My Favourite word in the English language. (Part 2)

If we trace the roots of the word grace (charis in the Greek) we find it is a verb that means “I rejoice, I am glad”. But they are not the first images that come to mind when people think of the church. They would usually think of “holier than thous”. They would think of a place to go when you have cleaned up your act, not before. They would think of morality not grace.

Remember the words of the prostitute story yesterday; “Church, why would I go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse!” Of course, this is not always a true perception. The church runs soup kitchens, homeless shelters, hospitals, prison ministries, and other volunteer organisations that are the dispensers of God’s unconditional, free and generous grace. Yet the prostitute’s comment stings because it has found a weak spot. Some are so intent on missing judgment that they forget to celebrate our journey to heaven. The churches mission is to be a haven of grace in a world of ungrace.

Churches that don’t understand grace are preoccupied with a customized agenda of legalism – no drinking, smoking, skirt length, make up, jewellery and a multitude of areas that are supposed to affect your spirituality. Churches become ungraceful through an attitude of moral superiority.

Mark Twain used to say, put a dog and a cat together in the same cage as an experiment to see if they get along. They will. Put in a bird, a pig and a goat and with a few adjustments they will get along – then put in a Baptist, Presbyterian, and a Catholic and there soon would not be a living thing left.

We battle with the ungracefulness in our lives; pride, judgementalism, earning God’s approval by performance, and so on. The devil loves to lay cuckoo eggs in our pious nest. Grace comes from outside ourselves. It is a gift not an achievement. When we don’t understand that, the church atmosphere is choked with fumes of ungrace.

Grace is hard to fathom, because the world operates on a system of ungrace, where we earn what we get and get what we earn. Society is performance based. For example, the military is ungrace in its purest form. You are assigned a title, a uniform, a salary, and a code of behaviour. Every soldier knows where he stands in relation to others. You must salute and obey your superiors who can give orders to inferiors. The police force is the same.

Some corporations are a bit more subtle. Ford grades employees on a scale of 1 (clerks and secretaries) to 27(Chairman of the Board). Up to level 9 you have an outside car space. If you are on level 13 you get an office with windows, plants, and an intercom. Beyond level 16 the offices have private bathrooms.

Japan harnesses the power of ungrace. The USA has 519 imprisonments per 1,000,000 citizens. Japan has 37 – how do you explain that? When researching the statistics, they interviewed a man who had spent 15 years in prison for murder. The whole time he had not had one visitor. After his release his wife and son met with him and told him not to come back to the village. His three daughters were married and refused to see him. “I have 4 grandchildren,” he told the interviewers, but I haven’t even seen their photos. This is the power of ungrace in a culture that values saving face.

Ungrace operates in families too. There is a story from Spain of a father that wanted to reconcile with a son who had run away to Madrid. Now remorseful he put an ad in the paper that said, “Paco meet me at the hotel Montana at noon on Tuesday, all is forgiven – Papa.” Paco is a common name in Spain. When the father goes to the square there are about 800 Paco’s waiting for their fathers.

That story is similar to that of Earnest Hemingway. His own parents detested his libertine ways until his mother finally refused to see him. One year for his birthday she mailed a cake along with the gun his father had used to kill himself. Another year she wrote a letter explaining that a mother’s life is like a bank, “Every child enters the world with a large prosperous bank account. The child makes withdrawals and no deposits during all the early years. Later as he grows up his responsibility is to replenish the supply that he has drawn down on.” She spelled out how he deposits to keep the account in good standing. Flowers, fruit, candy, paying his mothers bills and above all a determination to stop “neglecting your duties to God and your saviour Jesus Christ.” Hemingway never got over his hatred for his mother and her saviour. On July 2 1961 he shot himself. 

If ungrace, is ugly, grace is the opposite. TBC