Motive
I Thessalonians 2:1-8
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Last weekend I got a text from a friend while I was up at Ghost Ranch for the Presbytery meeting.
“I’m inquiring into concept of grace,” he wrote, “religious, psychological, practical application for living in a world of mendacity and mediocrity.”
We don’t text a lot, this friend of mine and I. He knows I’m a pastor, but he doesn’t really go to church anymore. Needless to say, I was caught a little off guard and asked if I could call him. Like anything worth saying, I was going to need more than a text to unpack that one. Who can say anything meaningful in the standard 140 characters? When I finally got him on the phone, I asked him where the question had come from.
He’s had a rough year, as you might surmise from his characterization of the world as mendacious and mediocre. Like many of us, the people he loves don’t always make the kind of choices he thinks they should. Others in his life aren’t always truthful about their intentions, or what they really want. It’s been a struggle for him.
A few weeks ago, he got some help, a new medication he’s taking has made a difference in his outlook. And he began to notice this word, grace, all over the place. On church signs, or in their names themselves. As part of organizations doing work in his community. He wanted to know just what it meant. So I tried to unpack it for him as best I could. What I came up with was something like this.
Grace is a gift. It’s the fairly radical proposition that our lives are not what we make of them; for good or for ill, as the sum total of our success or failure, what we get right and what we get wrong. No, our lives are a gift freely given with no strings attached, to take or leave as we will.
That last part is important because a gift that comes with conditions, a gift that carries with it the suggestion that we somehow owe the giver of that gift something in return- a measure of gratitude, a gift in kind-is no gift at all. It is an obligation. It is a debt that is owed.
Grace is what gives our lives their value and worth independent of any of that, independent of expectations met, or exceeded, or disappointed. What grace does, essentially, is to throw out the balance sheet that the world around us and the world within in us uses to account for who we are and what we do, or don’t, have to offer. Or as one of my favorite Lutherans, Nadia Bolz-Webber puts it, grace says that, “you are who God says that you are.” That is exceedingly good news.
Grace says that what we have to offer has more to do with the gift of our lives as they have been given to us than it does with anything we think we might deserve as a reward for our efforts, or a punishment for our failures.
“Well,” my friend said, when I got done preaching to him on the phone, “that doesn’t sound anything like what the church teaches about having to do good works.” And there it was. Five hundred years later, and we’re still not sure that Luther was right.
Oh, it sounds good. We like the sound of it. But if we really take it to heart, if we really believe it, trust that grace is what saves us from all the collective misery of our trying to be good enough, smart enough, successful enough, and on and on- it sounds a little too good to be true.
I just got back from Chicago where I was attending a symposium on worship; what we do when we come together to turn our attention to the goodness of the giver who has given us this gift. One of the things that we talked about is what worship sometimes becomes when it loses its umph. For a lot of people, it was observed, worship (and since worship is an expression of who we are as church, church itself) becomes a forgiveness racket.
It’s a little like the guy who comes around to the neighborhood business to warn the owner that there have been a number of burglaries and arsons in the area. “This is a real nice shop you got here,” he tells the owner, “sure would be a shame if anything happened to it.” So he offers his services to the owner, to protect him from that kind of thing, for a small fee. And if the owner decides he doesn’t think he needs the protection. Well, it’s suggested that he just might be the unfortunate victim of a burglary, or an arson.
Only in the church’s case it’s the guy up front (and yes, all too often it’s almost always a guy) who effectively gets up and says, “that’s a real nice soul you’ve got there, would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.” The threat of hellfire is either explicit, or implicit, but the upshot is the same. Better come back next week to make sure nothing unfortunate happens. Better come to church, and pay your tithe, and volunteer however you can to stay on God’s good side. It’s a different kind of fire insurance, but’s it is fire insurance all the same. And it’s a wildly successful business model.
You may have heard me tell the story of the summer our family got the chance to visit friends in Bourges, France. Bourges isn’t as widely known as Chartes, Reims, or Rouen. But it is home to a magnificent medieval gothic cathedral called St. Etienne. Our friend was driving us around the city center of Bourges and I was craning my neck to take in its size that simply dominates everything around it. As I was marveling at it, my friend quipped from behind the steering wheel, “Indulgences weren’t all bad, eh?” That is how such architectural wonders got built, through the forgiveness racket.
This habit of turning our worship and our life together with God into something else didn’t suddenly materialize with medieval Christianity. It’s been a danger from the beginning. In the very first letter we have from Paul, the oldest Christian scripture in our bibles, he is defending himself and his work. It wasn’t uncommon back then for traveling teachers to come through town selling a bill of goods, making promises for your best life now, and trying to get a little something for themselves in the bargain, offering pie in the sky and convincing people that all they had to do was whatever the teacher told them to do to get right with God. Of course, the irony is that that kind of thing is enormously popular.
Seven habits. Five points. Three steps to a better you.
Who wouldn’t want to have a formula, a recipe, a magic spell or potion or pill to swallow, that would make all our struggles go away. Some way to manage lives that have become unmanageable.
Some program to make right all that has gone wrong.
Only that wasn’t what drove Paul to persevere in the face of opposition. That wasn’t what motivated him to pick himself up after being mistreated in one place only to push on to the next instead of tucking his tail between his legs and going home. Paul wasn’t one to be deterred by the opposition. He wasn’t interested in fame. He wasn’t trying to fleece anyone, or boost his fragile ego, or win in the ratings. He wasn’t trying to fill arenas, or advance an agenda. He was simply sharing the gift that he had been given.
The gift of grace and peace that comes from knowing that God is for us, not against us; that God requires nothing from us, yet gives us everything if we will receive it. It is a gift that invites us to do the same, to trust that the gift itself, that grace alone is enough and then to share it.
Only it turns out that’s easier said than done. Think about it, this is the first letter that we have from Paul to the church. That means that no sooner did he start sharing the gift of this radically good news than he ran into his detractors, people who didn’t like what he had to say, people who called it fake news, who accused him of causing trouble and disturbing the peace. So, what did he do? Did he stop?
Did he change the message to make it easier for them? Did he settle for saying what might be a little more popular with the people he was talking to, a little safer? Did he tell them what they wanted to hear, or did he tell them the truth that he had come to know?
We have his own answer of course. Like a woman who nurses a child, he gave them not only what they needed, in the process he gave them himself and his own experience of God’s great love.
It’s what Luther did too. There were plenty of people who accused Luther of taking the stand he did for less than pure motives. The 95 theses nailed to the door of the chapel in Wittenberg weren’t just the beginning of an upheaval in the church, they had profound political implications for the future of feudal Europe as it emerged from medieval systems of serfdom. There were plenty of people who wanted him to tone it down, if not recant entirely his position that it is grace alone that saves us from the hells of our own making. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. It was where he stood, and he knew he could do no other.
Five hundred years later, here is where we stand. We are part of a reformation of the church that is still and always being re-formed by our experience of grace. Grace doesn’t care how many members a church has. It isn’t impressed by how big we are any more than it worries about how big we used to be.
Grace really doesn’t have a stake in the way we’ve always done things, and it certainly isn’t trying to hold on to the past or go back to some bygone era. Grace is the gift of our life together that is continually being formed and re-formed by the breath of God that animates our own bodies, even as it animates this body. And it is a gift to be shared with anyone who wants to know what it is all about.
What we have to say won’t always be popular; preaching peace in a time of war, counseling humility in a sea of self-promotion, welcoming the stranger while others are chanting to build walls and close doors, living in a state of grace that saves us from the hell of having to measure up to the sometimes forceful demands of nations and economies and fear-driven prejudice.
That message is never going to fill the seats. But as someone said to me this weekend, “I don’t know anyone who says to their friends, ‘I just love my church because we never say anything controversial and walk on eggshells not to offend people.’”
Or as another friend put it, “we are living in hot mess times.” And friends, grace is the only thing that is going to save us from the hot mess of these times. Not our building (as beautiful as it is). Not our programs. Not our mission, or our music, or all of our careful attempts to not say anything too offensive and to please everyone.
Only grace can save us from everything that would have us work for what God has already given to us so freely in Jesus and called us to share just as freely as those who are following in his way.
Because grace is the only thing that ever has.