I’m Going to Keep Blogging About It Until I Figure It Out
Though I Never Will.

May 1, 2009

I’ve made an interesting observation. Interesting to me at least.

There are a number of congregations that cling to the word grace when chartering a name for their church. Grace Fellowship. Grace Community Church. Free Grace Church. Every Sunday when guests arrive through the front doors they’re handed the morning’s worship bulletin that tells them they’re visiting a church that morning that “is a place of grace for all people” and that they are gathering among “a people committed to living into the grace life.” As the service begins the praise and worship band steps forward to lead the congregation in hand-clapping, hand-waving, hand-raising choruses resplendent with powerful descriptions and gratitude for God’s grace and following a concluding refrain of “Amazing Grace” sung without instruments, the pastor approaches the pulpit to begin the final installment in his five part series on “Grace for Our Times,” available for purchase at the audio counter in the church narthex following service.

Okay, here’s my observation. Even in consideration of all the aforementioned attention and elevation of God’s grace there are a whole lot of Christians who get extremely edgy at it’s mention by anyone who doesn’t share their same theological bent or who they judge as living in sin as is the case with gay and lesbian Christians. When that happens conversations that began in grace become liberally peppered with counterbalancing warnings or accusations. Do not cheapen the grace of God. Do not use grace as a license for sin. God’s grace doesn’t exclude God’s law. You’re just using grace as an excuse to do what you want!

When someone argues that in accepting my sexuality I’m using grace as an excuse just to do what I want, I want to shout “You bet I am! And what I want is God’s will and to live into the life to which God has called me!” I also want to call them a chucklehead but I don’t. That wouldn’t be gracious.

What they don’t see to get is that the issue isn’t about how I use, or in their view, misuse grace but is rather a simple matter of two differing interpretations of a few select passages of Scripture. But back to grace….

I don’t understand how any Christian who has encountered the grace of God would charge another Christian with using that same grace as an excuse to sin. Would they? When we experience the grace of God then sin should be the very last thing we want for while the Law demands a life of obedience, grace compels us to seek and follow God’s will. Because we’ve experienced the grace of God we’re moved to pursue the will of God out of love and gratitude for what we’ve freely received rather than driven to obey out of fear of some retributive consequences. I’m not making this stuff up. This is pure Paul from the Book of Romans, more precisely Romans, chapters 5 and 6 (and yes, there’s more to Romans than chapter 1:26-28). Paul proposed that the Law was never given for us to keep but to highlight for us once and for all that we could never keep it. Enter the gift of God’s grace through Jesus that freed us from slavery to sin and made us captive to God. Sin remains present in the world but it’s pull has lost its power with us once and for all. The chains have fallen and we are freed to follow the One who broke our chains and the freedom that was given to us now fills us with the desire to love and follow our Liberator. So when Paul asks “Shall we sin more so that grace may more abound?” and then answers his own question with “God forbid!” what I really hear Paul saying is “How ridiculous to even ask such a question!” (Romans 6:1)

Like a man freed after twenty years in prison there will still be days when we who have been freed by grace forget we’re free. The mind and heart long held captive needs time to adjust to the reality of complete freedom. Old routines and behaviors lose their hold slowly. The freed man walks with his right shoulder two inches from the wall in his own home because that’s what was required of him in prison each time he left his cell, and we who have been freed from sin’s power will at times still do what we don’t want to do and not do what we want to do (Romans 7), not because our hearts are set to sin but because we’re working to remember we’re no longer bound to the old life but freed to newness of life. And unlike the man out of prison our freedom comes without a probationary period to prove we deserve our freedom since we know that we don’t. After all, we didn’t do the time. Christ did.

I talk about grace a lot. It’s always on my mind. I wonder about it. I mediate on it. I pray for more of it or at least to understand more of the grace I’ve already received in full. None of this means I understand grace. Who will ever understand the unsearchable, unfathomable, immeasurable, boundless, limitless, extravagant grace of God? I have so little understanding about the grace of God and yet I’m held in such awe and wonder of it all that it leaves me undone.

I can talk about the theology of God’s grace as I understand it and by that I mean the love and mercy of God that was embodied in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Karl Barth said that “Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not Grace.” Capital G, did you notice? God doesn’t possess grace. God is Grace as God is Love and Compassion and Kindness and Justice and the hundred thousand other and’s that follow. So what is Grace? Read the Gospels. Encounter Jesus. He was God and he provided a generous glimpse of God’s grace.

That’s the theological window to the grace of God but it’s when grace crosses into the experiential that words fail. For some the grace of God came to us in the way Paul Tillich describes:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness and it is as though a voice were saying “you are accepted.

Such grace leads us to weep at the mention of the word or a passing thought of its glory. Such grace makes it nearly impossible to approach Christ’s table without arriving there on our knees. Such grace makes us at once feel both insignificantly small and yet profoundly cherished. Such grace makes us want to break free of the boundaries of these mortal bodies so that our spirits would be free to run to its Source. Such grace is truly amazing grace and every moment we live and with every breath we take, we’re standing neck-deep in the grace of God. Whether you know it or not. And such grace is relentlessly calling us to give grace to the world from the grace we’ve been given.

Do grace. Be grace. Live grace.

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Posted in Love and Grace