Defiant Grace--February 21, 2020

Defiant Grace--February 21, 2020

“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved…” (Ephesians 2:4-5)
See? A “but.” More importantly, a “But God…”

"But" is one of those great words that says a lot in three letters. It is adversative. In other words, it means, “Regardless of whatever just came before, this next thing is true anyway, even in spite of what I just said.” The word and is practically just a plus sign—it can be as dull as your shopping list: I need eggs, and milk, and bread, and canned tomatoes, and on and on and on. But each of those things could go on a list with anything else and still not really relate to each other. The word “but” has a certain defiance to it, sort of an in-your-face quality.

Hold onto that feeling as you read these verse from Ephesians again: even though we were dead in sins, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us… made us alive.” We were dead, but God made us alive with Christ. We were turned away from God, mired in our own messes and sin, but God put our sins away and pulled us out when we couldn’t even ask for a life-preserver on our own. We didn’t have a thing to offer with which to buy, earn, deserve, or merit a new life, but God just up and gave us that new life by grace.

I don’t know that I ever really thought about it like this before, but all of this means that grace is really a kind of defiant thing, isn’t it? Grace is God’s way of saying, “I don’t care what you say you’ve done—I’m going to love you anyway. I don’t care what was in your past, what is still going on in your present, and what you have yet to do wrong in your future—I’m doing good to you anyway, and will be faithful to you.” Defiant grace doesn’t take a look at the evidence and decide to be kind to us because we have proven our worthiness.

Martin Luther said it this way in the last thesis of his Heidelberg Disputation from 1518: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” In other words, unlike stingy, finite human love, God doesn’t have an imaginary standard he carries around to compare us to, and then only love us if we meet the standard, but God finds us as we are and then makes us into new creations regardless of whatever we were. That’s what grace is like—God’s wonderfully stubborn unwillingness to give up on us despite the fact that we don’t bring anything to the table but our brokenness, and God’s passionate determination to make us lovely by loving us. Grace is God’s obstinate refusal to let our dead-ness be the end of the story. Grace is what it looks like when God takes a look at the shipwrecks we have made with our lives and God says, “But…” to it.

Maybe we need to add a verse to the old song, something like this (I expect you’ll know the tune to sing it to):

Defiant grace, how bold the sound
That took me as I was!
No points to earn it could be found:
Your love said, “Just because.”

For whatever else has come before, in Jesus Christ God has said, “But still…” over your life and mine. But still I claim you as my own. But still I am trading your stale-in-the-coffin deadness for my gift of stone-rolled-away-from-the-tomb life. But still my love will be unswerving and unfading, despite your fickle and flaky faithfulness sometimes.

Let’s sing the song, and live our lives, like that is true.

Lord God, thank you for your grace that defiantly refuses to let our deadness be the last word over us.