Grace Is Like Home

Grace is Like Home--August 3, 2016

"Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. these are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things--anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourself with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of is creator.  In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!" [Colossians 3:5-11]

There is at least one critical difference between your house and a super-fancy five-star restaurant. You are welcome in your own home even when you are smelly, sweaty, and streaked with dirt from yard work on a soupy hot-and-humid summer afternoon, but the maître d' at the old Four Seasons could turn you away for a lack of proper attire back before it closed. 

In other words, you can't stink if you want to get in to the Country Club, but at home, as Robert Frost put it once, "they have to take you in." Sure, the lobster bisque and wild mushroom ravioli might always be elegant and delicious at a swanky restaurant, and their wine list is probably larger than the few bottles you might have crowding a corner of your dining room or kitchen counter, but at home, you belong, even when you are utterly disgusting.  Hands covered in soil and fertilizer from the garden?  Still welcome at home.  Soaked with sweat or drying paint in your hair from repainting the garage door?  This is where you can come in from the heat.  Say what you will at about the appetizers and fancy napkin folding at an exclusive eatery, but they will never let you in as you are when you have been laboring in the yard all day.

Now, that said, nobody in your house wants you to just stay smelly.  And for that matter, you don't want to stay smelly, either.  Nobody likes to be the one whose shirt is drenched in sweat and whose face is streaked with soil.  Nobody likes to be the one whose shoes are caked in manure. Nobody likes to have blades of grass embedded into the streaks of drying paint on your forearm from doing a bunch of chores in one day.  When you get into the house, the first thing you want to do is get out of those disgusting clothes, get a shower, and get into something clean.  Of course everybody in the family, yourself included, is firmly anti-reeking.

But in your own home, the welcome is first.  You are accepted as you are, because this is home.  Because this is family.  And one of the things families do is commit to loving each other even when they are stinky and smelly.  In fact, it's only because you are welcome in your own home that you have the freedom to toss your smelly jeans into the washing machine and toss your smelly self into the shower. 

Both your family and the restaurant would prefer people who smell nice--the critical difference is that your family loves you even when you smell to high heaven and at the same time offers you the possibility of taking off the old work clothes so you can put on something new.  The restaurant will only have a place for you once you have made yourself smell springtime fresh. 

The word for that difference is grace.  Grace is both what accepts us as we are and makes it possible for us to leave behind, more and more, the stinky stuff.

That's the picture we get from the third chapter of Colossians, too: God is doing something to us, to make us people who stink less.  But before anything happens, God loves us like they do at the place you call "home"--God takes us in when we reek, too. But just like you know that you don't WANT to keep wallowing in filth once you come in from the day's work, but WANT to be able to leave the mud-streaked jeans in the laundry room so you can get a shower, part of God's grace is the way God works on us to be able to leave behind soul-stink. 

We all have it: we all have places inside our deepest selves that just stink--the bitter anger at the world we want to be rid of, but just don't know how to let go of on our own.  The self-centered greed that keeps us wanting more and more but pushes other people out of our way while we grasp for it.  The cruel words we wish we could take back the moment we speak them.  The impulses to use people or treat them as objects rather than as creatures made in the image of God.  The writer of Colossians imagines all of that like it is so much dirty laundry that we were sweating in outside, and he tells us that don't have to keep wearing it anymore!  We were loved as we were, and we are loved as we are.  But grace has a way of letting me strip off the things that I don't want to be saddled with anymore.  Grace has a way of making it safe for me to leave those old clothes on the laundry room floor so I can be made more and more to be renewed.  Grace is both the acceptance and the ability to change.  But the order is important--we are loved, we are accepted, we belong, just as we are, first... and only then from within that place of being "at home" in the love of Christ can we actually find the space and freedom to be renewed and have the stinky parts of ourselves refreshed. 

If our picture of "church" is more like a restaurant where they block the door because you will disturb the ambiance of classiness, we will have missed the point of grace.  Grace doesn't come with a dress code, and the church is not a country club.  Grace opens the door to us while we are sweaty, and at the same time lets us peel away the things we have allowed to give us soul-stink. Grace is like home.

How is God's grace working on you right now?  How can you be the voice of homecoming and welcome to someone else who has been told they have to get their life together first before they can be accepted?

Lord Jesus, pull us inside the door of your grace, and take these dirty, sweat-stained things away so that we can be renewed, day by day by day.