This Grace in Which we Stand

 

This Grace in Which We Stand

March 6, 2023

 

At Romans 5:2 St. Paul refers to “this grace in which we stand.” With Paul it is never quite clear, to me at least, whether we have to do anything to acquire God’s grace or not. Sometimes he seems to say yes, we have to have faith. Other times he seems to say God’s grace is always there for everyone. Paul, it seems to me, lands on both sides of what I believe to be a defining issue in American Christianity: Do we have to do something in order to be saved or do we not? There is no question that an enormous majority of Christians will answer that question, “Yes, we do. There’s something each of us has to do in order to be saved.” For most Christians the thing they think they must do in order to be saved is believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We so often hear Christians asking people, “When were you saved? By which they mean when did you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. A late, great friend and mentor in ministry of mine once told me he answered the question of when he was saved by saying “About two thousand years ago.” It’s about the best answer to that question I’ve ever heard. I once had a few parishioners mad at me because, as they put it, I never told them what they had to do to be saved. Those who ask that question, and those who get mad at their pastor for that reason, all make the same assumption. We must do something in order to be saved. If we don’t do whatever it is we must do in order to be saved, we won’t be saved. Christians traditionally have said that if you aren’t saved by doing whatever it is they say you have to do, your soul will spend eternity in the agonies of hell.

Well, there’s a reason I didn’t tell those parishioners of mine what they had to do to be saved. I didn’t tell them that because they didn’t have to do anything. I’m sure I said words to that effect dozens of times at least in sermons in the three years I was pastor of that church, but these folks didn’t grasp the truth that they didn’t have to do anything. Like most Christians, they surely had been told their whole lives that they had to do something, probably in believe in Jesus Christ, in order to avoid spending eternity in hell. Unfortunately, nay tragically, that has been Christianity’s main message from the beginning of the faith two thousand years ago.

Folks, it just isn’t true. Each and every person who has ever lived has stood completely in God’s grace their entire lives. Unless God is not a God of grace, it has to be that way. Scripture tells us that God is love. 1 John 4:8. The love that God is must surpass human love absolutely. If it doesn’t, it is human love not divine love. God’s grace is God’s love, which is God’s very essence, poured out endlessly on all of creation. We humans live our lives always surrounded by God’s love, God’s grace. It is like the air we breathe. It is to us as water is to fish. We live in it. We’re surrounded by it. We can’t and never do live without it. It even permeates our very being. Our souls are filled with it. They never lose it. Mystics and contemplatives of all faith traditions come to that truth. It is the ground of our being. We are never, ever, separated from it.

In his book What the Mystics Know the great Christian sage Richard Rohr says that we are spiritually starving in the midst of plenty. We just don’t get it that, as Rohr says, “We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God.” If we are already totally in the presence of God, and we are, then we are already totally in God’s grace because God is love. God is therefore also grace. Rohr also tells us what our problem really is. He follows his words about our being in the presence of God by saying, “What’s absent is awareness.” Joseph Campbell says, metaphorically of course, that we don’t see the spiritual dimension of reality because we have scales over our eyes. God and God’s grace are around and within us every moment of our lives, but we just don’t see them.

Which, when you think about it, makes no sense. If God is always everywhere, even inside of us, how can we not see God present everywhere? Put another way, just what are those scales we have over our eyes? I believe that there are at least two causes of the spiritual blindness from which so many of us individually and our culture collectively suffer. One is the philosophical materialism of so-called Western culture. The way most people of Western culture think has been strongly conditioned by Enlightenment rationalism and the Scientific Revolution. Reason alone leads to the conclusion that only the material, that is, the physical, is real. That’s why Karl Marx preached dialectical materialism. Science addresses questions about physical reality brilliantly and convincingly. These two related developments in Western culture, rationalism and science, have reduced truth to fact for nearly everyone in our context. Even most people who self-identify as people of faith believe that truth consists only of facts.

Yet the rationalism and science that lead us to so many facts are incommensurate with spiritual reality. To understand the spiritual as mere fact is badly to misunderstand the spiritual. The spiritual is not less than factual. It is so much more than factual. Most people in our culture just dismiss the spiritual as irrational, unscientific, and therefor not real. We aren’t likely to experience the reality of something we deny is real. That denial is one of the scales we have over our eyes.

The other is the way the supposed teachers of Christianity have told people for centuries that God’s not mostly down here with us. Rather, God is mostly up there in heaven staring down at us. These authorities have mostly told people that God is angry and wrathful. You’d better believe in “Him” they say, this God always being masculine, or He’s gonna get you but good. And don’t look around here for Him. Look up. Way up. To a different level of existence and certainly not down here with us. We aren’t likely to experience the presence of something or someone we don’t believe is here to be experienced. The conviction that God is there not here is another of the opaque scales over our eyes.

Well folks, the spiritual, that is, God, is real and really is present all around us. Some of us know that truth because we have had personal encounters with God. I know I have. We can all know it because we can see that every human culture there has ever been, even, at least to some limited extent, ours, has known the reality of the spiritual. They have all sought to live connected to it through a system of symbols and myths, in other words, through a religion. Human beings over the millennia and across cultures haven’t all, independently, just made up a spiritual dimension of reality. They have experienced it, or at least some of them have. They have experienced the reality we call God because God is real and God is here. We believe that God is there too, but what’s important is that God is definitely here.

Here, and full of love and grace. Nothing but love and grace. And that means we don’t have to do anything to be saved because we already are. We are saved not because of anything we’ve done or not done or believed or not believed. We are saved because God loves what God has created. God relates to what She has created not in judgment and wrath but in love and grace. God, who is love, is not about to damn anyone because God loves everyone. So do we have to do anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have to avoid doing anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have to believe anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have not to believe anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved.

The function of religion is not to create anything for anyone that wasn’t already there. Faith does not create a salvation that wasn’t already there. Religion’s function is not to create, it is to reveal what is already there. There always and everywhere. And it is to give us a way to live into God’s amazing, omnipresent Grace. We do not stand in God’s judgment. None of us does. We stand in God’s grace. Every one of us does. We do indeed, to use Paul’s phrase, stand in grace. The world will be a much better place when masses of people realize that divine truth.