Slippery grace slips away

It’s fitting that Andy Stanley chose the end The Grace of God with the story of the prodigal son.

It’s a familiar story. The younger of two sons asks his father for his inheritance, squanders it in riotous living, repents and returns home, hoping to work as a servant. The father welcomes him with open arms, and orders the fatted calf to be slain for the celebration dinner. The dutiful older son resents this favorable treatment for his brother, and his father has to take him to taks for his attitude. We don’t learn what happened after that.

When I’ve studied this passage (Luke 15) before, and I’ve heared preached many times. We usually focus on the younger son, or the father, or the older son. For some reason, reading the account as told by Stanley, it struck how like both sons we are.

We are the prodigals, and we are the dutiful sons – and often at the same time. It’s the genius of the story – we can identify with both sons, because we are both sons. We are the prodigal who indulges in sin, and we are the obedient older son who keeps faithfully at what’s set before us.

And there’s tension between these two sons, these two ideas, and Stanley calls it the tension of grace. “It’s this tension that makes grace so slippery,” he says. “Perhaps it’s this tension that has driven churches and Christians through the centuries to add to and subtract from grace. There’s something in most of us that screams, It can’t be that easy. But as much as we want to qualify grace, it can’t be qualified.”

We identify with the prodigal, because we are sinners. And his repentance was genuine, and recognized by that father as genuine.

We identify with the obedient son, because we have all been there. Like Martha washing the dishes and preparing the food while Mary lounges around with Jesus, we wonder why our contribution isn’t being recognized. After all, the older son stayed with the father, stayed at the homestead, and worked beside his father while his brother indulged himself in pleasures (however fleeting).

And there it is – that tension. We want the younger son to be forgiven, because we were forgiven. But shouldn’t he have to prove himself? Couldn’t God make this a little harder?

It’s helpful to remember the context for the story. Jesus had been teaching and preaching, followed by large crowds wherever he went. He was especially popular among the tax collectors and known “sinners,” and that rankled the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.

So Jesus tells them three parables – the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost, or prodigal, son. All three stories have the same point – the importance of the sinner who repents. Telling three stories with the same point punched the point home. Saving the story of the prodigal son for the last really punched it home – there was no evading whom Jesus was talking about.

The interesting thing about Jesus was that his listeners always understood his message, even when it was clearly aimed at them. The Pharisees got the point of the story. They knew Jesus was talking about them.

And no matter which son we chose to focus on, Jesus is still talking about us.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Grace of God. Today’s discussion concludes the book. To see more posts on this final chapter, “How Sweet the Sound,” please visit Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines.

Painting: The Prodigal Son by Rembrandt (circa 1669). Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 

So whom is church for?

We’re reaching the end of Andy Stanley’s The Grace of God, and I’m hitting my first area of disagreement.

Well, it’s not exactly disagreement. It’s more a case of I think he’s focused on half the picture.

Can I really say that about Andy Stanley? On I plunge.

This chapter, “Commissioned by Grace,” asks and answers the question, “Is church for everyone or is it just for church people?” Stanley doesn’t hesitate. It’s for everyone, he says, and he paraphrases St. James in that the church sometimes makes church too hard for people. “If the church is God’s primary vehicle for dispensing the message of grace, then the local church is clearly not for church people,” he writes. “It’s for everybody.”

And he’s right. We can slip into our “godly” insistence on form and procedure and “this is the way it’s always been done” and thus tell communicate to any newcomer that they’re welcome as long as they get with the program.

But that cuts both ways.

We can make our church services so “seeker-friendly” that they resemble little more than a toned-down rock concert, or sometimes even a toned-up rock concert. I’ve attended churches where the hymnals had disappeared, replaced by words projected on a screen that had a lot about I and me. And I’ve attended churches where singing anything but what was in the hymnal was considered the equivalent of heresy.

I’ve attended churches where the staff stifled any individual initiative from the congregation, and churches where the congregation expected the staff to do everything.

I’ve attended churches where no one greeted newcomers, and churches that replaced Bible teaching with popular books.

I’ve attended churches that were so focused on “seekers” that they forgot the need to make disciples.

All of these things are signs of something wrong. And the answer may not be a happy medium or compromise but something entirely different. And I don’t have an answer as to what that might be.

One clue might be how so many of us – young and old, disciple and seeker – are drawn to liturgy. So much changes every day in this virtual, 24-hour-news-cycle world that a church worship service, and a church, similar to the one from 2,000 years ago is not only welcome but stabilizing, an anchor in a world built upon transience. Or saying the Lord’s Prayer and the 23^rd Psalm in the language of the King James Bible connects me to believers or 450 years ago, and believers scattered among a wide array of denominations today. (I will often pray the “Jesus prayer,” both aware of and appreciating the fact that the meaning of it, if not the exact words, connects me to Orthodox believers.)

But the church is more than a style of worship, or what words we use in a prayer. Stanley’s right – church is for everyone. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything relating to church members should be excluded.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Stanley’s The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Commissioned for Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Raining Grace: Stephen and Saul

The very early church had a problem. The “Grecian Jewish” believers perceived that the Hebrew Jewish believers favored their own in caring for the widows. Today, we would immediately split off and form a new church, but the elders of the early church handled it differently. They listened, agreed, and then told the church to choose seven men to serve. (It’s interesting that they didn’t appoint the seven themselves but instead told the church to choose them.)

The seven they chose, Luke tells us in the book of Acts, were Stephen, Philip, Procurus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. Stephen is specifically singled out as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit.” Of the other six, only Philip is ever mentioned again – Philip the Evangelist of Acts 8 and 21.

We don’t know any of Stephen’s background or even when he joined the church. He might have been one of those “thousands” who heard the disciples preaching in the temple courtyards and came to faith. We have the impression he was young, although that’s not explicitly stated.

A few verses later, Stephen is singled out again. Luke describes him as “ a man full of God’s grace and power, and did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people.” Luke, of course, is setting the stage for what is about to happen. Stephen makes a speech to the Sanhedrin, tells the truth, and is dragged out to be stoned. As he’s dying, he asks God to forgive his murderers.

Watching the stoning “in approval” was Saul.

Stephen’s death was one of the significant events of the early church: he was the first martyr; it was the start of the first persecution; the church was scattered into the surrounding territory; and it was a significant step into what eventual became the spread and triumph of Christianity on the Roman Empire.

And then there was Saul, who helped lead the persecution in Jerusalem, and did so well that he decided to carry the campaign to Damascus. And on the road to Damascus, Saul became Paul.

Several times in his epistles, Paul refers to his role as persecutor of the church. And I can’t help but think that the image of Stephen crying out to God to forgive his murderers must have been remembered by Paul every time he mentioned his role.

Both Stephen and Paul were forgiven. Stephen did not do the terrible things Paul did, but both were forgiven. Both experienced the ful measure of God’s grace.

As Andy Stanley points out in The Grace of God, grace is also poured out over us. It’s a kind of unruly, unpredictable thing, this grace of God, confounding our human notions of fairness. Whether we believe as a child and work our entire lives for the Lord, or sincerely accept faith on our deathbeds, the grace of God pours down.

Grace poured down on Paul; it poured down on Stephen. Believers might want to identify more with Stephen, but most of us more closely approximate Paul’s early experience.

It is something to grateful for, this grace that pours down. There’s nothing we do that can earn it. It just pours down.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Saved by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Betweenthe Lines.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Filled by Grace

For the last five months, work has been intense.

Let me repeat that: For the last five months, work has been intense.

It’s the kind of intensity that births bone weariness, to the point where you often feel like you’re walking in thick fog. Days ran together, one long slide of stuff.

Nothing’s changed lately. Still the same stuff.

And then I started reading The Grace of God by Andy Stanley. It’s the subject of the book discussion led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. We’ve been tackling a chapter a week. Last week, the chapter was about the story of Nicodemus, and I moved in a different direction, writing a fictional account of what Nicodemus might have been like, and what he might have done. I’m not sure why I did that, but that’s what came from the reading.

This week, in the chapter entitled “Filled by Grace,” Stanley discusses the Samaritan woman at the well. And what he said at the outset flipped my “on” switches. Jesus just didn’t happen to pass through Samaria on the way from Judea to Galilee. Yes, it was the most direct route, but no self-respecting Jew would “pass through” Samaria. Jews and Samaritans weren’t exactly the best of friends; for a Jew headed to Galilee, it would always be a detour around Samaria.

But the account in the gospel of St. John plainly says that Jesus “had” to go through Samaria. The disciples, familiar by now with his occasionally odd behavior, didn’t question the route but simply followed along.

It stuck with me and wouldn’t let go. Jesus “had” to go through Samaria, the geography the Jews thought of as ugly and unclean, its people heretics. But that was where he had to go.

Sometimes, and perhaps a lot more often that we would care to, we have to go through difficult periods or circumstances. We pray for relief or deliverance or change. And sometimes those things happen. But often they don’t.

The question we have to ask ourselves, the question I had to ask myself, was whether God’s grace is sufficient.

I’d like to believe there is a grand purpose for going through this period of work, that great things will result, good things will happen and I’ll be able to see the reason once it’s over.

But the lesson may be far simpler, and far less momentous. It may be something as simple as  teaching me the sufficiency of grace.

And so I ask myself again, if grace sufficient? What if the “reason” for this period never becomes apparent? Is grace enough?

As I read Stanley’s words, I realized that grace was indeed sufficient.

It’s enough. Grace is sufficient to sustain.

To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Nicodemus Remembers

I cannot explain why I was first attracted to what he said, to him. I was walking to the Sanhedrin, when I saw the crowd and stopped to listen, there at the edges. I heard his voice before I saw him, and it was the voice of authority.

I remained longer than I planned, listening to him that day. I moved closer. No one could touch his voice of authority, even though they tried, over and over. I wondered if he had been trained in the law courts. He quietly demolished each leading, provocative question. Call it destruction by love.

They weren’t happy, though. Or convinced. They sniffed something of the heretic about him.

But what I heard rumbled through my bones, trying to find a way inward.

I sent word, quietly, to one of his disciples. Might we meet, beyond the prying eyes of the priests, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, the Romans?

We both understood that I was not prepared to meet with him openly. The risks were too great for a man in my position.

He was waiting, quietly, when I arrived. This close, I could see how the crowds diffused his presence, which was completely focused for this crowd of one.

I was unnerved. His presence, his words, his toughness mingled with gentleness: all were unnerving. I was stripped bare, defenseless.

I was loved.

I left shaken, my soul rent. I turned to prayer, my servants giving excuses to all, murmuring about an illness. And it was true, that illness. My self was dying.

I stayed aware of his activities. I knew this would end badly; the Sanhedrin was plotting and would not be denied. I envied his disciples, but my physical separation from him did not stop my interest, or my response. I was continuing to die, terrified that I could not stop it and terrified that I might.

That day on the hill, that terrible day, I stood with the jeering crowd. I finally understood what ne meant about being reborn. My self had died; my self was alive. To die as he did was to die to my sin, the sin no performance of the law could ever cover.

He died on that hill. He was not reborn on it; I was.

Joseph, my friend, asked me to help. We went to Pilate to ask for his body, to bury it properly, not the garbage him where it was destined with other dead criminals.

Pilate smiled in mild surprise at our request, we two wealthy members of the Sanhedrin asking for the body. We no longer cared who knew; the priests objected but Pilate’s approval cowed them. My friend Joseph and I had unexpectedly moved through the eye of the needle.

We prepared his bruised and battered body. Even in death, his face told me this was not over.

We must have been a spectacle, we two rulers, doing this work of burial. When we finished, his body wrapped in the shroud, the guards rolled the stone in place.

As we walked away, I looked back. We were in a kind of garden, like the one where I first met him. I knew this was only beginning. He had healed my soul too deeply that night, in that other garden, for it all to end here.

Joseph and I will slip into the darkness of history, to be known only for the questions we asked and the rite we performed. He, however, will remain the light.

This post was inspired by Reborn by Grace,” chapter 10 of The Grace of God by Andy Stanley. Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing the book. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Remember Levi

I’m considering taking on a motto.

Remember Levi.

Levi is the man we know today as Matthew, the author of the New Testament gospel. But when Jesus arrived in Capernaum that day, that day he told the paralytic “Your sins are forgiven” and “Take up your mat and walk,” that day he outraged the teachers of the law with his presumption of forgiving sins, that day he also happened upon Levi the tax collector.

And he looked into the heart of Levi, and said “Follow me.”

Jesus had already outraged the teachers over the implication of assuming equality with God – only God could forgive sins. To punch the implication home, he healed the paralytic. And then he risked the outrage of everyone else by consorting with that most despised of all officials – the tax collector. The Jewish tax collector. The man of the priestly tribe who had bought his office and now had to squeeze the people to both pay their taxes and pay off the cost of buying the office.

Tax collectors were not loved. Think of your reaction to knowing the U.S. Internal Revenue Service made people’s lives miserable simply because of an affiliation with “Tea Party,” and now “Israel” and “Occupy.” Think of your reaction if that they had that personally to you. Your thoughts of the tax collector would not be warm ones.

And, in the eyes of the Jews, Levi the tax collector was also something else. He was a lackey of Rome. “As a tax collector,” writes Andy Stanley in The Grace of God, “he served as a financial go-between, serving an almost priestly role between the treasury of Rome and his Jewish kinsmen. In a culture that was supremely religious, where seemingly every month played host to a different festival of day of remembrance, his guilt must have followed him like a shadow.”

We tend to focus on the part of the story here Jesus goes with Levi to his home, and has a meal with him and all the other people willing to consort with Levi – likely among the most despised people in all of Capernaum.

We tend to overlook the first part. The part when Jesus first sees Levi, sitting at his table, a line of people waiting in front of him to pay taxes, waiting to be cheated and trying to figure out how little they could get away with.

Jesus says two words: “Follow me.”

You’re doing the job you’re paid to do, that you pay yourself to do, and some itinerant rabbi walks up to you and says, “Follow me.”

And you do it. You stand up, you walk away from your job, and take Jesus to your home. And from then on, you are no longer Levi the tax collector. You are Matthew the disciple, the Matthew who will one day write an account of the life of Jesus expressly for the Jewish people, the people who hated you, the Matthew who, according to tradition, will be martyred for the sake and in the name of that young rabbi.

“Follow me.” Two words, and Levi the tax collector was born again.

And that’s why I’m considering taking on a motto. “Remember Levi.”

If Jesus could love the despised tax collector, and be willing to be seen with a man considered a traitor by his own people, then he could love me, too. That’s the lesson of Matthew – there is always hope for the grace of God.

Remember Levi.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading the Grace of God. To see what others have to say on this chapter, “Accepted by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Painting: The Calling of St. Matthew by Arnold Houbraken (ca. 1710), Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht, Netherlands.

The Years of Silence

We’ve come to a pause in our reading of The Grace of God by Andy Stanley, a pause that covers about 400 years.

It’s a period covering roughly 400 B.C. to the birth of Christ. Many Protestants call it the “400 years of silence” – the period when no writing was produced that would be added to the canon. Catholics take a different view, and include what are often referred to as the “Apocryphal” texts – Esdras, Maccabbees, and a few others. All three Christian traditions (Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox) generally agree on the New Testament canon.

But it wasn’t exactly a quiet period in the history of Middle East. Momentous things were happening that would have a significant impact upon the first century A.D.

The Persian Empire declined, and was conquered by Alexander the Great. Alexander’s empire was divided into three parts upon his death, but Greek culture and influence became pervasive.

Antiochus Epiphanes got a little too enamored of himself, and defiled the temple in Jerusalem, for he re received a rebellion and loss of territory.

For a time Palestine and Israel operated quasi-independently, until Rome occupied the territory when the ruling factions couldn’t stop their bickering.

For 400 years, there was no prophet, or canonical writing, and no direct communication by God to his people, at least in the way they had experienced it before. It was a kind of silence, but a silence which masked how the stage was being set.

Like an unannounced intermission,” Andy Stanley writes, “the curtain of world events closed on the story of God’s grace, and the stage went dark.”

By the time of the birth of Jesus, there was a common government for the Mediterranean world (Roman), a common culture (Greek), an empire-wide road system that allowed ease of travel – and, among the Jews, a growing expectation for the arrival of a Messiah, one who would lead them to victory over the Roman oppressors and restore Israel to its promised earthly power.

But that’s not what happened.

While this story is a large one, it struck me as I read it that there’s a personal application. We can go for long periods of hope and expectation, and nothing happens. We can pray and pray for something to happen, and nothing happens. We can convince ourselves that our suffering can’t last forever, that something must change, and yet nothing seems to happen.

Only silence.

And yet, something is happening. Something is always happening. We may not see it or sense it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

A stage is being set. It’s always being set.

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Andy Stanley’s The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Selah,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Illustration: A map of Alexander the Great’s empire at its height.

Jonah: It’s Not About the Fish

For those of us who didn’t first learn about Jonah in Sunday School, the story seems scientifically impossible and a proof point that the Bible contains preposterous accounts, if not downright inaccuracies.

For those of us who did first learn the story of Jonah in Sunday School, we leave the scientific debate to others. (I don’t embrace creationism versus evolution arguments, either.) Hearing the story as a young child, all I can say is that it made sense, a truth easily grasped by children  and often far better than learned adults.

It’s not about the fish.

The story of Jonah is about many things, and to focus on the fish is to miss all of them. It’s about faith, obedience, understanding the culture and world one lives within, understanding how God works in that world, repentance, and having expectations confounded or confirmed.

Jonah is an individual whose life gets played out in a much larger context. And it’s a geopolitical story, the story of the capital city of a brutal empire being brought to its knees.

And, as Andy Stanley points out in The Grace of God, it is a perplexing story of God’s grace. Perplexing, in that the Assyrians deserved anything but grace. What they did deserve was destruction for their brutality and the evil they committed upon the surrounding nations and peoples (they were the ones who conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, whose people disappeared into history).

And yet, the fish notwithstanding, Jonah makes his way to Nineveh, and preaches repentance for three days (the same number of days he was inside the fish; and likely the same number of days in his “anger at God” period at the end of the story). The city listens to his preaching, repents, and is spared God’s wrath, much to Jonah’s chagrin. He knew this would happen, because he knew God as a God of grace.

And it made him angry.

I identify with the Assyrians. I did nothing to deserve God’s grace. Nothing. Just the opposite, in fact. And I was grateful for it.

And I identify with Jonah. Don’t all those people today who deny and ridicule the very notion of God, the people think his church is filled with stupid yahoos, the people who murder and destroy and tear at the very fabric of our society, the people who are trying to force an anti-Christian underpinning on everything in the culture, well, surely they deserve to get theirs, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps they will hear the call to repentance; perhaps Christians will articulate a call to repentance. Perhaps God will spare them too. The story of Jonah is also the story opf how anyone, no matter how evil, can repent and be forgiven.

Yes, the story of Jonah is a story of God’s Grace.

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God by Andy Stanley. To see more posts on this chapter, “Puzzled by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Sally Pesavento via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

David, Poetry, and Grace

A few years back, I was studying the life of David, one of the most complex, and most humanly real, people in the Bible. His life was often a life of extremes, and his personal character could be as well.

Known as the man “after God’s own heart,” David lusted for another man’s wife and had her husband murdered in battle; was responsible for the destruction of the town of Nob because he lied; and came close to seeing his own family and dynasty destroyed because he wouldn’t take action against a rebellious son.

And yet he killed Goliath, helping defeat the Philistines; unified Israel and regained lost territory; sought forgiveness; and was told by God that his kingdom would have no end.

He was the boy shepherd who became a king, the warrior who became a hunted outcast, and the king who nearly lost his throne.

One of the things I did during my study was to write a number of poems about David and some of his circumstances. (If you’re interested, you can read them here: David, Hillside; Shammah’s Psalm of Lament; Madness in My Royal City; Michal; Jonathan; and The Gratitude of a King.

It was one of the first times I had used poetry to help me through a Bible or character study.

I like the fact that David was a poet, having written a considerable number of the psalms. Some of the most heart wrenching, human statements in any language are David’s psalms.  

I wrote the poems over a several-week period, and as I did I became increasingly aware that one theme dominated David’s story. That theme was God’s grace.

David was anointed to be the future king when he was still a boy, and for no other reason than God’s grace (even the prophet Samuel was surprised).

David was no match for Goliath, but he unexpectedly took him down through God’s grace.

David repeatedly escaped Saul’s murderous wrath over and over again.

David’s son attempt[ted to seize the throne, and almost succeeded.

And David was forgiven, over and over again.

David’s life is the story of God’s grace. He didn’t deserve any of it – quite the contrary – but he was continually washed in God’s grace.

Like us.

“While the details of our lives may overlap little with David’s,” writes Andy Stanley in The Grace of God, “there is one thing we all have in common with him. We’ve all put God’s grace to the test. We have broken the law. We’ve been irresponsible with his blessing. We’ve confessed a sin only to turn right around and repeat it.”

And yet, Stanley says, “If David’s story is any indication, grace has no end.”

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Sustained by Grace,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Painting: David and His Harp, by Marc Chagall.

Genocide? Or Obedience?

In 2010, I attended a writer’s retreat at Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas. I was part of the poetry seminar, led by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Our overnight assignment was to write a poem about a Bible passage we found troublesome.

I chose Joshua 5-12.

One of the main themes in that section is herem, a Hebrew word meaning destruction of essentially everything. In that section, before a number of battles, God tells Joshua and the Israelites to commit herem when they defeat the foe. That means killing every living thing – men, women, children, domestic animals and livestock.

The command was given several times, and the Israelites obeyed (one tried to hold on to some treasure and got death for him and his family as a result). At Jericho, only the prostitute Rahab and her family were spared, because she had protected the spies. Every other living thing in the city was put to the sword.

The passage is clear. God told the Israelites to do it.

Today we use words like genocide or “ethnic cleansing.”

No matter what it’s called, the idea of herem is unsettling. In most of the conflicts, God told his people to undertake mass killings of those they conquered.

Theoretically, I can understand what was happening. God was cleansing the land. What I didn’t know, until Andy Stanley pointed it out in The Grace of God, was that God was also judging the Canaanites (referred to as the Amorites in Genesis), the people living in the land promised to the Israelites.

Stanley says that the sins of the Amorites were grievous and offensive to God (things like child sacrifice); that they had been given ample time to repent and change (several hundred years, in fact); that they had heard what was coming with the Israelites (Rahab clearly knew the whole story of the Exodus). So it wasn’t only about the Hebrews taking the promised land; it was also about the Canaanites being judged for their sins.

My modern sensibilities still recoil. It doesn’t seem harsh; it was harsh. But I’m reminded of our own examples of non-God genocide – the Nazi death camps, the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, Rwanda, and Dafur. The difference is that God had a godly purpose.

God is both terrifying and loving, Stanley writes. The terrifying part is, well, terrifying.

This is the poem I wrote.

As for me and my house
A meditation on Joshua 5-12

Would I have been cleansed
in the wilderness, or buried
in the sand as a submission
to the cleansing?

That man wielding the
great sword, that man
commanding the Lord’s host,
that man who makes ground
holy,
would I have obeyed, even
unto death?

Could I have stood in that
Jericho doorway, and plunged
the sword into the mother
and then the child? Or the child
first and then the mother?
And plunged that sword again
at Ai and Makeddeh,
Libnah and Lachish,
Eglon and Hebron,
Hazor and Anab, Jarmuth and
Gexer and Bethel and Aphek
and Tirzah and Megiddo and…

When the man who makes
ground holy turned over
the tables of shekels and
talents and doves, shouting
at thieves and robbers,
would I have conspired
to kill him, becoming yet
another submission to the
cleansing?
Or would he have
cleansed me?

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Rescued by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. 

A Quick Word Association

If I said the word “law,” what comes to mind?

I think courtroom. Litigation. Lawsuit. Rules. Speed traps (we have a notorious one close to our home.) Lawyers. Judge. Trouble. Trial. The Old Bailey (I watched all the Rumpole shows on PBS) (and read the books). Perry Mason. Matlock.

The fact is, we associate the word “law” with rather negative things.

We think of the Ten Commandments, for example, as a kind of summary of “the law.” All the do’s and don’ts. All the thou-shalt-nots. And all that quintessential micromanagement in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The Old Testament seems like it was one mean place.

Perhaps we’re overlaying our modern attitudes about “law” onto something that was a very different place, a very different time. Perhaps the problem isn’t the law as delineated in the Old Testament, but our own contemporary attitudes applied to an old understanding.

When I hear the word “law,” about the last word I think of is grace.

I don’t think of lawyers and grace in the same sentence, unless the lawyer is named Grace. (I knew a lawyer named Grace once, and it was definitely an oxymoron.)

And yet the concepts of law and grace are not an oxymoron.

“When we trust and obey,” writes Andy Stanley in The Grace of God, it becomes clear that the law of God is actually an expression of the grace of God…When we see God’s law the way he intended it, we understand that the grace of God and the law of God are not opposing concepts. There is no tension between the two. One is simply the expression of the other.”

Think of the implications of that statement. There is no contradiction between the Old and New Testaments. It’s not the mean God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New Testament. It is not the law versus the gospel of love. The major divisions of the Bible do not oppose each other – they explain each other.

All those arguments, all those superior attitudes about how the Bible is divided into two different gospels – meaningless.

Our minds are so attuned to modern-day understandings of “law” that they rebel against the idea of anything else.

It’s almost like trying to imagine that a lawyer could be aptly named Grace.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re discussing Stanley’s The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Ruled by Grace,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: The Royal Courts of Justice, London, by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Self-Directed Kindergartners

When our oldest had completed his first year of middle school, we decided the time had come to change schools. We had become increasingly concerned with the direction he school district was going. And then came the 6^th grade English teacher, whose notes from school included spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. For seventh and eighth grades, he attended the local Catholic school (and we’re not Catholic).

Then came our youngest, eight years behind his brother. He had attended a local pre-school, and it was time for kindergarten. We had him on a waiting list at the Catholic school, but the odds of getting him in were long. We weren’t members of the church, and the early grades were the most crowded. So we expected to send him to the local elementary school.

A friend who was a teacher aide at the school had warned us about one particular kindergarten teacher, the one who believed in and practiced self-directed education for kindergartners. He class was chaos, the friend said, and children learned nothing. The previous year they had “self-educated” themselves into learning to play with toys better.

The letter assigning our youngest to a class arrived. It was that teacher. I called the Catholic school principal in desperation. Was there anything at all available? Anything?

It just so happened a spot had opened up that very day in the kindergarten class. A family had suddenly been transferred to another city.

Sold! I said.

The chaos of a self-directed kindergarten class was almost too painful to contemplate. To throw a child into a class where he or she had no previous relationship with the teacher, might know a few of the other students, and be told to develop their own education plan was a bit over the top, even for some of the experimental things being tried in the school district at the time. (This craziness was generally abandoned once the first grade teachers discovered the problems of self-directed kindergartners becoming first graders.)

There was no relationship, and no rules. There was chaos.

We don’t normally associate relationships with rules, but as Andy Stanley points out in The Grace of God, rules followed relationship in the Old Testament. We thing of the books of Moses as crammed with all the rules, regulations, shalt nots and do nots. And they are. But they came after God provided relationship. And the rules, also known as the Ten Commandments and the Levitical law, were designed for a people who had not been a nation for 400 years, who had previously been slaves, and did not have the first notion of how to govern themselves as a people.

The rules followed relationship. Grace was there first, before the law. In profound ways, the law was a demonstration of God’s grace. The law was not a tool for God to micro-manage their lives, but to help people live and work together.

God saw what happened with the people while Moses was with him on Mount Sinai. The self-directed Israelites decided to build themselves an idol, like the surrounding nations and tribes had. They whined and complained and pitched temper tantrums. They wanted their toys, and they wanted them now.

Imagine what their first-grade teachers would have thought.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re discussing The Grace of God. Too see more posts on this chapter, “Redeemed by Grace,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.