I will likely get myself into some sort of trouble by posting these thoughts, but I am going to do so any way.  The first portion is something I wrote in June of 2014.  The rest I wrote this morning (February 5, 2014).  There will undoubtedly be more on this subject.

I find that the church has little or no concept of what should be its central theme and the core of its identity: Grace. At least my experience gives me the indication that it's sort of a fairy tale we promote while demonstrating anything but the effects of grace.

We are bottom line people, we are results people and if we don't have results then someone is at fault. We want measurable strategies because we live by a punitive system.

If I am a pastor and that is my experience, then as the shepherd of a flock, it must be my fault. Oops! There I go...assigning blame!
I know I exhibit this in my own life and attitude. I am impatient with myself and others when things do not go as I expect them to go. I forget how patient God is with me. God is still waiting and knows that given all the time in the world I still won't measure up. 
The best I can do is allow that incredible patience God has with me to seep into my heart and begin to show up in my attitudes with myself and others. When that happens, a little light from the kingdom shines through.
What might be the effect on our lives, communities of faith, neighborhoods and cities if we honestly lived as if we believed God's grace was real?

This thought about grace is becoming a pest, it won’t go away. It’s like a bobber on a fishing line and I keep seeing something nibbling on the bait making it bob up and down.  Amusingly, it's me doing the nibbling too.  As I spend more and more time reflecting on grace, sort of sinking down into it, I find that what I’ve thought of grace is a severely modified and mutated grace.   It is a genetically modified grace. The DNA of sin and human-framed justice has been introduced to grace and what I consider (and it seems most everyone else) grace is different than the original, but close enough in appearance that we continue to replicate it.  

There's a line in Galatians (6:7) that seems to have profoundly affected our concept of grace: “you reap what you sow." In other words, if someone does something wrong, something sinful, then the universe has a ledger and it will deduct the cost of that sin from your bottom line.  Perhaps this is true, albeit in a slightly less cosmic way.  But is grace inhibited or curtailed or affected by our sin?  I think this is where we have lost the notion of grace.  Grace is outlandishly and overwhelmingly in a different league than sin and it is not in any way affected by our wrongs.  It is complete and absolute no matter what.  Mass murderers and white-liars are seen the same way in the eyes of grace.  That is hard to type, because I have this sense that it can’t be right.  But if grace is really, REALLY grace, then it has to be right.  It has to be right, despite my sense of what is right.  And my sense of what is right is that the mass-murderer deserves some different level of consideration than does someone guilty of a white lie, the kind that parents are constantly telling their children, like Santa Claus is a jolly fellow who lives at the North Pole and delivers presents to children who are good, since he knows who is naughty or nice—there it is again, that persistently present and misaligned notion about being good and receiving good and being bad and not receiving good. 

Let’s face it, grace is way more radical than any of us can imagine or get used to.  And that’s a good thing.  I don’t want grace that is limited by my imagination or my sense of justice.  Lord, save me from my own standards and rules!  Especially those I use to measure others! 

Here’s the Good News:  God does.  Grace rules.  Not our twisted and limited form of grace, but God’s unlimited, unmerited, unimaginable grace. 

While there are churches that are full of anxious people whose eyes are focused on budgets and attendance and standing like over-excited puppies at the doorway ready to pounce on any new-comer, there’s a serious lack of this grace.  No wonder people aren’t showing up.  There’s talk of grace, but there’s a glaring inauthenticity.  Does anyone care to hang with people who say one thing and then do another?  It makes one crazy. 

I do not write these things to point the finger at the church.  I am part of the problem—a serious part of the problem when I am called to be a messenger of grace and I deliver a modified version of the message.  Of course, I think that grace is so radical that if one was to live it out as it calls us to, then most pastors would be fired pretty quickly—it’s just too much to adjust to without divine intervention, which is exactly what grace is—divine intervention.  We don’t receive grace like it’s a package dropped off at our doorway.  Grace comes with God attached.  Otherwise it isn’t grace. 

Back to the church…there are a host of sacramental efforts to re-introduce the church to its mission and calling which are wonderful, but they’ve also been done in a way that has inoculated the church to the truth.   So much so that it seems God is letting churches die in order to resurrect them.  Understand that when the church fails, that doesn’t mean God does.  God will not fail and where we see no way, God provides a way.  And so we’re back to grace—the real grace, not the fake grace we parade around. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of cheap grace and costly grace.  He was on to something there.  Nearly 100 years ago he could see this cheap grace in churches.  Soren Kierkegaard saw it too, even before Bonhoeffer.  The truth of the matter is, there are numerous people who have recognized it for centuries.  Jesus pointed it out as well.  And then he demonstrated the meaning of costly grace, the kind that isn't limited in any way by sin.  

© Stephen Carl