Unwanted Grace

Unwanted Grace

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 21, 2016

Scripture: Luke 13:31-35

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Lent, although I suppose you all know by now. Lent is one of the seasons of the church year that is about anticipation and preparation. In Lent it’s anticipation of and preparation for our annual commemoration and celebration of the central events of the Christian story of grace, the events of Holy Week. That week we walk once more with Jesus through his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his last meal with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and crucifixion by the Romans, and then only after all that his glorious Resurrection. Lent is preparation for marking those events in God’s story of grace. Lent is nothing less than preparation for grace itself. It is preparation for receiving anew God’s free and unmerited love in which we are saved and reconciled to God. Thanks be to God!

Thanks be to God indeed, but recently I’ve been struck by something about God’s grace that I haven’t paid much attention to before, at least not in these terms. I’ve been struck by how much of the time we people don’t want God’s grace, or at least we sure act like we don’t. I first thought about this dynamic when I read a story in the early pages of Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain, that some of us are reading together these days. Merton tells a story about himself and his younger brother from when they were very young. Thomas would be playing outdoors with his friends. His little brother desperately wanted to play with them, but they wouldn’t let him. They’d throw stones at him to chase him away. Despite the stones, he just wouldn’t leave. He’s stand some distance off, afraid to come closer because of the stones. Merton describes him as “standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction…, as insulted as he was saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. Yet he does not go away.” Merton sees this story as an image of God’s grace and our rejection of it, with his little brother playing the part of God and Merton and his friends playing the part of sinners.

Merton comments: “This terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it.” We reject God’s love, God’s grace, he says, “simply because it does not please us to be loved.” It doesn’t please us, he says, because “being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we need love from others” and because we think that being loved so unconditionally seems “to imply some obscure kind of humiliation” Merton is saying that he and his friends didn’t want the unconditional love that Merton’s little brother was offering them. He points in his usual powerful way to a paradoxical fact of human existence: Even when we know that God offers us unconditional grace, much of the time we just don’t want it.

People not wanting God’s grace isn’t just a phenomenon of the modern world, although I suspect that it is far more widespread in the modern world than it was in antiquity. Jesus saw it in his own time and in the history of Israel. We heard him comment on it in our passage from Luke this morning. There he says “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (That by the way is a feminine image of God, but I’ll leave that matter for another day.) Speaking in effect as God, Jesus uses an image of a hen and her chicks as an image of God’s free offer of love and points out how unwilling we are to accept it.

And I can hear you saying: What’s he talking about? I want God’s grace. Of course I want God’s grace. Who wouldn’t? Maybe I say I hear you saying that because I hear myself saying it too. Well, let me suggest what I think is going on when Merton says that we don’t want God’s uninterested love and I say we don’t want God’s grace, by which I mean the same thing. To do that, let’s go back to Merton’s story about his little brother wanting to play with him and his friends and they not letting him. What would have happened if Merton and his friends had let the younger child play with them? They would have had to change what they were doing, that’s what. In this story Merton is about nine, and his brother is about five. Nine year olds and five year olds don’t play the same way. They aren’t interested in the same things. They aren’t capable of doing all the same things. So if Merton and his friends were really going to play with little brother they would have had to change their play. If they had accepted little brother into their lives, having him in their lives would have made demands on them. Letting him in would have had a cost. It would have cost the older something, and they didn’t want to pay the price.

That, folks, is how it often is with us when it comes to accepting God’s grace. We want it, but we want it free. We don’t want to have to pay for it. We don’t want it to make demands on us. We want just to say thank you God and go on with our lives as before. The great martyred German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke powerfully of this dynamic around grace. He called what we want, and what we mostly accept, cheap grace. He said that we make God’s grace cheap when we accept it without cost, when we accept it and change nothing in our lives. When we accept the gift without accepting the demands that come with the gift. That, he said, is cheap grace.

Bonhoeffer said that God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. That may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t. God’s grace truly is free, that is, God offers it unconditionally. We don’t have to do anything to earn it, and indeed we really can’t do anything to earn it. God offers it anyway. Freely. God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. It isn’t cheap because it has two very high costs associated with it even though it is free.

Bonhoeffer says that God’s grace isn’t cheap because it costs lives. First of all it cost a man his life, Jesus, who died to bring us God’s grace. That’s hardly cheap. It came at a very high price, the price of a man’s life. But Bonhoeffer had another life that he said God’s grace costs. That life is our life. It is the life of every woman and man who truly understands God’s free gift of grace. Of course it’s not that we physically die as soon as we truly understand God’s grace, but that grace still costs us our life. That is, it costs us the old life we had been living before we truly understood God’s grace. When we truly understand God’s grace we really have no choice. We must leave our old lives behind. We must leave the lives we lived according to the standards of the world and start living according to the standards of the Kingdom of God.

See, God’s grace is free; but it comes with strings attached. Not strings that mean we must do something to earn it. No, God’s grace really is free. Strings, rather, that mean that God’s grace comes with demands. God’s grace demands not that we earn it but that we respond to it. That we respond to it with transformed lives. It’s not that God’s grace goes away if we don’t, but God’s demand that we do is still there. Or if you don’t like the word demand, think of it as God asking us, God pleading with us, to respond to God’s grace in our words and in our lives. Yet demand is the word that works for me. I’m often reminded of the line from one of the verses of the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” where it says “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” That line nicely sums up what I mean when I say God’s grace isn’t cheap. It demands that we respond with transformed lives.

Transformed how? Well, that’s a complex and difficult question, and I’m not going to try to answer it this morning. Answering it is truly the work of a lifetime. If you want to start exploring answers to that question, please join us this coming Saturday morning at 10. We’re going to have a discussion around precisely that question. It will only be a beginning, but it should be a meaningful time, and I hope you can join us.

God loves. God saves. God calls. God demands. God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. May we have ears to listen and hearts to respond. Amen.