P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

THE ONE AND ONLY GRACE PLACE

There’s got to be nothing more terrifying than to face death in a battlefield firefight. And maybe the only thing worse than that is if the death turns out to not accomplish anything.

If you ever saw the infamous first 25 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, or read the book by Max Collins, the opening scenes happen on June 6, 1944. Fifteen hundred boats of varying kinds were storming the beaches of France in a cold fog. And Captain Miller and about 30 American GIs were riding into the teeth of the storm in an LCVP – a Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel – also called a Higgins boat. The men were seasick beyond belief, rapidly filling up the assigned “vomit bags” with rather expensive fare, because the night before, the men had been served a sumptuous steak dinner some soldiers sarcastically called the “Last Supper.” And Captain Miller, veteran of many skirmishes and looking after his 30 recruits, knew the fight was going to be desperately deadly.

“He was a fugitive from the law of averages,” Collins writes. “How many sevens in a row can one man roll in the same game?”

A nearby boat hit a mine, and the air and water were immediately filled with burning gasoline and severed body parts. And as they got close to the beach, German machine-gun fire rattled against the front gate of their boat. It was suicide to open the hatch and face that deadly hail, so Miller tried to time their exit for one of the brief lulls in the shooting. When there was a quick space, he gave the order. “Now!” The door opened up, and at that split second the machine gun roared to life again.

And INSTANTLY, in just a matter of a couple seconds, two-thirds of Charlie Company’s Second Ranger Battalion – at least the part in that one boat – was gone. Blown to smithereens. Thirty men had been in the boat; just like that, twenty of them were dead. They never had a chance. They didn’t fire their weapons a single time, not a single bullet. They didn’t hit the beach; they didn’t even get their shoes wet. They didn’t capture one inch of enemy soil or wound a single enemy soldier. For them the war was over without a shot being fired.

Now, I’m sure as we look at the bigger picture, more than half a century later, you would say that their being there played a part. A certain number of young men are going to die taking Omaha Beach, and they were those young men. And no doubt President Roosevelt wrote generous, tender letters to the mothers and widows, describing the heroic sacrifice of those boys in that boat. But the hard reality is that their death did little more than use up one German bullet apiece.

An hour later, though, a dead-eye Tennessee sharpshooter named Daniel Boone Jackson – in this fictional story – fired a total of three shots which dropped the German machine gunners manning the MG-42 that had been decimating the American troops. In the space of less than a minute, a sniper’s accurate firing opened up the entire seawall and turned the tide against the Axis powers. And the deaths that seemingly counted for so little were balanced out by the moments of handpicked violence that achieved so much.

I know that this painful panorama of blood and guts seems far removed from the quiet, bagpipe strains of Amazing Grace, as we continue to study together the science of this heavenly gift to a war-torn world. Grace seems to us a serene word, a tranquil pond instead of a whirlpool of violence, a gentle sunset instead of bombs bursting in air. But as we think back through the history of earth’s experiment with sin and war and death, the reality is this, friend: there’s just one death that provides grace. It’s one death on a cross, happening in 31 A.D., that saves wretches like us. The life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ takes us from blind to sight and from lost to found.

There’s a complicated word we don’t use too often on this broadcast, but I think it fits here. “Efficacious.” You’ll find it in the dictionary tucked in right before “efficient,” and maybe that’s no mistake. Because if something is “efficacious,” then it does what it is supposed to do. It efficiently achieves its mission. In Saving Private Ryan, after several blood-bathed tragedies, Captain Miller’s company finally got James Francis Ryan safely home. Their sacrifices on his behalf were efficacious. And what Christians believe is that the sacrifice Jesus provided on the cross that Friday afternoon had the promised effect: it provided for our salvation, our eternal life. It got the job done.

If you’ve been with us for any part of this special series on grace, you’ve heard some great snippets we’ve borrowed from a recent “Week of Prayer” issue of the Adventist Review, the worldwide journal in my own home denomination. And right toward the end of the lead article, beautifully penned by the president of our world church communion, Jan Paulsen, he points us to this great truth.

“God’s grace is revealed to us IN JESUS CHRIST,” he writes. “Without Jesus, salvation would not and could not be offered to us as an undeserved gift.”

He quotes, of course, from Paul, who clearly explains this reality in his letter to the Ephesians. The idea of grace is all through Paul’s writings, certainly, but now he expresses the source behind it all. After telling us that Calvary allows us to be adopted as God’s sons and daughters again “through Jesus Christ,” he then says this in verse 6:

“. . . To the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us IN the One He loves.” His beloved Son Jesus, of course. “In Him [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.”

And Paulsen concludes:

“Salvation by grace is dependent on Jesus. Voluntarily He shed His blood so that we may be freed, an undeserved gift. We were dead in sin. But He saved us. THAT IS GRACE.”

Now, friend, I know that Webster’s will give us all sorts of pedestrian definitions of grace, starting with “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for this food” and going right down to the way a pretty girl carries herself as she walks into a ballroom with you as her lucky escort, and then delicately sips her tea with grace. Grace is when we are kind to each other, when we overlook faults, when we give someone a birthday present that is beautifully wrapped. But I find it encouraging that the Eleventh Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary moves in the direction of this Calvary monument in its very first definition, when it states that grace is:

“Unmerited DIVINE assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.”

And if you accept the Christian Bible as your rule of faith, God’s inspired writers unflinchingly inform us that we only receive this unmerited favor, this heavenly pardon, because of one death on a cross. Missionaries have died through the centuries; godly men and women have laid down their lives for the cause of Christ; brave volunteers for God’s church have spilled their blood on hostile foreign shores ever since the first disciples were martyred. All good sacrifices; all noted and rewarded by heaven. But friend, there’s a crucial difference between their blood or your blood or my blood . . . and JESUS’ blood which was applied to our accounts on a Friday afternoon just outside Jerusalem. Grace comes from that one divine source and from no other place.

It’s nice to look across the friendly fence and see – speaking as a Protestant Christian – that my Catholic friends are in full accord regarding this same great truth. The current catechism says it well:

“Justification” – which is given to us through grace – “has been merited for us BY the Passion of Christ who offered Himself on the cross as a living victim, holy and pleasing to God, and whose blood has become the instrument of atonement for the sins of all men.”

In the Book of Common Prayer used in the Episcopal faith, the same is said:

“We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by faith and not for our own works or deservings.”

I know you and I can never fully comprehend how a loving Father and a willing Son carefully and willfully and deliberately and knowingly and lovingly stepped forward and accepted upon themselves the bloody challenge of Calvary. When Captain Miller’s ragtag, decimated bunch of men got to Ramelle and found the long-lost Private Ryan, he was stunned to learn his three brothers were dead, but then stubborn in his refusal to leave his platoon there at the bridge. And one of Miller’s guys shrieked at him: “Look, you jerk! Two of our guys got killed buying you this ticket home! Now take it!” But Anthony Caparzo had been shot at long-range by a faceless sniper, and medic Corporal Edward Wade of San Diego had been accidentally killed by a German machine gunner. Neither man wanted to die; neither man stepped heroically in front of a speeding bullet to save anyone – not to take anything away from their sacrifice. But friend, you and I have grace today because Jesus Christ deliberately painted its saving letters across the sky with His own dying blood.

It’s all Him . . . and it’s nobody BUT Him.