Reflections on Ragamuffin Gospel

Grace Again?

Why do we keep coming back to the message: God loves us, though we do not deserve it,  the essential meaning of grace? We enter the kingdom of God by this door, but keep going out and coming in again. It is like a recurrent dream that we can not escape. We are only asked to believe it, as if we didn't believe it the first time, as if believing needs to be practiced, because it is so easily unlearned.

If you think believing once in your life  is complete redemption, just listen to the bitter voice of a KKK clansman or the rage of  a sniper, his faith broken by PTSD. Grace may be offered to all, but all do not accept it.

Even when we accept the message of grace, we easily give it away. It is no less than human nature to believe that "Discipleship will be an untarnished success story; life will be an unbroken spiral toward holiness," as Brennan Manning says (30). The church itself has devised an upward spiral toward holiness: baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral. How many  people stand before Godonly on these occasions? Only then to remind themselves of the grace of God, because they do not want to be reminded of it every day. The church is complicit in this myth that we are always on the upward way because we entered the right door once.

We can hardly blame the church for our hard hearing, our stony hearts. We do not want to live our lives at the mercy of God by our very nature. We have a merit badge mentality, that we gain God's favor only by the faithfulness of the Elder Brother, not the fickleness of the Prodigal Son.  If we are members of a church, we inevitably want to consider our faithfulness as a secure investment in a heavenly enterprise. How often are church people offended if they are passed over for a position, if they are not publicly recognized for their service, or if a newcomer gets most of the attention.  We are always checking our status in the kingdom of God, because we assume we have earned it. 

Jesus is  hard on the Pharisees, the most religious people in the Gospels, because, like church members today, they easily succumb to self-righteousness. What does this mean--"self-righteousness"? Merriam-Webster says: "convinced of one's own righteousness especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others : narrow-mindedly moralistic."  Look how the definition becomes more offensive with each clarification:

1.  Convinced of righteousness
2. In contrast with  . . . others
3. Narrow-mindedly moralistic

Self-righteousness is a degenerative condition. First we are convinced of being right, then we feel superior to others, and then we develop a code that proves how right we are.  None of this is conscious or intentional.  We develop a shell and feel its protection against need, against vulnerability.

The shell of self-righteousness is what Jesus has to knock against to get through to us. We are saved, but have become water-resistant to the streams of mercy. We are among God's hard cases, because we believe we are righteous.

So insidious this shell,  it can secrete from merely writing or speaking about self-righteousness (as I am doing now). Writers and speakers have the severe obligation to live what they communicate or the shell of self-righteousness encases them. Preachers and teachers have to be the first audience for their language or it loses its power and freshness. It is hard to preach vulnerably, much easier to write or speak from a pedestal, claiming superiority. It happens by losing the touch of grace, hiding under the shell of self-righteousness, which Jesus has to bang against to get our attention.

"Prone to wander, Lord I feel it."  To experience grace again and again is to be eternally vulnerable and open to God's mercy. Not a place we will easily gravitate to, a place we are more likely to run from, a dangerous place.  So we are called back to grace again and again. We are reminded again and again that we have earned nothing in the Kingdom of God. We are saved by grace day by day.  Every day a child, seeing the newness of life and the joy of forgiveness.

Bill Tucker

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