What's So Amazing About Grace?

A few weeks ago, at the beginning of February, I was blessed to be invited to lead a workshop on grace for the Mississippi Conference’s confirmation retreat at Camp Lake Stephens in Oxford, MS. The weekend went really well. About 200 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders from across Mississippi came up to Oxford and learned more about what it means to be a Christian in the United Methodist Church. However, I found myself struggling.

While I really do enjoy all of the areas and opportunities that come out of being in parish ministry, my passion for ministry lies with youth. I love spending time with them, learning about how they understand the world, and being a part of how their faith is formed. But I’ve got be honest with you – youth ministry is tough – especially, for me, when it comes to junior high students. I love our junior highers – all of them. And you know, all young people ask good, tough questions, but there’s something about a seventh grader’s questions that can cut straight to your heart. There’s a brutal honesty that leaves you feeling exposed and stammering for an answer that might pacify this curious mind. There’s an element of curiosity that doesn’t want any flowery language, or any well-woven, nuanced sentences – they just want the truth and they want you to be real with them. And I’m telling you that if you’ve never experienced one of these questions before, then consider yourself lucky because they’re scary.

During this recent confirmation retreat, I had an encounter with a young man who posed such a question to me upon the conclusion of my workshop. After telling a room of roughly 30 students about how God’s Prevenient Grace is the kind of grace that exists before we even know that God loves us, that it’s the kind of love that chases after us and pursues us at ever chance – that God’s Justifying Grace is the grace that we experience when we make a decision to mold our lives after, and follow the example of Jesus’ life found in the Christian Scriptures; that it’s the grace that places us in a right relationship with God where we can begin to grow in faith and in knowledge of Jesus – that God’s Sanctifying Grace was the grace that all Christians experience once we experience in that God sends the Spirit to guide and encourage us to love as Jesus loves and to see others as God sees them: as family. And that all of these kinds of grace are just God’s way of showing us how much God wants us to be in, and moves us towards, a free, undeserved, unmerited love-relationship with God - this student, this kid, this seventh-grader says to me in front of the room, “This is all great stuff, but why can’t pastors ever tell us something different about God’s love for us? How come we always hear the same thing over and over again? I mean, when you think about it, I only have to go to church for three years and I’ll hear all there is to hear about the Bible, God, Jesus, and me.” And here’s where it cut straight to my heart – he then asked, “What’s so amazing about grace if all you can tell me is that I don’t deserve it, and that God’s in control of it all anyway and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

I stood there. I remember that I blinked quite a few times. I remember that I could feel my face getting red and hot. I remember that I could feel little beads of sweat forming on my forehead and my nose. And I remember all of the looks that this room full of sixth, seventh, and eighth-graders, and pastors were giving me as I stood in the front of the room with a power point slide reflecting off of my face. And I remember, too, what I said to him. I said, “You’re right.”

“What do you mean ‘I’m right’?” he said.

I said, “I mean that you’re right. You don’t deserve grace and God is in control of it and there is nothing you can do about it. You’re right.”

I could have said a number of things.

I could have gone into the way that Paul uses the Greek language to help readers understand that the work that God does through grace is called poiēma, and that it means the same thing in Ephesians and in Romans that is does when the Scriptures refer to God’s perfecting work found in the creation stories of Genesis – that we, as grace-filled people, are “holy and blameless,” meaning that Jesus Christ has borne the burden of sin that would keep us away from being in a true relationship with God.

I could have noted that there are reversals found in the Ephesians text that shows us what life is like as a Christian – that while we are dead where we stand, through grace we are made alive in Christ Jesus – that even though we have done things to satisfy our needs to accommodate the demands of our culture, demands that leads us away from the life that God intended for us to live; that because of the resurrection of Jesus, we are able to rise to a new life in God’s love – and that while the forces of evil, forces that would reject all the love that God has for us, would rather pull us down; God’s sacrificial love that we know through Jesus seats us in exalted places where God raises us up above anything that is contrary to that love.

I could have showed him that by Paul’s use of the phrase “with Jesus Christ” instead of “in Jesus Christ,” we realize that grace is historical, in that the people of Israel have a history and that Jesus has a history and that the church has a history – and that by receiving God’s saving grace we can say that we are part of the history of Israel, God’s people; that we are part of Jesus’ history through his life, death, AND resurrection; and that we are a part of the church’s history, that all that we are and all that we are created to be matters in the grand scheme of God’s gift of grace.

But I didn’t say that.

What I said was that he was right – that he didn’t deserve God’s grace and that there was nothing for him to do about because God was going to give it to him anyway because God loved him. But I didn’t stop with that.

I continued and said to him, “By accepting God’s gift of grace you tell everyone in the world two things: (1) That God can do great things through Jesus Christ, and (2) that you have realized that you can make a difference in this world for the good of humanity because that’s what God calls us to do once we accept the gift of grace. Because of grace, you become God’s beacon of love in a world that can’t see because of the darkness. Because of grace, you become a part of God’s family, entitling you to a life of responsibility to love others as much as God has loved you. And because of grace, you are able to experience the way in which God loves you regardless of who you are, where you’ve come from, or what you’ve done.”

Even though this conversation that I had was with a seventh-grader, I have a feeling that many of us might be asking the same questions that he had: “What’s so amazing about God’s grace?” And my answer to you would be the same answer that I gave to that seventh-grader. God’s grace is amazing because it sets us in a safe place above all of the stress and troubles of life, where our spirits unite with God’s through God’s act of love found in Jesus Christ. God’s grace is amazing because it connects us with all Christians in all times and in all places. God’s grace is amazing because it relentlessly chases after us, putting us in a love-relationship with God, and helps to mold us into who God intended us to be: a people of love that change worldviews, which change lives that reach beyond the trappings of this world to show others what life is like WITH Jesus.

May you, this Lent, continue to remember the all-consuming love of God that drove the disciples to remember the reality of life with Jesus, that caused Nicodemus to scurry around in the night to ask Jesus questions about what it means to be born-again, and that causes us to follow the One in whom we live and move and have our being; so, that when Easter comes, we might be able to look back into depths of our lives and see that God does love us - realizing that there’s nothing that we can do about it.