The Problem with Grace
Psalm 14 (Year C)
Luke 15:1-10 (Year C)
 
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
What beloved words these words are, some of the most beloved in hymnody.  John Newton's "Amazing Grace" has to be one of the top ten, all-time favorite hymns.  Even persons who are non-religious recognize and appreciate hearing "Amazing Grace" sung or played instrumentally.  A great deal of comfort is to be had in singing those lines, isn't there?  It is one of those hymns that gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.  Amazing grace that saves me.  Grace that goes searching for me and finds me.
God's amazing grace is one of the primary themes in today's gospel reading. When Jesus talks about a lost sheep being searched for until it is found, and the lost coin being searched for until it is recovered, he is alluding to the compassionate, seeking, gracious God whose nature is to go searching for every one of us until we are found; until we are back safe in our spiritual home.  So, it makes us feel good to think that we are the little lost sheep that once strayed from the fold, but the great Shepherd of the souls came looking for us.  Or we are the little lost coin that rolled away from the Master, but the great Accountant of Heaven came looking for us?even us?until we were found, safe and sound.  And so, one of the reasons we come here week after week is to celebrate this wonderful grace that reaches out to us and wraps us safely in a warm embrace.  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!  That truly is a reason to celebrate, isn't it?
But, I am sorry to say, there is a problem with grace.  This problem was brought to light in Jesus' interactions with the religious leaders and experts in the law.  Now, these folks certainly were within the realm of God's grace.  They knew the scriptures frontward and backwards.  They did everything they could to follow God's law.  They did everything they could to live good, clean lives.  They believed themselves to be God's people.  And I am inclined to believe that God considered them to be God's people as well.  They were within the realm of God's grace.
But the problem arose when Jesus began associating with those that everyone knew were beyond the reaches of God's grace?tax collectors, prostitutes, the socially unclean, people of "doubtful reputation," what some today might call "scumbags" or  "riffraff" or "white trash."  There was murmuring.  And gossiping.  And judgmental finger-pointing. 
What really got Jesus into trouble was proclaiming that the grace of God extended to all these of doubtful reputaton?no one excluded!  Revolutionary!  Radical!  Ridiculous!  Grace was fine and good, as long as it was restrained, kept within limits.  But for the religious leaders and experts in the law, there was only so far that grace could go.  And thus, to drive home his message of radical inclusiveness, Jesus told the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and later in the chapter the lost son, to try to convey a new image of God as a God of unlimited grace.  A God who wants no one to be lost or feel estranged from God or God's community of faith.
Fast forward 2,000 years?it just may be that we, too, have a problem with grace.  This problem with grace is a problem that we may find hard to admit.  Who is grace for?  This is the unspoken question.  The crux of the problem is this: grace truly is amazing; grace truly is marvelous?as long as it involves us or those close to us.  But when God's grace begins to spill over onto certain others, we start to have problems with it and resent it, don't we?  And I sometimes struggle with this as much as you do.  For instance, this past Monday we watched Dateline on NBC as it told the story of how Dr. Petit and his family in Cheshire, CT, were brutally attacked earlier this year by two career criminals.  The doctor was beaten, his wife and two daughters sexually molested and burned to death in their home.  Such persons who commit such heinous crimes call into question our idea of grace, don't they?
As one UCC writer has commented on this passage: "We tend to romanticize the sinners in this [Lukan] text (most of us have very little contact with shepherds or prostitutes), but we probably fall uncomfortably closer in our practice and attitudes to these religious folks than we'd like to think we do, when we're confronted with real-life modern sinners and folks who are ?lost.'  This is where the problem of grace comes in. We really want it for ourselves, but it's a little harder to think that it's freely given to everyone, isn't it?"1  We take comfort in thinking about the lamb being carried on the shoulders of the Good Shepherd, as long as the lamb is us.  But it can make us very uncomfortable to think about the lamb being one of those we may secretly deem to be outside the limits of God's grace.
And so, we are forced to ask ourselves, "Who are the people that we view outside the limits of God's grace?"  As Richard Swanson says in his commentary on this passage, "These strong little stories require us to think hard about whether we believe any of what we say about grace and forgiveness."
Jesus' call is to identify with him in extending grace by seeking, finding, and restoring the lost, whosoever they might be.  And we are called to join in the celebration and rejoicing whenever anyone has the experience of grace, or whenever a lost soul is found or returns to the fold.
I am reminded of that United Church of Christ "God Is Still Speaking" ejector television commercial and the powerful message it bore.  For those who didn't get a chance to see it, the commercial showed different people?minorities, homeless persons, and the like?being ejected from their pews in an affluent, white congregation.  The idea was that in a lot of churches many people are not welcome.  But in the United Church of Christ, no matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here.  The response to that commercial revealed that for so many people the feeling of being ejected or rejected by some church proved to be all too true.  The responses revealed the depth of pain being carried by so many who felt excluded or estranged from God's grace.
One UCC pastor tells the story of how a distressed young mother, toddler in tow, stopped by a church one morning.  The church administrator invited her into the living-room-like setting of the narthex, where she settled in next to the fireplace.  When the pastor joined her, he asked how he could help.  Tears rolled down her cheeks as she explained that their first child, a beautiful 3-year-old daughter, had just been diagnosed with a mental disorder.  She said she had received the news three days earlier, and since then she had not been able to feel God's presence, always a living reality to her before.  The young mother was driving by the UCC church and saw the "God Is Still Speaking" banner.  Perhaps, she thought, she might be able to find God there, and so she came in.  The pastor and mother talked for a long time and prayed together.  As she prepared to leave she stopped to thank the pastor, saying she hadn't been sure what to expect.  The pastor assured her she was welcome to stop any time, to come in for meditation and prayer, to talk again, or if she was so inclined to join them in worship.  The woman was Muslim.
The challenging question is whether we are willing to share God's grace.  It is whether we are willing to picture ourselves as equals with others whom we in the past may have deemed to be outside the limits of God's grace.  The question is whether we will join Christ in the ministry of search and rescue.  And the question is whether we can join in the celebration over every one who is found.
The only problem with grace, as I see it, is the limits that we try to put on it.  God's grace is abundant.  And God's grace is to be celebrated.  It's party time in heaven, Jesus says, whenever another wayward soul comes to realize God's grace.  When all is said and done, every one is invited to God's party.  The only requirement is that we check our exclusive, judgmental attitude at the door.
1Samuel online commentary. 
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Six Words to Be Avoided
Isaiah 43:18-21
Mark 2:18-22
 

Before our children married, every summer we tried to take a family vacation.  One aspect of our summer vacations was visiting amusement parks.  Thus, we have been to Disneyworld (FL) and Disneyland (CA), Busch Gardens in Virginia and King's Mountain in Cincinnati, the Mall of America in Minneapolis and Six Flags Mid-America in St. Louis.  But it was when we visited Busch Gardens near Colonial Williamsburg that something different happened, something that was to forever change our visits to amusement parks.  Mary Lou and I went one way and Nathan and Kristin went another way.  In a while we met back up again and they said, "Mom and Dad, come and ride this little roller coaster with us."  "I don't think so," we replied.  For you see, we didn't ride roller coasters.  We had never done that before.  We would ride the Ferris Wheel, but never a roller coaster.  "Ah, come on," they pleaded, "it's not very bad at all.  You'll like it."  Wanting to be good parents, we finally agreed to take a chance and go along, even though we had never done that before. 
     Well, you couldn't actually see the roller coaster at the entrance area where you got on.   It was hidden.  We took our seats on the Big Bad Wolf and the cars began to move.  As soon as we exited the platform and rounded a curve, we started climbing this extremely tall incline that seemed to have no end.  Once we were at the peak, we could see the entire amusement park, and half of Virginia, it seemed like.  Furthermore, we were starring down a drop-off that looked a mile long.  Our kids had duped us.  "Oh no!" we screamed just before we lost our breath and our hearts leaped up into our throats.  The roller coaster fell down the steep slope and made a sharp turn near a river's edge, so close that it looked like we could have reached out and grabbed a handful of the James River, had we not been going so fast.
     Well, we survived the Big Bad Wolf; a little shaken and weak-kneed, but we survived.  We chided our children for tricking us.  But you know what?  The next amusement park we visited, what do you suppose was one of the first rides we ran to?  If you guessed the roller coaster, you guessed right.  Even though we had never done it before Busch Gardens, after that first time we grew to like it.  So whenever we visited amusement parks after that, we rode the roller coasters.  Whenever we traveled through St. Louis, we always stopped at Six Flags Mid-America because of the big, white, old-fashioned, wooden roller coaster that we would ride at least two or three times.
     "But we've never done that before."  Perhaps you have said that too. 
The fact is, most people tend to be resistant to change and trying new things.  So it was with the folk of Jesus' day.  Some people came to Jesus and complained that his disciples were not acting in traditional ways.  They asked him why his disciples were not conducting themselves the way the disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees were.  The real bone of contention at this point was fasting.  Why were Jesus' disciples not fasting like John's disciples were?  They were not following tradition.  They were doing things differently.  People just couldn't understand it.  "But we've never seen it done that way before," the people complained to Jesus.  Jesus explained that the conventional rules of fasting did not apply to that time and place. 
     Jesus compared his coming to attending a wedding party.  No one would think of fasting while the wedding party was in progress.  The wedding is a time of feasting and joy.  While Jesus?the bridegroom?was with his disciples, they did not need to fast.  A time would come when the bridegroom would be taken away from them; on that day they could fast.
     So Jesus told the two parables of the cloth and the wineskins.  Let's suppose that you have a long-sleeve cotton shirt.  You have worn a big hole in the elbow.  You have washed and dried that cotton shirt so many times that it has shrunk at least two sizes.  You wouldn't think of sewing a brand new, unshrunk cotton patch over that hole in the elbow.  For if you did, when you washed and dried it, the new piece of cloth would shrink and pull, making a terrible-looking, puckered mess and even bigger hole.
     As to the wineskins, they didn't have glass bottles in those days like we do today.  Wine was often stored in the skins of animals.  When the skins were fresh and new, they were pliable, flexible and could expand with the wine as it fermented and expanded.  But as the skins got old, they also dried out and got hard and brittle.  You might store water in old skins, but never new wine.  For as the wine fermented and expanded, it would burst the hard, brittle skins and be lost. 
     The point Jesus was trying to make was it's a new day.  He had ushered in the kingdom of God.  Things would have to be done differently now.  The disciples of Jesus could not be expected to act in the old traditional ways.  God was doing a new thing in the lives of the faithful.  The new era called for a new way of looking at things, even though they had never done it that way before.
"But we've never done that before" is something that you will hear a lot in churches, especially churches that have been around a long time.  As commentator Bruce C. Birch observes, "In religious life we  . . . call up the past as a way of refusing the future.  ?We've always done it that way' is an old familiar cry in the church.  We invoke tradition, hoping . . . that it will tell us what to do."1
     But let me tell you folks: The church of our time is changing rapidly.  A new day is dawning for the American Church.  The changes that have occurred in the church since I started preaching 30 years ago have been dramatic.    Up until 1986 I was typing the Sunday bulletin on blue stencil paper on a manual typewriter.  The stencil was then wrapped around a drum covered in messy, black ink, and that produced at best a smudgy, blurred copy.   Then this thing called a Xerox machine came along that we could use to copy bulletins.  And then the personal computer.  Now we can't do without one of those.  And a lot of ministry and church business are carried on via the Internet.  And technology and projectors and the arts are making their way into worship.
     The days are fast leaving us when the traditional worship service that most of us here today are used to and comfortable with will appeal to much of America's population.  And many churches that can't or won't go along with changes are going to be left behind.    Christian pollster George Barna predicts that the percentage of Americans who express their faith through the traditional church will fall from about 40% today to 20-25% by the year 2025.  More and more people are being drawn to "high-impact services filled with audio and video media," like that being offered by the New Beginning Fellowship that will soon be holding services in the Madison Theater.
     One of the aims of the "Casting Your Nets" revitalization program is to get us to consider our church's mission, purpose and outreach and how to make our church more contemporary, meaningful and appealing to the community around us.  It may be that some changes need to be made or some new things need to be added.  The challenge for us is to consider doing some things differently.    Like considering sometime in the future starting a second, more contemporary worship service; experimenting with new ways of doing spiritual formation; changing the way we go about church business; and adding more forms of art to the Sunday morning worship service.2   We may have to stop trying to put the new, exciting wine of God into old wineskins?i.e., into the traditional way of doing things. 
     The good news is God is a God who continues to "make all things new."  God is indeed seeking to do a new thing among us.  As Douglas R. Loving has noted, "The quest for new wineskins can open doors to fresh ministries and vibrant witness. . . .  Seeking fresh wineskins for . . . new wine challenges us all.  The journey can release ingenuity and open doors to new ministries.  It may also reconnect us with God's dynamic, transforming movement within each of us."3
     Regarding the newness that God wants to impart to our church?as well as to our families and our individual lives?we need to be careful about saying, "But we've never done that before."  "But we've never done that before" are six crippling, future-killing words that should be avoided at all costs.  As with our experience with the roller coaster, as we open ourselves to the newness and change that God might have in store for us, we might just decide that we like it.

¹New Interpreter's Bible Commentary, vol. II, p. 1186.

²see "Changing the Conversation: Nurturing a Third Way for Congregations" by Anthony B. Robinson, Alban Institute

³Douglas R. Loving, CHRISTIAN CENTURY, February 16, 2000, p. 177.

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