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"Grace be with you all" Part 2 of 2 from the 2024 Spring Vision Newsletter
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ… the ordering of the Persons of the Trinity may strike us as peculiar. Usually, in a list, we speak first of the Father, then the Son, and finally the Holy Spirit (as in the Great Commission – Matthew 28:19). This order aligns with God’s self-revelation to humanity. However, here, Paul starts with the Lord Jesus Christ, who invites us into the knowledge of and participation in the triune God. Grace is a quality of God; a benevolence towards humanity, bestowed freely; the undeserved, unexpected, unimaginable goodness of God. It is grace that we can know God as the Father, Son, and Spirit, and this we learn from the teachings and Person of Christ. It is grace that we are reconciled with the Father through the Son. It is grace that through the Father and the Son, the Spirit is sent to earth to work through and sanctify the church.
This is all accomplished by the love of God. God’s love is at the heart of the gospel, the story of our salvation. God loved the world in such a way that He took the consequences of our sin (death) and turned it into redemption through Jesus Christ on the cross. Because of God’s love, we experience the undeserved grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Finally, the communion of the Holy Spirit. First, we can understand this to be the abiding presence of God in our lives. We are sent out into the world, knowing that through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power and life of God, He is with us wherever we go, whatever we do. But there is a second meaning that gets to the heart of Paul’s message to the Corinthians. When we receive the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Sealing, we are united to Christ through the Spirit, and by virtue of this also united to each other as His body. The communion of the Holy Spirit should lead us into a fellowship of grace with one another.
The underlying issue that Paul is addressing with the Corinthians is a lack of grace, love, and harmonious fellowship in their churches. This benediction, then, points us to the qualities immanent in the presence of God, that need to become immanent in the congregation. A transformation must take place that leads to a community that embodies grace, love, and fellowship. The blessing empowers the congregation to become what is it supposed to be.
In our sealing we accept “the calling to become a firstling” (CNAC 8.3). This means we are preparing to spread the gospel in the kingdom of peace and point humanity to Jesus Christ. Therefore, the essence of our congregational life, already today, should be proclaiming the gospel – the story of God’s love for humankind, caring about others above ourselves, and striving to be in perfect unity and fellowship with Christ, and through Him, with each other. This is what a grace-filled congregation looks like.
Grace, love, and communion are a picture of the triune God, but also an image of congregational unity. Through Jesus Christ’s self-sacrifice, we experience God’s love for us, and we experience the Spirit’s power to transform and shape us as a church, into a unified body. Receive these words as a blessing, but also a responsibility to become the body of Christ in a broken and divided world.