Lenten Perspective: Accepted

Adapted from a Sunday school lesson delivered at Bethel United Methodist Church in West Greenville, South Carolina on February 5, 2012.

I share these thoughts, hoping they are of help to someone else.

Accepted

Scripture:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Ephesians 2:8-10 (NRSV)

Why, why are You still here with me?
Didn't You see what I've done?
In my shame I want to run and hide myself
But it's here I see the truth
I don't deserve You...

But I need You to love me, and I...
I won't keep my heart from You this time
And I'll stop this pretending that I can
Somehow deserve what I already have
I need You to love me

From "I Need You to Love Me" by BarlowGirl

To begin this perspective I want to pose a question: What does it mean to be acceptable to God?

In the time of Christ, the Pharisees were a sect of the Jewish people who dedicated their lives to following the the Jewish Law to the letter. They believed that, in order to be acceptable to God, a person must obey each and every one of the 613 rules and regulations found in the Torah, the five books of the Jewish Law. They set an impossibly high standard, and they ostracized those who failed to live up to this standard.

Christ came into the world and turned the world upside down. He showed love, kindness, mercy, and acceptance to the people shunned by the Pharisees, and He saved his harshest critique for the Pharisees themselves, whom He said "load people with burdens hard to bear" and "do not lift a finger to ease them."¹ He compared them to "whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth."² Christ came into the world to fulfill the Law by showing us what following the Law really is, not an endless list of rules and regulations but a way of loving God and other people.


If anyone were to be right with God through following the rules, it would have been St. Paul. Before he began to follow Christ, he kept the Jewish Law faithfully as a Pharisee and did everything he could to guard the Law from those he considered a threat.³ Even so, he was still deeply aware of his own shortcomings. In one letter, he writes, "For we know that the Law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"⁴ If anything, the Law aggravated his faults, for he wrote, "For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me."⁵

Martin Luther, at one point in his life, also dedicated himself to following the rules. Looking back, he wrote, "I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work." What Luther found was that, the harder he tried, the more he saw his shortcomings. His good works did not bring him closer to God; in fact, they served to do the opposite. "Love God?" he wrote, "I hated Him!"⁶

To borrow an analogy from one of my favorite books, it was as if Paul and Luther were climbing a ladder to God, but, for every rung they climbed, God had climbed even higher. No matter how high they climbed on this ladder, God remained hopelessly out of reach.⁷

At the beginning of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis makes two arguments. First, he argues that every human being has a basic understanding of right and wrong. This explains why all laws of morality are basically similar, be they religious or secular. This understanding is not of human creation but was placed within us by some Entity, namely God, who wants us to behave in a certain way. Lewis' second argument is that all humans fail to act upon this understanding of right and wrong. What follows from these two arguments is that humans, because of their moral failures, would seem to have put themselves at odds with the Entity who gave us our understanding of right and wrong.⁸

We can all just forget about being good enough to earn God's favor, because we all fail abysmally. Thankfully, a person is not accepted by God because of his or her works: a person is accepted by God because of God's grace. We all have failed morally and will continue to do so, thus we all need God's forgiveness and grace to redeem us and to transform us. Grace is something that, by its very nature, cannot be earned. Grace is a free gift, given and received with no strings attached. The moment one starts trying to earn a gift is the moment that the gift ceases to be a gift.

According to theologian Paul Tillich, grace is that which calls out to us in the dark times of our lives, saying, "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!"⁹

Grace can be a bitter pill to swallow. First, receiving grace requires us to be humble enough to admit that we need it. Second, the idea that we are accepted just as we are can sometimes seem too good to be true. I wonder if these stumbling blocks sometimes lead us to add stipulations to grace.

Jesus ministered primarily to the Jewish people, but, in the early days of the church, many non-Jewish people began following Jesus as well. At this time there was a tension between accepting a Gospel of grace and following a Law that the Jewish people had known their entire lives. Some Jewish church leaders began requiring that the non-Jewish followers of Jesus also follow the rules and regulations found in the Jewish Law. Paul sought to counteract these particular teachers, even dedicating the Letter to the Galatians to this issue.

Years earlier, Paul had butted heads with other church leaders at the Council in Jerusalem. At this gathering, early church leaders came together to discern whether or not the non-Jewish followers of Christ should be required to be circumcised and required to follow the Jewish Law.¹⁰ The council's resolution was articulated by St. James:
Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles¹¹ who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood. For in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every sabbath in the synagogues.¹²

In Fall to Grace, Jay Bakker uses these conflicts in the early church to highlight the concept he calls "Grace Plus." This is the idea that we are saved by "grace plus something else."¹³ For many early Christians, it took the form of grace plus the Jewish Law. For the Jerusalem Council, it took the form of grace plus sexual purity and dietary regulations, both of which were part of the Jewish Law. For many Christians, "Grace Plus" may take the form of grace plus communion every week or grace plus disavowing all the right things or grace plus tithing or grace plus doing good works. None of these things are necessarily bad things, but we should not do them in order to be considered acceptable to God, lest we find ourselves climbing an unending ladder.

St. Paul writes, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast." This is a common proof text for the concept of "salvation by grace through faith." Very rarely do people quote the next verse: "For we are what He has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life." Here again we have grace, faith, and good works thrown into the mix together.

It has been made clear that grace and acceptance from God are not a result of good works, so perhaps good works are a natural result of grace and acceptance from God. The relationship between faith and works can be compared to a horse pulling a cart. In this analogy, the horse is our faith, and the cart is our good works. Just as the horse pulls the cart, so also our faith drives our good works. If we perform good works in order to be acceptable to God, then we have "put the cart before the horse," so to speak.

Christ really only gave us one command: to love. When Christ said that the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love each other, He said, "On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets."¹⁴ When we truly love, we do not have to worry about any moral law because we fulfill the purpose of the Law with our love. When we love, we extend grace to other people. It is love that gives birth to the good works that should characterize our lives.

If we are commanded to love, can we still say that Salvation is a free gift? Does this command not turn love into a law? Maybe love is not what God wants from us, but instead what God wants for us. Maybe love is not a requirement placed on humanity, but something that humanity, by its nature, desperately needs. Maybe it is for love that we have been created. Maybe it is when we love that we are at our best. Maybe it is love that gives our lives meaning. Maybe anything other than a life lived with love is actually something from which God wants to save us.

The United Methodist communion liturgy reminds us that we don't always love each other as we are called. We receive the bread and the wine, called the body and blood of Christ, to remind us of the grace that God has given us and continues to give us every day. God's grace gives us the opportunity to start over.

Law screams, "Get it right, or else!"

Grace whispers, "I love you even when you don't get it right."


Notes:
1 - Luke 11:46 (NRSV)
2 - Matthew 23:27 (NRSV)
3 - Philippians 3:5-6
4 - Romans 7:14-15,24 (NRSV)
5 - Romans 7:11 (NRSV)
6 - Jay Bakker, Fall to Grace. 2011, Faith Words. pp. 48-49
7 - David A. Seamands, Healing for Damaged Emotions. 1981, David C. Cook. p. 15
8 - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Book I
9 - Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations. ch. 19
10 - Conflicting accounts of this gathering are reported in the Bible. Compare Acts 15:1-35 to Galatians 2:1-14.
11 - Gentiles are non-Jewish people.
12 - Acts 15: 19-21 (NRSV)
13 - Bakker, pp. 61-62
14 - Matthew 22:34-40 (NRSV quoted)

The image featured in this perspective is of unknown origin but is assumed to be public domain.


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