A Time to Laugh

Dancing Grace

Philip Yancey describes my European cousins demonstrating grace in a godless culture–dancing a kind of graceful and irresistible polka amid the ungraceful, goose-stepping soldiers. What would happen if we Christians extended our hand to (instead of waving our fist at) the lost and dying world? What would happen if we stopped viewing ourselves as pilgrims just passing through and started acting as God’s children relishing and sharing His gifts?

For many years dissidents in Eastern Europe met in secret, used code words, avoided public telephones, and published pseudonymous essays in underground papers. In the mid-1970s, however, these dissidents began to realize that their double lives had cost them dearly. By working in secret, always with a nervous glance over the shoulder, they had succumbed to fear, the goal of their Communist opponents all along. They made a conscious decision to change tactics. “We will act as if we are free, at all costs,” Polish and Czech dissidents decided. They began holding public meetings, often in church buildings, despite the presence of known informers. They signed articles, sometimes adding an address and phone number, and distributed newspapers openly on the street corners.

In effect, the dissidents started acting in the way they thought society should act. If you want freedom of speech, speak freely. If you love the truth, tell the truth. The authorities did not know how to respond. Sometimes they cracked down — nearly all the dissidents spent time in prison — and sometimes they watched with a frustration bordering on rage. Meanwhile the dissidents’ brazen tactics made it far easier for them to connect with one another and the West, and a kind of ‘freedom archipelago‘ took shape, a bright counterpart to the darkling “Gulag archipelago.”

Remarkably, we have lived to see these dissidents triumph. An alternative kingdom of ragged subjects, of prisoners, poets, and priests, who conveyed their words in the scrawl of hand-copied samizdat, toppled what seemed an impregnable fortress. In each nation the church operated as a counterforce, sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly insisting on a truth that transcended, and often contradicted, official propaganda. In Poland the Catholics marched past government buildings shouting, “We forgive you!” In East Germany, Christians lit candles prayed, and marched in the streets until one night the Berlin Wall collapsed like a rotten dam.

Early on, Stalin built a village in Poland called Nowa Huta, or “New Town,” to demonstrate the promise of communism. He could not change the entire country at once, he said, but he could construct one new town with a shiny steel factory, spacious apartments, plentiful parks, and broad streets as a token of what would follow. Later, Nowa Huta became one of the hotbeds of Solidarity, demonstrating instead the failure of communism to make just one town work.

What if Christians used that same approach in secular society and succeeded? “In the world the Christians are a colony of the true home,” said Bonhoeffer. Perhaps Christians should work harder toward establishing colonies of the kingdom that point to our true home. All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.

Acting Grace

I read recently that the old black-dog-white-dog comparison made so often in our slice of the world should be revised. We usually hear that we have residing within us a white dog (Holy Spirit) and black dog (Satan/flesh/sin nature) that are fighting tooth-and-toenail to win, and the one who wins is the one we feed. Instead we should say that we have the white dog (Holy Spirit) residing within us, and out on the front lawn is a dead black dog. And we need to quit trying to feed and play with the dead, maggoty black dog.

This sermon from last Sunday is another reminder to stop playing with that dead black dog.

Enlarging Grace

5-8Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

9-11But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

12-14So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

15-17This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

18-21That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.

22-25All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

26-28Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

29-30God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.

31-39So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture: 

They kill us in cold blood because they hate you. 
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.

None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.

Romans 8

Pursuing Grace

Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

Luke 15:8-10

It was Thanksgiving Tuesday. 2002. I had just had my last of three miscarriges, my fourth pregnancy loss. I was wearing the charm bracelet that my sister-in-law, Sarah, had so carefully assembled for me to remember each baby. A pair of baby shoes and an aquamarine charm for our first loss in March 2000. A little girl and a ruby charm for our Elise, born still at full-term in July 2001. A ball cap and a peridot charm for our August 2002 loss (which we knew was a boy). And then a little Mommy and child charm with an April stone for our most recent loss on November 15, 2002 — a little girl we were so certain would make it because she was such a surprise. I wore all those to Super Walmart for some Thanksgiving bounty.

I was leaving — picking up some last minute produce that I forgot — and I looked down to see my entire charm bracelet falling apart. Every charm except the first two were gone along with all the beads in-between. I retraced my steps, and the disassembly had started somewhere around the Pepsi, but it had really collapsed in the produce. I picked up what I could see, but there were many beads underneath the grape and lettuce displays. If I just had a broom. . . .

I looked around for an “associate.” As usual, there was no one to be found. Except at the Deli counter. I explained that I just needed a broom to pick my charms. She obviously was unimpressed, but she faked a phone call to someone out of my range of hearing and then told me they were on their way. A lie. No one came. It felt like my family — or what was left of it — was scattered on the filthy floor among the raisiny cherry tomatoes, and no one would help me.

Fine. I marched to the cleaning aisle and grabbed my own broom. If they aren’t going to help me, I’ll use someone else’s yet-to-be-purchased broom. If you were also there at Walmart that day, you saw me — grey, stretchy skirt and all — sprawled out on that icky floor. The ruby charm. The little girl. The mommy/child charm had been run over by a grocery cart, but no matter. It looked fine. I retrieved all the charms but one — the peridot stone.

I looked and looked and looked. I prayed. Hard. The stone could be replaced, I’m sure. But I didn’t want a replacement. I wanted that one. I spent several minutes there, weeping, praying. I set time limits for myself that I kept breaking.

Finally, a nice grandpa and his tween grandson asked what was up. A friend! I explained that I had lost a green stone charm somewhere here, gesturing broadly toward the tomato display. The gentleman in the grandpa and the treasure-hunter in the grandson were intrigued, and they looked with me, all of us hoping that new sets of eyes might see something fresh.

They finally but kindly gave up, and the grandpa offered some ideas as we stood next to the bagged lettuce. “You should tell the manager. Maybe they’ll find it when they clean up?” he suggested. I said with tears in my eyes but grasping at humor, “You think they clean up here?” He smiled sympathetically. I’m sure he saw the tears. I said again, “I know it was somewhere here!” I gestured again and looked down. There it was. Hidden among the wilted lettuce pieces. “There! There it is!!!!” The tears and smiles came easily now. I said, “Thank you so much. If you hadn’t come along, I would have given up earlier. Thank you. You have no idea what this bracelet means to me.”

I left that night exhausted and exhilarated. God helped me find that last little green charm among the same-colored garbage. He kept me looking when I was discouraged, brought along an unmet friend when I needed support, and put my foot right where I’d see it. It wasn’t infinitely important, but it was important to me. I look at that bracelet now — I wear it only to church these days since it’s becoming so chock-full of memorials — and remember how much God loves me. He has looked for each of us on the dusty floors and under the seemingly more important commercial displays until He found us.  And He commissions an angel choir to rejoice with Him when He does find us.

It makes no sense. To a detached deli clerk, it’s just more material goods that are easily replaced. It’s hardly worth the effort. But in love, those little memories are everything. In Grace, material worth is insignificant. A lost son, lost sheep, or a lost coin — God pursues us even when we have given up ourselves.

Cyber-Grace

My dear blogging friends –

I know you’ve heard it. I’ve heard it too. That “harumph” from the non-bloggers among us when we mention this little corner of the virtual world we like to call home. These are the same people who wring their hands about the lost art of letter-writing or journal-keeping or speech-giving.

Usually these dear ones are too busy to blog — a situation I don’t understand entirely. I’m too busy not to blog. I need a space to clear my head. To write down pithy quotations I don’t want to lose. To memorialize an event. Words are my love language after all. If you get a book from me, you’re getting what I consider a treasure. If I’m writing something down, it’s the quietest part of me that doesn’t get out among this academic bureaucracy.

But what I find even more unfortuate is that my harumphing friends are often the same ones who distrust open-source software (like the one running this blog) and editable encyclopedias. They prefer top-down “propositional truths” from so-called experts to bottom-up rantings of nobodies. Touché.

Grassroots ideas are full of chiggers, but they are also pretty bug-resistant too. Any product — intellectual or agricultural — manufactured organically is usually pretty robust.

There’s something grace-filled about blogging. I can say it and you can see it with as much freedom as our ISPs will allow. You’re no expert, and neither am I. No top-down, Theory X hierarchy here. Ideas stand on their own. It upsets the Powers that Be because it’s so uncontrolled and uncontrollable with no legal oversight. It’s raw, risky, and restless. It’s lawless. It’s powerful.

Just like Grace.

Prophesying Grace

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here am I, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.

Genesis 22

The Hebrew indicates that Abraham said that God will provide HIMSELF as the offering. Abraham prophetically saw God Incarnate as the sacrifice. Offering Isaac would not have been adequate. Only Christ would do. A relationship between humanity and divinity is only possible with Grace.

Islam reads this same story exactly opposite. Not only is Ishmael the sacrifice on the altar, but also it is the self-sacrifice that God is seeking. Islam means submission, and it seeks to replicate that self-killing to win God’s favor.

Self-sacrifice is not what God seeks because even a final self-sacrifice is not enough. Self-sacrifice is self-righteousness. And as we lob those pretty vegetables on the altar, we think that the sweat of our brow is what will please God. It can’t.

Paul pin-pointed that problem in Galatians. Promises fulfilled half-way through legal loopholes or human endeavor must be cast out. Living by the flesh is not living a life of carnality (that’s rarely a temptation for the religious among us). Living by the flesh is living quite lawfully and assuming that our self-sacrifice can be counted as righteousness.

Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written,

Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;
break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than those of the one who has a husband.”

Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.

Galatians 4

We need to live freely. We need to relish the fact that our righteousness is not dependent on our legal self-sacrifice. We don’t need to put ourselves on that altar because Christ was already there. We need to live like the children of promise that God says we are.

Grace for the Lowly

Surely he scorneth the scorners: but he giveth grace unto the lowly.

Proverbs 3:34

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

James 4

Humility is far from a blue ribbon we earn. When Icarus floated his waxy wings right toward the sun, when those Babeling architects built their ziggorat toward the sky, when Cain offered his tasty veggies — all were demonstrating the opposite of humility — hubris.

In fact, any of our efforts, however well-intentioned, are hubris. After all, Icarus’ dream to fly was a noble one. Those Babylonians were just trying to reach God after all. And Cain was sacrificing to God. Those are all honorable, seemingly-selfless things.

But done without God they are contemptible. It’s not that we must be passive and let go and let God. And it’s not a battle between God and me. It’s that we realize Whose we are and Who blesses our work. God’s going to do His work, and He invites us to join Him. He makes those toddler toys do amazing things because He’s right there with us, enjoying us and loving us.

Extravagently Loving Grace

More from Paul that defies the idea that “discipline is everything.” No, in fact, it’s very little. Paul, who knew what the study of rhetoric and the study of law looked like, eloquently states that neither is the key:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

   Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
   Love doesn’t strut,
   Doesn’t have a swelled head,
   Doesn’t force itself on others,
   Isn’t always “me first,”
   Doesn’t fly off the handle,
   Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

Selling Ungrace

I’m beginning to see a pattern. From Ancient Greece through the Enlightenment to contemporary evangelical authors – the way to create a bestseller is to reinforce rigorous (a.k.a. “virtuous”) living, difficult choices, and carbon-copied lifestyles. Don’t make it look easy or obvious, but describe cultural values as some stylish but inelastic clothing you put on. Clothes make the man, after all, right? Just like the book jackets (a.k.a. “covers”) let you judge the book.

In “Against the Sophists,” a pagan Isocrates asserts:

And yet those who desire to follow the true precepts of this discipline [of rhetoric] may, if they will, be helped more speedily towards honesty of character than towards facility in oratory. And let no one suppose that I claim that just living can be taught; for in a word, I hold that there does not exist an art of any kind which can implant sobriety and justice in depraved natures. Nevertheless, I do think that the study of political discourse can help more than any other thing to stimulate and form such qualities of character.

And another pagan Quintillian, Institutes of Oratory, Book X:

It cannot be doubted that a great portion of art consists in imitation, since, though to invent was first in order of time, and holds the first place in merit, yet it is of advantage to copy what has been invented with success. Indeed the whole conduct of life is based on the desire of doing ourselves that which we approve in others. Thus boys follow the traces of letters in order to acquire skill in writing; thus musicians follow the voice of their teachers, painters look for models to the works of preceding painters, and farmers adopt the system of culture approved by experience.

Agnostic Benjamin Franklin:

All the heretics I have known have been virtuous men.

Mormon Stephen Covey, in “Seven Unique Human Endowments“:

Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower. At the low end of the continuum is the ineffective, flaky life of floating and coasting, avoiding responsibility and taking the easy way out, exercising little initiative or willpower. And at the top end is a highly disciplined life that focuses heavily on the highly important but not necessarily urgent activities of life. It’s a life of leverage and influence.

Evangelical R. Kent Hughes, in The Disciplines of a Godly Man, starts the chapter entitled “Discipline for Godliness”:

I learned that personal discipline is the indispensable key for accomplishing anything in this life. I have since come to understand even more that it is, in fact, the mother and handmaiden of what we call genius. . . . We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it in the arts, business, athletics, or academics. This is doubly so in spiritual matters. In other areas we may be able to claim some innate advantage. An athlete may be born with a strong body, a musician with a perfect pitch, or an artist with an eye for perspective. But none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (cf. Romans 3:9-18 ). Therefore, as a children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything–everything! I repeat . . . discipline is everything. (11-13)  

Funny, though. That’s not what the Apostle Paul says. Paul doesn’t say that discipline is the key to spiritual “success.” Becoming Christlike is not like putting on a girdle–squeezing you into looking like a Christian from the outside in. Romans 12:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I guess Paul didn’t write a mass-marketed bestseller. But still — why are we trying to sound like the world’s bestselling ungrace at all? Looking good isn’t doing good. And still, it’s not what you do, it’s Whose you are.

Offering Grace

The world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing that the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.

Gordon MacDonald