Ash Wednesday Ruminations on Grace

Richard Lawrence Cohen has a clever story, The Grace Store, about a guy who looks for grace online. I urge you go to his site and read it right now. Go ahead, I'll wait for you here.

Okay, wasn't that good? Richard is a terrific writer.

But, of course, Richard's wonderful bit of microfiction begs the question, "What is grace, exactly?"

I took that as my topic in a micro-sermon that I wrote for the Comments section of Richard's blog [additions or revisions are bracketed]:

Richard:
Okay, since I consider "grace" sort of my specialty, get ready for some preachifying, Lutheran-style.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis [for his opposition to Hitler] said that God's grace is free, but that it will cost you your life.

I've always pictured it like this: Our arms are filled with all the stuff that we falsely think can give us life. You know, stuff like status, power, a reliance on money to measure self-worth, sexual conquest, racial or ethnic domination, and so on. These are things which the world, at various times and in various places, tells us will help us to "earn" a sort of transcendent, meaningful, or at least, a "comfortable" life.

In fact, we like the thought of earning life through this stuff because if that's the way things operate, then we are in control. We become our own Gods.

But then along came Jesus, Who--if you believe the New Testament's witness about Him--was sinless and yet, on the cross, voluntarily accepted our separation from God the Father and the life He gives. (Separation from God, in the end, is what sin is.)

On Easter, Jesus shows up, risen back to life--something seen by more than 500 people--and He says, in effect, "You can have life from the only One Who capable of pulling off resurrections. All you have to do is let go of the dead idols you're holding and take hold of my living hand."

Dead idols imprison us, causing us to do horrible things to others and to ourselves. Renouncing them, giving up on the life we once thought held so much meaning, is a kind of death. (The New Testament speaks of crucifying the old self.) But when we throw in with Christ, the NT teaches, we grab onto the only one who can give life and proved it on the first Easter.

You can't earn the life Jesus offers. All you can do is put down your dukes and quit fighting.

The word for grace in the Greek of the New Testament is "charis," from which we get the word, "charity." That word pretty well sums up the Christian notion of "grace."

It also sums up the Jewish notion of grace, as witnessed to in the first testament. This goes all the way back to Abraham of whom Genesis says, "Abraham believed and God reckoned it to him as righteousness."

In other words, like everyone who puts down her or his dukes and surrenders to God's free offer of life, Abraham didn't earn God's grace. Abraham wasn't righteous first, obeying a holy rule book, and then, lo and behold, found himself accepted by God. Things happened in reverse order: Abraham trusted God's acceptance of him, willing to go to some unknown country at God's direction. and God said that his trust was all he needed.

When Jesus says, "“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news,” He's effectively saying, "Grace is available. Drop all that stuff you're carrying, the stuff that you think gives you life but actually sucks it out of you, and latch onto me! I'll give you the life you've always been looking for."

The Twelve Steppers have it right in their first two steps, which really just summarize this business of emptying one's arms of idols and then, filling up on God: 1. We admitted we were powerless over [fill in with your favorite idol here]; 2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Three songs really convey what I mean by grace better than I have here:

Grace by U-2.

Carry the Weight, composed by Larry Norman. It's been recorded by Ringo Starr and by Lost and Found, among others.

Amazon... I mean, Amazing Grace, written by the former slave ship captain, John Newton, who lived everything he writes about in that song. [You'll have to read the Comments on Richard's blog to understand the allusion here.]

This is how I picture grace.

End of sermon.

Mark

UPDATE: Richard and I have continued our dialogue on this subject of grace. He responded:

Mark: Thank you. The Bonhoeffer quote is the perfect expression of the idea I was trying to approach in the post. And in mentioning people who have had to pay for grace, I was specifically thinking about people who have recovered from longterm addictions that ruined large percentages of their lives. Your picture of laying down idols is a most appealing one; I'm wondering, though, if there isn''t a negative side of renunciation too -- having to give up the ordinary joys and pleasures and loves of a decent worldly life -- giving up one's family, as I think Jesus said, in order to follow God.

I know "Amazing Grace," of course. Embarrassed to say I don't know that U2 song or the other one. Musically I'm trying to return to the 80s -- the 1780s.

Again, Mark, I thank you for making this wise and serious -- and hoped-for, frankly -- contribution to the discussion.

I replied:

Richard:
First of all, I was wrong about the title of the Larry Norman song. It's actually, "Weight of the World." I love the chorus:

You carry the weight
The weight of the world
It's breaking you down
On your back like a boulder
Before it's too late,
Get rid of it, girl,
Get it off of your shoulder
I know you've been used
But you gotta lose the weight of the world.

You raise an interesting point when you write, "I'm wondering, though, if there isn''t a negative side of renunciation too -- having to give up the ordinary joys and pleasures and loves of a decent worldly life -- giving up one's family, as I think Jesus said, in order to follow God."

The passage to which you refer, I think, is the one in which Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). Those words are jarring until we learn that the word translated in English as "hate" is a Semitic comparison. Jesus is talking priorities here. He neither wants us to give up our families or the pleasures that family living affords. (Thank God!)

The Gospel of John says that as He was dying on the cross, Jesus Himself thought about His mother, commending her to the care of "the beloved disciple," almost universally thought to be John, the Gospel writer. Here is a post in which I tell the story of a woman whose "dedication" to her family amounted to a kind of God-obscuring and I would say, joy-killing, idolatry that was harmful to her family. I was so taken with her words when she told me this true story twenty-five years ago!

The connection between addiction and idol-worship is so close that as I grow older, I'm becoming more convinced that they're synonomous. Life can be so painful and challenging sometimes, that the allure of addictions is understandable. So is their intractability. All of which makes grace more amazing. (Or amazon, as the case may be.)

I love your post and I'm so thankful that we can have these sorts of discussions on your blog, Richard!

God bless you!

Mark

Then, Richard wrote:

And you, Mark.

Your comparison between addiction and idolatry is very apt, I think. And not only addiction in the literal sense, but the "soft addictions" (TV, work, spectator sports, entertainment, pets) that so many of us depend on to get us through the days.

Yes, that was the Gospel verse I was thinking of.

And now to read that post of yours...

I thought that Richard's point about "soft addictions" was important and told him so:

Richard:
Your identification of what you call "soft addictions" is profound.

The Genesis account of humanity's fall into sin says that the serpent was the most subtle of all creatures. Sin is subtle.

It happens whenever otherwise benign or even wholesome pursuits are done at the wrong times, in the wrong ways, in the wrong places, with the wrong people, or to excess.

The difficulty in dealing with "soft addictions" is that they appear so benign. They don't seem like addictions or like sins.

But their effect on us is like that of the small amounts of water that flow through the Grand Canyon, slowly and inexorably wearing the rock down.

One example of "soft addictions" is what Neil Postman was talking about in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The otherwise benign and necessary impulse to relax and to be entertained or diverted in the midst of a busy life slowly gives rise to a mentality of always wanting to be entertained and of impatience with anything that doesn't please us...and immediately.

The result can be an indifference to others that is coldhearted and in effect, hatred. Or, we can become inveterate thrill seekers, searching for a new "buzz" in our relationships, in our purchases, in the stuff we put into our bodies, and so on.

Yet, the entertainment addiction is so soft, so subtle, that suggestions about its dangers are seen as downright weird.

These are subtle evils and hard to overcome.

But, I believe, grace can and does overcome them.

Mark

Conversations like this are what make blogging so unique and special.

By the way, I think that my favorite lines in the Norman song are in the bridge:

It all comes down to who you crucify
You either kiss the future or the past goodbye

Wow!