"Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, 'My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.' But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today." [Deuteronomy 8:11-18]
A day before he died, our older brother in the faith Martin Luther took a scrap of paper and wrote the last sentence he would ever pen: "We are beggars. This is true."
He was right.
But it does take a crucial change of perspective to realize that, indeed, it is true that we are all beggars. It means letting go of the illusion that I am the source of my own success. It means surrendering the right to get praise and credit for all my accomplishments... because that was never really my right to begin with. Whatever good I have in my life is a gift of grace. Before I get up on my high horse and moan about "all those freeloaders out there..." as it can be tempting to do, I need to acknowledge that I am a recipient of God's free gifts on a day by day basis, and everything good in my life has come by grace. So if I am going to go around labeling people who live off the provision of another as "freeloaders," I should be honest and spot the one who is looking back at me in the mirror. We are beggars, says Luther, the whole lot of us--not just the people I feel justified in looking down on.
God knows that we have an innate impulse to puff ourselves up and see ourselves in a distorted perspective. God knows that we have a way of forgetting how people before us and around us have blessed us. God knows we have a way of assuming that my money, my house, my possessions are all my reward, rather than recognizing them as God's provision for my daily needs. God knows we have distorted vision that skews and obscures how much we rely on others and falsely enlarges our own importance. Sin, it turns out, is not reducible to just "bad things we do," but sin has to do with our distorted ways of seeing everything, ourselves included.
And since God has known that about us all along, the Scriptures rehearse for us again and again God telling us, "Don't forget... everything is from grace. Don't forget... it's all a gift. Don't forget... when you could not do for yourself, I was the one providing for you all along." God said it to the wandering Israelites, as Deuteronomy tells it, before they at last entered the land they had been waiting for. "When you get there, you're going to be tempted to have selective amnesia and to edit out the memory of all I have done for you. Don't forget. Don't forget that at every turn I gave you all you needed." God goes even further and warns them in advance: "I know you'll want to say that you've accomplished this all by yourself... and then that will lead you to want to be stingy with the poor and to look down on them as if they just didn't work hard enough. Don't do it--everything you have is a gift, and you are meant to be a channel of blessing for the person next to you who has nothing."
If we are going to take grace seriously (and I think we should), it will do two powerful things to us. First, it will force us to see that we ourselves have been living off of God's goodness before we ever did a thing, and even though we can never pay God back. We are the freeloaders... we are the beggars, even til our last day on earth and even if we have spent our lives as faithful workers on God's team. We are always beggars--dependent on grace. And then second, that will change the way we see other people around us, too. I am no longer allowed to dismiss people who are just scraping by, and assume they must be "lazy" or "lack a serious work ethic" or "deserve" to be poor, or that they must be "freeloaders." Because if they are... well, then I am, too. And all of us are. Every one of us, despite our illusions of being self-made successes, has only empty hands that receive the good gives of a generous God.
We are all freeloaders in that sense, so I don't get to throw that label on other people as though I am better than anybody else. We might as well see it and own it, so that we will know how deeply we are beloved--we who bring nothing to the table but our neediness and are met with nothing but grace from the God who gives generously.
God knows that we have an innate impulse to puff ourselves up and see ourselves in a distorted perspective. God knows that we have a way of forgetting how people before us and around us have blessed us. God knows we have a way of assuming that my money, my house, my possessions are all my reward, rather than recognizing them as God's provision for my daily needs. God knows we have distorted vision that skews and obscures how much we rely on others and falsely enlarges our own importance. Sin, it turns out, is not reducible to just "bad things we do," but sin has to do with our distorted ways of seeing everything, ourselves included.
And since God has known that about us all along, the Scriptures rehearse for us again and again God telling us, "Don't forget... everything is from grace. Don't forget... it's all a gift. Don't forget... when you could not do for yourself, I was the one providing for you all along." God said it to the wandering Israelites, as Deuteronomy tells it, before they at last entered the land they had been waiting for. "When you get there, you're going to be tempted to have selective amnesia and to edit out the memory of all I have done for you. Don't forget. Don't forget that at every turn I gave you all you needed." God goes even further and warns them in advance: "I know you'll want to say that you've accomplished this all by yourself... and then that will lead you to want to be stingy with the poor and to look down on them as if they just didn't work hard enough. Don't do it--everything you have is a gift, and you are meant to be a channel of blessing for the person next to you who has nothing."
If we are going to take grace seriously (and I think we should), it will do two powerful things to us. First, it will force us to see that we ourselves have been living off of God's goodness before we ever did a thing, and even though we can never pay God back. We are the freeloaders... we are the beggars, even til our last day on earth and even if we have spent our lives as faithful workers on God's team. We are always beggars--dependent on grace. And then second, that will change the way we see other people around us, too. I am no longer allowed to dismiss people who are just scraping by, and assume they must be "lazy" or "lack a serious work ethic" or "deserve" to be poor, or that they must be "freeloaders." Because if they are... well, then I am, too. And all of us are. Every one of us, despite our illusions of being self-made successes, has only empty hands that receive the good gives of a generous God.
We are all freeloaders in that sense, so I don't get to throw that label on other people as though I am better than anybody else. We might as well see it and own it, so that we will know how deeply we are beloved--we who bring nothing to the table but our neediness and are met with nothing but grace from the God who gives generously.
We are all, as Luther said it, beggars. We are all, in a word, graced.
Lord God, you give us everything we need day by day, we ask, too, that you would open our eyes to see our need and your provision, so that we may stop condemning and criticizing our neighbors and stop pretending we are above anybody else. Open our eyes, Lord God, to see our need, and your giving, of grace.
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