Sermon – There is no Manual for Life. Instead there is Grace.

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church, Harrisburg, PA on Sunday July 12, 2026. It is in response to 1 Timothy 1:12-17. You can listen to the audio at this link.)

A couple years ago, my family got me a grill for Christmas. A nice one. But it did not come put together. It came in a box, with about a hundred parts, and a manual.

Grant helped me put it together. It took us two hours. We went piece by piece, following the manual, matching up the bolts and the brackets, until it finally looked like a grill and worked like a grill. Without that manual, I have no idea what we would have ended up with. Probably something that leaked gas or fell apart the first time we used it.

Life does not come with a manual like that.

Nobody hands you a set of instructions when you are born. Nobody hands new parents a manual either. They send you home from the hospital with this tiny, vulnerable human being, and that is it. No booklet. No diagram. You are just supposed to figure it out.

We spend our whole lives with parts we do not know what to do with. Pieces that do not seem to match up with anything else. Most of the time, we are making it up as we go.

That is exactly why grace and mercy are not optional extras for getting through life. They are essential.

Here is how I want us to think about those two words today. Grace is getting what you don’t deserve. Mercy is not getting what you do deserve.

Grace is God giving you love and worth you never earned. Mercy is God holding back the judgment you had coming.

Hold on to those definitions. We are going to need them.

Our reading today comes from 1 Timothy. And it reads like a confession. Paul, or someone writing in Paul’s name, looks back at his own life and says this out loud in front of the whole church: I was a blasphemer. I was a persecutor. I was a man of violence.

That is not a résumé. That is not something you put on a business card. That is a man naming the worst things he ever did and doing it in public.

And then he says something remarkable. He says Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom he is the foremost.

The foremost. The worst one. The one furthest from God. And that is the one Christ chose to save, to show mercy to, and then to trust with the work of the gospel.

Paul is not writing this to brag. He is writing this so that everyone reading it, everyone in that church, everyone here this morning, can look at his life and say: if God could reach him, God can reach me too. If God’s patience held out for the foremost of sinners, God’s patience will hold out for me.

And this is the whole point of the passage. Grace and mercy are not for people who have their life together. They are for people who don’t. And if we are honest, that is all of us.

No matter how put together our life looks from the outside. No matter how good the pictures look on our phones. Underneath the facade, none of us actually received a manual for this. None of us know exactly what we are doing. We are all just matching up parts and hoping it holds together.

I wonder sometimes if that is exactly the point. If life came with a manual, would we still need grace? If we had step by step instructions for how to raise our kids, how to keep a marriage healthy, how to grieve well, how to forgive, would mercy even mean anything anymore? Maybe the reason grace and mercy exist at all is because none of us ever really know what we are doing. We just show up, do our best with the parts in front of us, and trust that God is patient with the result.

Bono, from the band U2, was once asked about the difference between karma and grace. And he said karma is about getting what you deserve. Grace interrupts that. Grace lets love step in and stop the consequences we have coming.

We are not people of karma. That can be hard to sit with, if we are honest. Because how many times have we watched someone do something terrible and thought, I hope they get what is coming to them. That is karma talking. That is not how God operates.

And we should be grateful for that. Because if karma were how God worked, it would apply to us too.

Now here is something interesting about this letter that I want you to know. Most scholars who study this today believe that 1 and 2 Timothy were not actually written by Paul himself. They believe these letters were written in Paul’s name, after Paul had already died. And that was not considered dishonest back then. It was actually a common and accepted way of carrying a teacher’s voice forward.

Why does that matter? Because it means this letter comes from a church that is a generation or two removed from Paul. A church that is growing. A church becoming more diverse, with new questions and new people, further and further from anyone who actually walked with Jesus or sat under Paul’s teaching.

This letter is a window into how the church works, or sometimes does not work, as the Holy Spirit keeps leading each new generation to figure out what it means to be the body of Christ. Again. And again.

That is not a strange or distant idea for us. That is us. That is Christ Lutheran.

This church started in 1890. German immigrants built it. They grew so much that by 1920 they tore down their first building and built the one we are sitting in right now. They kept growing. By the late 1950s they expanded again to fit everyone. By 1960 there were three thousand members here.

And then it all came apart. White flight. Redlining. The neighborhood changed and the church did not change with it fast enough. By 1990, there were seven members left in this building. Seven.

That is not a small decline. That is almost the end. 

And then something new began. Health ministries started. Free clinics opened. The church found a new way to be church, rooted in showing up for the neighborhood instead of waiting for the neighborhood to show up for us.

And as we grew in service, we grew in relationship. And as we grew in relationship, the people who call this place home changed too. More diverse in race. More diverse in income. More diverse in who we love and how we live. We are still figuring it out. We will always be figuring it out. That is what it means to be a church led by the Spirit instead of a church frozen in one moment of history.

If someone wrote a letter to Christ Lutheran the way someone wrote a letter in Paul’s name to Timothy, I think it would sound a lot like this. I think it would talk about grace and mercy, because that is exactly what has kept this place alive.

We have received grace here. Grace in mission partners who show up year after year with no reason to except that they believe in what God is doing in this place. Grace in people who walk through our doors and find community they did not know they were missing.

We have received mercy here too. I could not begin to count the times someone has stepped in to fix something we could not afford to fix. Or covered a cost that should have sunk us. Or shown up with food at the last minute when it looked like there would be nothing to offer.

I see this trust every time I give a tour of this building and tell the stories of the people who walk through these doors. I see it when a guest comes to worship for the first time and is moved because the welcome here is real. I see it when I am walking down the street in this neighborhood and someone I do not even recognize shouts out, “Pastor, pastor, please pray for me.” They do not know my name. But they know what church I serve.

I have said before that trust is our currency here. And that trust was not built overnight. It was built over decades, through the hard years and the seven-member years and the years of figuring out what it means to be a healing place in a hurting neighborhood.

This past Wednesday, our nurses set up the outreach clinic right out on the sidewalk because the weather was nice. And while we were out there, people stopped. Some stopped to get their blood pressure checked, or their blood sugar. Some just stopped to talk, to offer a blessing or receive one. The neighborhood knows what this church means to them. They know the love here is real.

So many churches struggle to connect with the people around them. I think a lot of that struggle comes from seeing your neighbors as separate from you, as people out there instead of people who belong with you. Here, the church is not just a building or a worship service. It carries a reality this world is desperate for. Healing.

Grace and mercy are both forms of healing.

Grace heals your sense of worth. It tells you that you have value simply because you exist, simply because God made you and loves you. Not because of anything you did to earn it.

Mercy heals relationship. It is what happens when the distance between you and God, or between you and another person, gets closed instead of held open.

Both of those come from God. Both of those come from Jesus.

I think the name of this church matters more than we often notice. Christ Lutheran Church. Christ. That is the center of who we are. Not a program. Not a building. Christ and his way.

A way of peace. A way of shalom. A way of grace and mercy. A way of healing. A way of setting people free. A way of wholeness. A way of forgiveness. A way of being community together instead of being strangers who happen to share a zip code.

Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the beloved community. A community where love and justice hold each other up, where no one is thrown away, where the walls that divide us come down because they were never supposed to be there in the first place.

I wonder if a letter written to us today, the way 1 Timothy was written to that early church, would sound less like a set of church rules and more like Dr. King’s vision of the beloved community. That is what grace and mercy build, when we let them. Not a perfect church. A beloved one.

I want to close with a story, because in a few minutes we are going to sing it.

John Newton was a slave trader. For years, he captained ships that carried human beings across the ocean in chains. He was not a good man doing a hard job. He was a man doing something horrific, and for a long time, he did not see it that way at all.

But over time, something in him began to change. A storm at sea nearly killed him and he cried out to God in the middle of it. He kept working on slave ships for a while after that, which tells you that grace does not always arrive all at once. Sometimes it takes years to work its way through a person. But eventually Newton left that life behind. He became a minister. And he looked back on everything he had done, the same way Paul looked back and called himself the foremost of sinners, and he wrote it down in a hymn.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.

A man who trafficked human beings became the man who gave the church one of its most beloved songs about grace. If that is not proof that no one is beyond reach, I do not know what is.

So here is where I want to leave us. Not with a call for you to do anything. Not with a challenge to try harder or have more confidence or dig deeper. Because this whole passage, this whole sermon, has never really been about what we do.

It has been about what God does.

God is the one who acts. We are the ones who receive. And most of the time, we receive it imperfectly. We receive it while still doubting we deserve it. We receive it with our hands a little closed, a little unsure, wondering if this time grace and mercy will actually reach us too.

We don’t deserve it. That is the truth. We don’t deserve it and yet God gives it anyway. That is not a flaw in the story. That is the whole story.

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom Paul was the foremost. Of whom John Newton might have been the foremost. Of whom you might feel like you are the foremost, on your hardest days.

And still, grace comes. Still, mercy comes. Not because we earned it. Not because we finally figured out the manual. But because that is who God is, and that is what God does, again and again, for the foremost of sinners and for all the rest of us too.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.