A Grace That is Greater Than All Our Sins

A homily shared on June 14, 2026 by the Rev. Dr. R. Scott White | Trinity Episcopal Church

Romans 5:1-8

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person-- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

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Somewhere along the way, every one of us learned the same lesson. We learned it so early we cannot remember when and how it happened, and we’ve learned it so well, we mistake it for the truth about the universe—love, we learned, is paid out of our performance—to be good, useful, impressive, uncomplicated—perform well, and you will be loved. Fail, and the love may be withheld.

Early on we learn to organize our whole lives around that lesson. We polish the parts of ourselves we show and hide the parts we suspect would cost us. And the church, God help us, has too often preached it: clean yourself up, and then God will have you.

For many years now, researchers have been asking what happens to human beings when they are loved without condition, versus what happens when love is rationed out as a reward. I’ve taken interest in the results of this research over the years.

The findings are not ambiguous. Children who must earn affection learn to perform and to hide; they grow anxious, brittle, suspicious. But the child who knows herself loved before she has done anything at all—she is the one who grows brave. Attachment researchers call it having a secure base: the child who is certain of love is the child free to explore, to risk, to fail and return. The therapist Carl Rogers built his life’s work on this discovery. He found that people do not change to be accepted. They change because they have been accepted. Acceptance is not the prize for transformation. It is the soil transformation grows in. And in case you’re thinking that acceptance means approval of every decision made and every action taken, you can let that go. There’s a difference between acceptance and approval.

What is also fascinating is that the research shows that the body itself keeps score. People who feel they belong live longer, heal faster, hope more. Loneliness, the epidemiologists tell us, wears on mortality like smoking. We are, down to our neurons, creatures built to be loved first and on the basis of that love, we can do great things.

The research is fascinating. Yet we know this as the character of God. And it’s the discovery of this truth about God that lit St. Paul on fire.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Hear the tense. Not strive for peace. Not let us try to have peace. We have it. We can even see, in the earliest manuscripts, that the copyists themselves stumbled here—one vowel in the Greek separates we have peace from let us have peace, a declaration from a demand—and you can feel, in the manuscripts, the scribes’ itch to turn the gift back into an assignment. The church has been fighting that itch ever since.

But everything Paul says in this passage is announcement, not exhortation. Peace with God is not a project. It is a standing. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. You do not climb into grace. You stand in it, the way you stand in sunlight.

And it is from inside that standing—only from inside it—that Paul dares to say the outrageous thing: we boast in our sufferings. Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. He’s not speaking of a self-improvement program; Paul is not telling you that suffering is good for you, and neither am I. What he’s saying is that hope is possible in the hardest times because God’s love has been poured into us by the Holy Spirit. Poured. Not distilled drop by drop from our endurance. The love comes first. The endurance grows out of it.

Then Paul says it plainly, in case anyone has missed it. While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. And he pauses, almost wryly, to note how far this is from anything we do: rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. Perhaps. For the best of us, on our best day—perhaps. That is the ceiling of human love, and it is a low ceiling.

But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

While we were still sinners. Not after the repentance. Not once the trajectory looked promising. The cross is not God’s response to our improvement; it is God’s gift in-spite of our failings. And notice how it is not a private thing—us, we, the ungodly—a whole rebel humanity, are being loved in the middle of our rebellion. This is not God scanning the crowd for the salvageable. This is God dying for the crowd.

So, the researchers were right, and they were measuring something older than they knew. Human beings flourish when they know a love that comes first. They are diminished when love is withheld for proof.

Which means the lesson we all learned first is a lie. Love is not a wage. It was never a wage. The performance can stop. The hiding can stop. The exhausting project of becoming lovable can stop—not because standards dropped as is often assumed, but because Jesus is perfect love; The beauty of the Cross is that even while we were still at our worst, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them.”

And, it is because of this love freely given that we are now free to make a difference in the world, to demand justice, to demand that every human being is treated for who they are in the eyes of God, a beloved daughter or son, for whom Jesus died. We are free to work for a transformed world, not because it’s our responsibility, but because it’s what we are created for, in love. In this love of God, we are free to walk in the pathway that God has already prepared for us, without the burden of needing to prove anything to God or anyone else, especially to ourselves.

You have peace with God. Present tense. Not the peace the world makes, enforced and provisional, but peace poured out, peace you stand in. And the only thing grace asks of you this morning is the one thing pride finds hardest: to stop earning, open your hands, and receive what was given before you asked.

While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.