It Ain't Easy--July 29, 2016
"In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another." [1 John 4:10-11]
In the end, this is the truth: grace is not easy.
We have been looking all this month at how grace tells the truth, but at the end of all that, the truth has to be spoken about grace itself, and it is a surprising truth to some: it ain't easy.
At first blush, of course, the whole notion of grace sounds exactly too easy: it sounds like God just up and forgives a bunch of still-sinning stinkers without even making them take the first step toward him by trying a little harder to follow the rules. And of course, that is one of the regular criticisms you'll hear about folks who take the Gospel seriously: "You just want to make things too easy!" "That sounds like you don't care about sin very much!" "If God just forgives us, then what possible motive do we have for being good anymore?" You get the drift. The common thread from these voices is that they think that because God does it all by grace, that grace is therefore "easy."
No. No, not at all. Nothing could be further from the truth, actually. Grace is not just God winking away our sins like they didn't matter. Nor is grace some grand divine cover-up, where God obstructs justice by shredding all the damning evidence against us like incriminating emails or shady secret tax returns and business dealings. Grace isn't easy--not for God... and not really even for us. And that's because ultimately, grace is not about pretending our mess-ups don't matter or pretending they didn't happen. Grace is about God's willingness to risk loving us when we are crummy at loving back.
You know you put it surprisingly well? Katharine Hepburn. Yes, the First Lady of Cinema once said it like this: "Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get--only what you are expecting to give. What you will receive in return varies, but really has no connection to what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving. If you are very lucky, you may get loved back. That is delicious, but it does not necessarily happen."
Those are hard words to take to heart, maybe because ours is a particular self-centered era, and we are taught to believe we are all entitled to have everybody else meet all of our wishes and wants. And maybe because our culture so often hears the word "love" and confuses it instead with its smoke-and-mirrors distant cousin, "romance." Maybe because we all have this overdeveloped sense we imagine is "justice" (but is often really envy) that says we should only give to others if they are going to give to us in return... you know, that's "fair." Maybe because we do not want to admit that each of us has been loved in life by people we will never be able to pay back. But Hepburn's point is hard because it gets right at the root of grace, which shares the same internal logic and genuine love: namely, if it is real, it is given away regardless of whether it will be returned. It is, in a word, unconditional.
That's one of the reasons I love these verses from what we call First John--when the subject of genuine love comes up, John stops us dead in our tracks before letting us focus on our selves or what we are supposed to do. And instead, John says, "No, no, no--it's not about what we do, not first, at any rate. Real love is about the way God loved us and gave everything--even God's own life--before we did a thing!"
Take a look at the line of Katharine Hepburn's again, and read it this time as though she is talking about God, rather than offering romance advice. Real love--God's love--gives without being contingent on getting loved back, or being paid in return. This is grace: it does not keep score, or insist on getting its own needs met. It does not worry about whether it looks foolish, either. It just gives itself away. That's not easy--that cost God everything.
And if we are honest, it is not easy to admit we need grace to operate like that. We would rather live in some illusion that we are all pretty decent investments for God, and that we totally pay God back by all of our... hmmm... occasional good deeds, moments of unselfishness, sharing of vaguely inspirational Facebook posts, and periodic offerings in church. We don't want to admit that we are beggars, and that is the truth. We don't want to admit that we are in need of an unconditional gift, even though we are both needy and stinkers--because that will force us down from our high horses where we like to criticize people we imagine are just mooching off of handouts elsewhere in society. But if grace really is as the New Testament describes it, then we are all living on handouts from God, and there is no room for us to judge someone else for the need they share in common with us. Grace is hard, because realizing that we have been graced already before we knew it means that we have to admit our dependency on God, and we like to imagine ourselves as independent and self-sufficient.
And then here is where grace deals us a double-whammy: once we realize that God has loved us, as Hepburn says, without condition or dependence on what God "gets" out of the deal from us, then it dawns on us that we are called to love others in the same gracious way. Not in order to earn what has been freely given already. Not to pay God back. But because God's grace does something to us... it transforms us from the inside out like a caterpillar being remade inside a chrysalis, or like a carnation drinking in the color from dye in the water. When you realize that God has loved you with a reckless and risky love, you also see all the ways you have been trying to get by with self-interested, conditional "love" toward everybody else in your life... and that won't work anymore.
Grace changes you--it compels each of us to see our need, and it pushes us to do good to other people, regardless of what they will or won't do for us. Don't call that easy.
This is the truth: you and I have been loved by God apart from any expectations from God that we will pay God back. And this is also the truth: the love of God, which is rooted in unconditional, gracious giving, will change you. It will remake you in its image, until you and I become living reflections of the amazing grace of God.
Lord God, let your grace remake us.
In the end, this is the truth: grace is not easy.
We have been looking all this month at how grace tells the truth, but at the end of all that, the truth has to be spoken about grace itself, and it is a surprising truth to some: it ain't easy.
At first blush, of course, the whole notion of grace sounds exactly too easy: it sounds like God just up and forgives a bunch of still-sinning stinkers without even making them take the first step toward him by trying a little harder to follow the rules. And of course, that is one of the regular criticisms you'll hear about folks who take the Gospel seriously: "You just want to make things too easy!" "That sounds like you don't care about sin very much!" "If God just forgives us, then what possible motive do we have for being good anymore?" You get the drift. The common thread from these voices is that they think that because God does it all by grace, that grace is therefore "easy."
No. No, not at all. Nothing could be further from the truth, actually. Grace is not just God winking away our sins like they didn't matter. Nor is grace some grand divine cover-up, where God obstructs justice by shredding all the damning evidence against us like incriminating emails or shady secret tax returns and business dealings. Grace isn't easy--not for God... and not really even for us. And that's because ultimately, grace is not about pretending our mess-ups don't matter or pretending they didn't happen. Grace is about God's willingness to risk loving us when we are crummy at loving back.
You know you put it surprisingly well? Katharine Hepburn. Yes, the First Lady of Cinema once said it like this: "Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get--only what you are expecting to give. What you will receive in return varies, but really has no connection to what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving. If you are very lucky, you may get loved back. That is delicious, but it does not necessarily happen."
Those are hard words to take to heart, maybe because ours is a particular self-centered era, and we are taught to believe we are all entitled to have everybody else meet all of our wishes and wants. And maybe because our culture so often hears the word "love" and confuses it instead with its smoke-and-mirrors distant cousin, "romance." Maybe because we all have this overdeveloped sense we imagine is "justice" (but is often really envy) that says we should only give to others if they are going to give to us in return... you know, that's "fair." Maybe because we do not want to admit that each of us has been loved in life by people we will never be able to pay back. But Hepburn's point is hard because it gets right at the root of grace, which shares the same internal logic and genuine love: namely, if it is real, it is given away regardless of whether it will be returned. It is, in a word, unconditional.
That's one of the reasons I love these verses from what we call First John--when the subject of genuine love comes up, John stops us dead in our tracks before letting us focus on our selves or what we are supposed to do. And instead, John says, "No, no, no--it's not about what we do, not first, at any rate. Real love is about the way God loved us and gave everything--even God's own life--before we did a thing!"
Take a look at the line of Katharine Hepburn's again, and read it this time as though she is talking about God, rather than offering romance advice. Real love--God's love--gives without being contingent on getting loved back, or being paid in return. This is grace: it does not keep score, or insist on getting its own needs met. It does not worry about whether it looks foolish, either. It just gives itself away. That's not easy--that cost God everything.
And if we are honest, it is not easy to admit we need grace to operate like that. We would rather live in some illusion that we are all pretty decent investments for God, and that we totally pay God back by all of our... hmmm... occasional good deeds, moments of unselfishness, sharing of vaguely inspirational Facebook posts, and periodic offerings in church. We don't want to admit that we are beggars, and that is the truth. We don't want to admit that we are in need of an unconditional gift, even though we are both needy and stinkers--because that will force us down from our high horses where we like to criticize people we imagine are just mooching off of handouts elsewhere in society. But if grace really is as the New Testament describes it, then we are all living on handouts from God, and there is no room for us to judge someone else for the need they share in common with us. Grace is hard, because realizing that we have been graced already before we knew it means that we have to admit our dependency on God, and we like to imagine ourselves as independent and self-sufficient.
And then here is where grace deals us a double-whammy: once we realize that God has loved us, as Hepburn says, without condition or dependence on what God "gets" out of the deal from us, then it dawns on us that we are called to love others in the same gracious way. Not in order to earn what has been freely given already. Not to pay God back. But because God's grace does something to us... it transforms us from the inside out like a caterpillar being remade inside a chrysalis, or like a carnation drinking in the color from dye in the water. When you realize that God has loved you with a reckless and risky love, you also see all the ways you have been trying to get by with self-interested, conditional "love" toward everybody else in your life... and that won't work anymore.
Grace changes you--it compels each of us to see our need, and it pushes us to do good to other people, regardless of what they will or won't do for us. Don't call that easy.
This is the truth: you and I have been loved by God apart from any expectations from God that we will pay God back. And this is also the truth: the love of God, which is rooted in unconditional, gracious giving, will change you. It will remake you in its image, until you and I become living reflections of the amazing grace of God.
Lord God, let your grace remake us.
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