Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 25, 2007The Church of the Covenant
Robert J. Campbell, D. Min., D. D.
Printer-Friendly VersionGrace Notes
Part V, The Gravity of Grace
Romans 2:1-11
John 8:1-12Dear Lord, so far today I’ve done pretty well. I haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent. But in a few minutes God, I have to get out of bed, and from then on I’m going to need lots of help.A member sent me this prayer in an e-mail last week and how true it is. We begin each day with the best intentions but without grace where are we by the day’s end?
Bonhoeffer said grace isn’t cheap. It’s costly because it required the life of God’s Son, yet how to preach it? How to speak about the mystery without mystifying it? How to examine that which surrounds us, that which pervades our very beings, or that which is a part of every thought, word, and deed leading to our hope in Christ? How to prevent grace from becoming just another “buzz word” like “family values” yet deliver the news that it truly is God’s free gift to everyone?
W. H. Auden’s poem For The Time Being pictures Herod shrewdly grasping the logic of grace, “Every crook will argue, ‘I like committing crimes.’ God likes forgiving them. The world is admirably arranged.” There’s the trouble with grace. It’s wonderful for me; it’s that other person’s forgiveness that is so troublesome.
Yet, Paul doesn’t seem to think so. He never gets tired of describing the miracle. “Even though I was the worst of the worst, I was shown mercy and now by God’s amazing grace.” The head of prison fellowship once said, “No one knows who will get to heaven. Jesus likes to remind us that there will be lots of surprises. ‘Not every one who says Lord will enter.’ What we do know is that there will be murderers and thieves. Saul of Tarsus and the thief on the cross are but two.” What then would cause us to walk in God’s ways when we know they get a free ride?
“God gives where God finds empty hands,” said Augustine. In other words, God takes the incentive and the risk by announcing forgiveness in advance. Grace then involves the transfer of that incentive and risk to us. “It is evil to be filled with faults,” wrote Pascal, “but it’s a greater evil to be full of them and not recognize them.”
People fall into two groups, not the good and bad but those who are guilty and know it and acknowledge it and those who don’t, like the folks gathered in John’s account. The scene opens in the temple courtyard. Jesus is trying to teach when a bunch from the religious right of his day drag a woman in front of him. Adultery takes two, but she stands all by herself. According to custom, she is probably naked to the waist just to shame her. She is no doubt terrified. How did they catch her? Maybe she was with one of those in the crowd who didn’t like her attitude.
It is clear that her accusers are interested in more than just her punishment. The law of Moses called for death by stoning. Roman law forbade the carrying out of execution, so it’s a clever trap. The moment’s full of tension. Jesus marks time by bending down to draw in the sand. Did he write the seven deadly sins–lust, greed, pride, murder, and revenge, which are the only ones that invite you to the banquet table to dine upon yourself? Jesus writes in the sand where the wind will soon blow away any trace of accusation.
Those whom Jesus was trying to teach see only two categories, the adulteress and her accusers. But Jesus cuts across the lines. “Let that person without sin throw the first stone.” He marks more time as the crowd dwindles and then only the woman remains. “Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I. Go and live. Put your past behind you.”
With a stroke of grace, Jesus changes the categories from righteous and guilty to confession and denial. One stood with empty hands while the others had their hands filled not only with stones but also with guilt. Repentance is the doorway to grace. It is not something God demands. It is simply like the prodigal, a description of what it is like to get back home. (1)
“Sola gratia” was the cry of the Protestant reformers. “By grace alone we are saved!” Trouble is, we avoid it especially in the church. It is much easier to see the world as right and wrong with judgment as religion’s roll. Why on earth should I be a good person if I don’t have to be? It’s the clever trap religious people have fallen into even before the time of Jesus, clear up until this very moment. But “why be good” is the wrong question. Rather it’s like any relationship that has meaning and fidelity, the real question is, “Why should we love?”
In my second year of college I had to have a language, so I picked Spanish because there was this pretty young blond in the class. Languages aren’t easy for me and when all of my friends were off partying, I had to memorize vocabulary. I had to pass the test! But had the dean of students said, “Campbell, it really doesn’t matter if you pass or fail,” I suspect I would never have learned a word. Now understand, I love languages–Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish. There are times I wish I could speak dozens of languages or at least understand someone on a bus or in a market. Languages are fascinating to me, but I just can’t learn them without a lot of hard work. So had I not been afraid of failing and therefore not graduating, trust me when I tell you, I’d have been somewhere else besides the library.
But suppose the only language that little young blond spoke was Spanish? Given my attraction to her, each and every word I learned would have been magic as I looked for ways to express my love. Our Christian faith is like that. It springs from grace. We love because we are loved. We forgive because we are forgiven. We learn to communicate with God in the language of love.
The religious people wanted to judge because security rested in their rules. Legalism is subtle. I would suspect there is not one of you here that would be comfortable in seeing yourself as a legalist when it comes to faith. It’s just that my rules are necessary; it’s your rules that are excessive. As someone once said, “The church has spent so much time driving ‘the fear that we might make mistakes’ into our faith that we are like ill-taught piano students. We play our songs, but we never enjoy the music because we’re afraid of flubbing it.
All religious systems promote rules. By contrast, Jesus refused to set rules that his disciples could follow with satisfaction. A person who professes external law is like someone standing in the light under a lantern fixed on a pole. Anyone professing the teachings of God in Jesus Christ carries the lantern in front, illuminating fresh ground and leading the way for others to follow. (2)
So how to learn to reside in God’s world of grace? How to move beyond rules and live the language of love? How to help others know the gift that is for them even when they have their pockets full of stones? In van Gogh’s painting, First Steps, a mother is leaning over her little child, arms outstretched as if to say, “Go ahead, I’ll hold you.” The infant is leaning forward, teetering on wobbly legs. The father has laid aside his spade as he crouches on one knee. He reaches and you can imagine him saying, “Come on I’ll catch you.” Those first steps are a mixture of gravity and grace.
Gravity pulls us, holds us grounded to earth. The mysterious gift of grace doesn’t overcome gravity, rather it acknowledges and then balances all the forces of gravity as we learn to walk. First as an infant, but then as an adolescent, as an adult, as an older person, no sooner do we learn our balance in a life of faith and there are new challenges, new learning. Each step of the way we have to discover anew the graceful, the grace-filled art of walking with God.
When God created the world, grace was a part of each creature as all were pronounced “very good.” But sin was the gravity that insisted on clumsy claims of disregard for others. It caused us to fall and in falling, we knock others down. The law was given as a crutch to help steady us for as long as we needed it, but the more we depend upon that crutch the less we’re able to stand, dance, and enjoy our journeys.
Truth is, God is closer to sinners than anyone else. Imagine that we are all puppets on strings. We cut our strings and gravity makes us fall. But God ties the strings back together again. That’s grace and each time God reties the string the knot moves us a little closer to God.
Ever watch the pictures of the astronauts moving around in outer space? Like swimmers, they move as if they are walking, but they are floating. They’re buoyant, unencumbered. There are two forces that rule the universe. Gravity causes a body to attract so that it continually absorbs. That force works within us as we acquire and collect the things we think we need. As we judge others in our own defense, we add stones to our pockets weighing us down and we get trapped in a gravitational field of self-gratification and self-love. Gravity makes us think we can make it on our own. Grace is the exception to nature’s law. It interrupts the gravitational pull so that we can once again, hand in hand, unencumbered, and as light as air, walk with God.
(1) C.S. Lewis
(2) Leo Tolstoy
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