Grace Unfiltered--October 11, 2021

Grace Unfiltered--October 11, 2021

"See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled." [Hebrews 12:15]

Just to be clear: grace is free, available, and inexhaustibly abundant.  There is absolutely enough--immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine--for a whole world full of us ornery humans. 

Trouble is, sometimes we Respectable Religious people get in the way and, whether we realize we're doing it or not, make it harder for people who are aching for a word of God's goodness and love to be able to hear that it's there and waiting for them.  Sometimes it's our additional rules, complicated jargon, extra baggage, or the particularly un-Jesus-like way we speak and act that becomes an obstacle.  And when we filter the pure well-spring of God's grace through our own bitterness, personal agendas, or hardened hearts, it comes out muddy and brackish.  We become the trouble that gets in the way of others encountering the grace of God. In other words, it's not a flaw or a lack in God's grace that keeps it from quenching people's thirst; it's the way we poison the well with our own mean-ness, conditions, and selfishness.

I'm reminded of that haunting line of Gandhi's, given in reply to a question about what he thought of Jesus Christ.  Supposedly, Gandhi's response was something like this:  "I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians--they are so unlike your Christ."  I think that's the dilemma we're faced with here in this verse from Hebrews.  When the writer admonishes us, "See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God," it's not because there's some shortage or insufficiency of grace on God's part--it's because he knows we sometimes get in the way and make it harder for the ones most in need of grace to know it is already theirs for the receiving. It's rather like when you turn on the spigot to water the thirsty flowers or tomatoes in your garden, and then you find that some childish prankster has put a kink in the hose so that it won't spray--or with the hope that you'll point the nozzle in your face to get a closer look and then they'll release the kink to drench you in the face at full force.  The problem isn't with the source--it's trouble in the channel between the source and the recipients that gums up the works.

The sad thing is just how many ways we stand on the hose for others who are thirsty and wilting in their souls.  We turn Christianity into a social club (meant only for people like us), or we turn it into some kind of sales-pitch ("Quick!  You've got to act now to reserve your spot in heaven--and while you're at it, God wants you to give us your money, too!").  We make it sound like the Gospel is simply a matter of vaguely spiritual self-help or a code of morality that will earn you prosperity in this life or a mansion in the next... or both.  We present the extravagant love of Jesus like it is a limited commodity, and we have a way of being known for who we hate or exclude, rather than who God's love includes (spoiler alter--it's everybody). We get God's Kingdom confused with political power or influence, and we have allowed the lure of being in charge to make us sell out to some rather un-Christ-like figureheads, all in the name of "taking back our country for God." And those moves are almost always disastrous. 

So when that's what people experience as "Christianity," well, my goodness, then, of course people are going to find that the "root of bitterness" has affected the taste of the sweet clean water we had thought we were sharing. I want to be the kind of person who can be a conduit, rather than an obstacle, for that pure, untainted grace.  I want to be the kind of person who can get out of the way of myself, so that the sheer unconditionality of God's goodness and love can be experienced without me diluting it to sound more reasonable, respectable, or reconcilable with the stinginess of the world.  I want to be the kind of person that Gandhi could meet and find him saying, "All right--I can see glimpses of the Galilean in you."  I want to be the kind of person in whom Jesus can be recognized, at least from time to time, rather than getting in the way of others seeing him.

In a sense, then my hope for us is that we would all be like that line of Robert Farrar Capon's about what the Reformation of the 16th century was all about. Capon writes: “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”  In other words, I want for me, and for all of us, to be the kind of people who don't water down the grace of God, but in whom God's goodness can be tasted in all its fullness.

Let's say that's our challenge for today. How can we look at every word, every choice, each of us makes, and ask, "If someone experienced me today, would they be more likely to encounter the grace of God through me, or less likely?"  What if we looked at how our words and actions either flow in continuity with the way of Jesus, or get in the way of people knowing Jesus because of us? And what if we dared to be people through whom grace could flow unfiltered, unfettered, and undiluted?

That seems a good way to spend this day's breaths.

Lord Jesus, let your grace flow through us, fully, faithfully, and freely.