It It Isn't for Everyone It Isn't for Anyone

 

If It Isn’t for Everyone It Isn’t for Anyone

February 25, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

 

The Southern Baptist Convention is both the largest Protestant denomination in the US and one of the most conservative. It’s always been conservative, but in recent times it has moved even farther to the right. It has taken several positions that diminish women and restrict their roles in the church and in life. It still thinks all homosexual acts are inherently and unavoidably sinful. In recent days it has expelled a church and its pastor in Georgia because the church accepted a gay couple and their three adopted children into the church. The pastor had been part of the SBC for years, but the larger church nonetheless threw him out because he and his church extended God’s welcome to that family. News reports say one-third of the congregation left the church when it did, but the pastor and the congregation stood their ground. The news reports I read about the incident quoted the pastor as having said two quite simple but truly profound things. He said he’ll preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to anyone, and he said that if grace isn’t for everyone it isn’t for anyone. That so much of the Christian tradition doesn’t understand and embrace these foundational theological principles is that tradition’s great shame, or one of them anyway. They raise two fundamental theological questions that I want to discuss here. Those questions are: Just what is God’s grace? And what does it mean? How a particular part of the Christian tradition answers these questions tells you just about everything you need to know about it. Sadly, most Christian churches still get their answers to these questions all wrong.

Christians talk a lot about God’s grace, but just what is God’s grace? To answer that question we need to make an important distinction and begin by saying what grace is not. Grace is not payment. It isn’t compensation for services rendered. Christians are however forever turning it into what it is not. They say we have to earn it as if God were an employer paying grace as wages or a foundation dispensing grace grants to those who deserve them. But anything we have to earn is payment not grace.

OK. Grace isn’t a payment, but what is it? It is how God relates to creation in love without requiring anything from us first. Grace is God’s free and universal gift of divine love to all of creation. Grace is God’s universal salvation freely given to and for all. Christians confess that God is love. 1 John 4:8. If God is love then surely God relates to God’s creation only as love. Even in our human relationships love given only in return for something isn’t really love. So much of Christianity still doesn’t get it that grace is freely given not earned.

O yes, they may say that grace is God’s free gift of salvation; but then they promptly turn it into something else. In the Roman Catholic tradition they turn grace into a reward for belonging to the church and obeying its instructions. In the Protestant traditions we most commonly turn grace into a reward for proper faith. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved,” we say, citing Acts 16:31. Do this and you will get that. Don’t do this and you won’t get that. Salvation becomes a reward for proper belief. It becomes something you have to earn. So much of Protestant Christianity makes believing the right things, understood as taking as true various alleged facts about God and Jesus Christ, into a work that we must do in order to be saved. But what we earn from God isn’t grace. It’s payment.

One of Jesus’ parables that most of us struggle with sheds a bright light on what grace is. It’s the parables of the workers in the vineyard. You’ll find it at Matthew 20:1-16. In that parable the owner of a vineyard hires workers at the beginning of the day. He agrees to pay them a denarius for a day’s work, a denarius being the usual daily wage. The workers agree to work all day for that much pay. Several times during the day he hires more laborers. Because these laborers were hired later in the day they worked fewer hours than the workers who were hired at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day all the workers come to receive their pay for their work. The owner gives each of them a denarius. The workers who worked all day object to those who worked fewer house receiving the same amount of pay as they did. The owner isn’t impressed. He tells those who worked all day that he has done them no wrong. He has lived up to his side of the employment agreement. He tells those workers that he can do what he wants with what is his.

In my experience almost everyone struggles with this parable. We think the laborers who worked all day are right. They earned more than the laborers who worked fewer hours, some of whom worked very few hours indeed. We think the all day laborers are right. Jesus doesn’t. We learn that God can do with God’s grace whatever God wants. We must assume, I think, that the workers who worked fewer hours had as much need of a full day’s pay as did those who worked all day. It wasn’t through any fault of theirs that they didn’t have the opportunity to work a full day. The landowner here gives to each of the workers according to their need, not according to how much they had earned.

That’s how it is with God’s grace. We think God should make us earn it somehow because that’s the standard by which we work here on earth. Most of us have worked to earn money in our lives. Most of us have to. Whether we’ve been paid by the hour or otherwise, we have learned that the general rule is that the more we work the more we’ll earn. We naturally apply that human standard of ours to God. We expect God to operate the way we do. From Jesus we learn that God doesn’t do that. God’s greatest gift to us is grace, is God’s unearned salvation that God gives freely, unconditionally, entirely without cost, to everyone of God’s people—and all people are God’s people.

Now let me say perhaps before you raise the issue yourself that I’m fully aware of the main objection people raise to this understanding of God’s grace. I’ve heard it over and over again. It goes like this: If God’s grace is God’s free, unmerited gift to every person, then we have no reason anymore to live moral lives. Why don’t we just go raise hell and do whatever we want? The rules don’t apply anymore. God’s going to save me no matter what I do. So what the hell! Let ‘er rip!

People raised the same objection to Paul’s theology of justification by grace through faith so many centuries ago. In response Paul wrote:

 

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. Romans 6:1-4.

 

As is so often the case with Paul, his language here is a bit obscure to us. Set aside for now his talk about death and rising from death. Those words reflect a theology of baptism that most of us don’t share. What is of value here is that when one is in Christ one simply cannot go on sinning but is called to walk in newness of life. That is, we live as new people freed from sin and no longer tempted by it. That’s Paul’s way of saying that once you really know that you are saved by God’s grace it won’t even occur to you to go on sinning. To the extent that you do go on sinning you don’t truly know God’s grace. That doesn’t mean you don’t stand in it. You do. It’s just that you don’t know deep down in your soul that you do. That’s the response to the objection to universal grace that it removes all reason for living moral lives.

The basic lesson here is that God’s grace is universal. It is for everyone. It has to be because if it isn’t it isn’t grace. It becomes something that some people earn and others don’t. If that’s true then grace isn’t grace, it’s payment for services rendered. All of creation and every sentient being in it stands always in God’s grace. If it isn’t for everybody it isn’t for anybody. If it isn’t for everybody it just isn’t grace. If we have to earn it there is no grace. But there is grace! God’s love and salvation are poured out for everyone. We can know it and live into it or not, but our doing not doing it doesn’t mean that God’s grace isn’t there. It is. Always. For everyone. Thanks be to God!