to set us free, to liberate us from sin’s hold in this life and the life to come.
We hear it over and over again. Through Jesus, we have received that which we do not deserve: new life, abundant life, everlasting life.
And Paul reminds us that not only has our identity been sealed in Christ, but so has our purpose.
For we in Christ are called to go forth and do new works. If you have blown up a balloon, now is a really good time to release it, because we as God’s people, filled with God’s Spirit, then are sent into the world to do good works.
Not because we have chosen to do good, but because God is at work among us, at work through us, and compelling us to go forward to be God’s hands and feet and heart.
It’s beautiful language, this language of grace, and we hold on to it for dear life, but it is hard to understand.
Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Grace is alarming and grace isn’t fair.”
Most of us want God’s grace for ourselves and God’s justice for everybody else. And there is bound to come a time when we confront this third error of grace, which is that there’s nothing remotely transactional about it.
Grace challenges our assumptions and stretches our ability to love.
Nadia Bolz-Weber tries to simplify things for her hearers, to take it out of the realm of heady theology and think of grace in the practical everyday.
And she offers this. She said, “I think I’ve started to define grace as the freight train that delivers into my life all of the most beautiful and unearnable things.”
Second chances. Getting to hold a baby. And puppies. Or eating a perfect peach in summer.
What does grace look like for you?
Because, see, once we get over the shock of grace, when we open ourselves to this gift, when we allow it to stretch us and transform us and enter into our day-to-day lives, we can experience a gratitude unlike any we have ever known.
We can exhale, noticing that because of God’s grace, we are free to be our truest selves, and we are free to greet another with compassion.
Maybe even so much compassion that we might slow down at an intersection and allow someone to merge into traffic even when we’ve got somewhere important to go.
Because God’s grace changes us. God’s grace makes us into someone new.
Not only one who has been forgiven of sin and poised for eternal life in heaven with God, but God’s grace allows us to love as we have been loved.
There’s a shortcut I learned as a teenager when I was trying to navigate the city’s roads.
I learned a road that ran parallel to a more major roadway so that when traffic was backed up, I could take the right lane and scoot off to the right and make a quick left and avoid the route that everyone else was taking.
But this road was narrow and it had one of those metal curb liners to hold the curb up in place.
And one evening, on the way to visit a friend, a car was coming in the other direction and I scooted as far as I could to the right of the road.
And yes, I blew a tire in the era before cell phones.
And without my trusty quarter in my shoe, I walked to the nearest Giant Eagle. I approached the pay phone at the entrance, and I made a collect call to my parents.
And I sat sulking on the curb near my busted tire while my dad and my sister made their way to rescue me.
They changed the tire, and my dad told me it wasn’t going to be safe to go the rest of the way to my friend’s house because it was not a good idea to ride on a highway with a donut spare tire, and that’s the way I would have to go.
So my dad told me, you know, the safe choice is just to come on home.
So when I got home and I called my friend, who then got in their car and drove on the highway toward me, my dad came out and handed my friend some money and said, “Why don’t you two go get some ice cream? It’s been a long evening.”
I think this is how grace works.
God rescues us from whatever mess we’ve gotten ourselves into or whatever mess the world has put upon us, whether it’s the mess of our own making or a mess of just being a person in a world where bad things happen.
Then God gets us back on the road, trying to point us in the direction of safety, showing us the route that will bring us to that fullness of life.
And then when we get there, God gives us ice cream.
Not because we’ve earned it or deserve it, but because sometimes we just could use some ice cream.
And this is what God does.
Let us consider how God’s amazing grace makes a dent in our lives and calls us forth to love, because God is love.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
