"Grace Only Works on the Dead"

"Grace Only Works on the Dead"

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       Do you remember sitting in class in middle school when the principal came over the PA system asking the following students come to the office?  And in true liturgical fashion the immediate response of the rest of the class was, “ohhhhh!” 

          Well, I was one of the students that the principal asked to come to the office.  I was in seventh grade and got in trouble with my English teacher Ms. Beenkin.  Because I know that my sin is absolved I am not going to tell you juicy details of the transgression.  However, I would like to reflect for a moment on that experience.

          When I returned to class the next day, Ms. Beenkin called me and my friend George to the front of the class.  We walked to the front with our heads held in shame.  We just knew that we were going to hear it, again.  I had already gotten the “I am not mad just disappointed” talk from my father.  What else could Ms. Beenkin say to make me feel any worse?

          But what happened next was probably the strangest and yet most wonderful thing I ever experienced in middle school.  Ms. Beenkin presented George and me with a gift.  She thanked us for being honest with our confession and told us that what we had done didn’t make her think any less of us. 

          Meanwhile, the girl who had ratted us out sat in the back of the roomed and steamed with anger.  I remember her talking to her friends like Ms. Beenkin was crazy—and quite frankly I thought it was crazy too.  She just couldn’t believe that George and I were being celebrated given the fact that we had messed up big time. 

          At the time, I had always thought Ms. Beenkin was a little strange and other wordily and this moment only confirmed that.  But now I realize that Ms. Beenkin knew what it meant to be a Christian, which would probably account for why I thought she was strange and other worldly. 

          Simply put, Ms. Beenkin knew about grace.  As Christians, we proclaim a story that drips with grace, a story that that has nothing to do with our righteousness and everything to do with the righteousness of God.  Everything about our identity is completely and utterly dependent on the grace of God. 

And to a lot of people grace looks strange.  It looks unfair.  Grace doesn’t make any sense to a world that is obsessed with who is right and who is wrong, a world that is obsessed with distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving.   

Perhaps the most outlandish statement on the grace of God is revealed in the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32).  As you can see, the story of the prodigal son ends with a big party.  And the party isn’t thrown for the guy who has the most awards.  There isn’t a MC who reads a two page introduction listing the accomplishments of the guest of honor. 

Instead, the only introduction that we get about the guest of honor includes an account about how he squanders his inheritance on loose living.  The guest of honor was once someone who was reduced to only dreaming about eating the same scraps of food as the pigs.  The guest of honor is pushed to the point where he comes crawling back to his father with his head held in shame.

The prodigal finally falls at the feat of his father and says, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”  And the father does something even stranger than Ms. Beenkin did.  The father calls for the servants to put the finest cloths on his son and announces that he is going to throw a party.  He is going to kill his prized possession, the fated calf for the occasion.  The father wants to celebrate because the son of his who was dead is alive again.

Meanwhile, the elder son steams with rage in the corner much like the girl who told on me in the seventh grade.  It just doesn’t make any sense, he thought.  He is the one who is good and upright.  He is the one who stayed back at home to help his father on the farm.  He is the one who deserves the party—not his ne’er do-well younger brother!

Robert Capon, prolific writer on the subject of grace, says, “Grace can’t work on the living.”  In other words, grace does not work on those who depend on their own righteousness for life.  Grace does not work on those who are set on separating the world into those who are deserving and those who are undeserving. 

Capon says, “grace only works on the dead.”  In other words, grace only works on those who have breathed their last breath of believing that they can bargain their way into new life by making up for their sins with good works.  Even more, grace only works on those who die to the illusion that the world can be saved by the most righteous of people. 

Capon also says, “God has decided that history cannot be saved even by its best…This ship of fools is doomed: if the villains don’t wreck it, the heroes will.”  In other words, grace is the only thing that will save this ship of fools because either way our proverbial ships are going to wreck and leave us for dead.  The quicker we realize that we, the righteous and the unrighteous, the sinners and the saints, are bound for death, the quicker we can realize that grace is the only vehicle that can lead us to new life.    

In the column I wrote this week for the Selma Times Journal, I began by asking what might seem like a pretty elementary question especially for church people.  I asked, “What is a Christian?”  I don’t ask this question theoretically, but instead I ask this question in an environment where so many Christians are, to be blunt, down right rude and mean and nasty. 

We live in an environment where many Christians look like the elder son.  Many Christians use their righteousness as a weapon against the unrighteous.  We live in this environment because the message of grace is simply not trusted by so many Christians—the very people who are supposed to trust the message of grace don’t.

When I think about the Christians in my life who have made the biggest impact on me, I don’t think about the person who made it to every Bible study, I don’t think about the person who saved themselves for marriage, I don’t think about the person who lived a sinless life.  Instead, I think about the people who modeled grace.

I think about Ms. Beenkin my strange and wonderful seventh grade English teacher.  I think about my chaplain in college, Ken Fields.  While he was far from perfect, he embodied grace for college students in ways that were lifesaving.  I think about all the people who trusted the message of grace enough to convey that outlandish message to a lost and broken world, a world that is tired of the self-righteous beating up on the unrighteous. 

Believe me, grace is not something we simply fall into one Sunday morning.  Grace is something we grow into.  A life of grace is a life that we dip our fingers into through the waters of baptism.  A life of grace is a life spent kneeling before the altar to confess our sins.  A life of grace is a life spent remembering that God’s posture of love towards us never changes no matter how often we fall to our knees. 

A life of grace is remembered and consumed when we gather around the Lord’s Table each Sunday to eat and drink the food that our heavenly Father has prepared for us from the beginning of time and forever, a food that is provided because our heavenly Father was willing to kill his most prized possession so that we might keep the feast. 

Ultimately, a life of grace is about coming back again and again to the font and the table so that we are drowned and consumed in the goodness and mercy of God.  A life of grace is marked by our willingness to die to the life that we think we should be living, die to the life that we think the world should be living, so that we might be reborn into the life that God has already prepared for us, a life that works because of a God who has nothing but love for his people.

As Christians our entire story hinges on the grace of God.  Our story doesn’t hinge on morality.  Our story doesn’t hinge being the best Christian we can be.  Our story hinges on crawling back to God.  Our story hinges on God’s word of mercy to a lost and sinful world.  And our lives as Christians is marked by conveying the message of grace to both to the righteous and unrighteous.   

I know what some of you are thinking.  But doesn’t grace just get cheapened if we just go right back into the world and sin again.  Doesn’t grace get cheapened if that person who we keep trying to convey grace to goes right back to sinning. I am sorry to all you Bonhoeffer fans but there is no such thing as cheap grace.

And let’s face it, sin isn’t really all it is cracked up to be.  In the long run, sin really isn’t that much fun.  It might be tempting at first but sin always leaves you sick and as good as dead in the end.  And if you still think there is such a thing as cheap grace, then I say to you, “you must not be sinning hard enough.”

God’s grace doesn’t count the number of times you come crawling back to God.  God’s grace will let you sin as much as you want until you are ready to pronounce yourself dead.  And that’s just it.  Grace only works if you are ready to pronounce yourself dead.   

Grace works on the father because he is dead.  He dies when he gives his son the inheritance he is supposed to give after he is in the grave.  Grace works on the younger son because he is dead.  He dies when he says to his father, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

So I say to you this morning—are you willing to die yet?  Are you willing to die to a world that says only a few deserve to sit at the table with Jesus?  Are you ready to breathe your last breath in a life that hinges being a better Christian or even a better person?  Are you done with a world that is set on drawing lines between who is in and who is out? 

Are you finally ready to join the feast that our heavenly Father keeps for all, a feast that celebrates the son who was lost and is now found, a feast that celebrates that son who was dead and is now alive?