“Amazing and Uncomfortable Grace” Several years ago, there was an absolutely fascinating study done of America’s favorite music and one of the discoveries was that for many Americans one of their favorite songs is actually an old hymn, Amazing Grace. Perhaps you know how it goes: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.” But what exactly is grace? And what makes it amazing? You know, when we use the word grace in ordinary conversation, we tend to downsize the word. We’ll say things like, “She’s a very graceful young woman,” and we mean she dances well. Or, “He’s a very gracious host,” and we mean he says nice things at dinner parties. We tend to use the word grace in small ways. But when the New Testament uses the word grace, it uses it in a very big way. It’s a powerful word. It’s an amazing word. In fact, it’s so powerful that sometimes grace can be quite uncomfortable. When the New Testament uses the English word grace, it’s actually the translation of a Greek word, charis, which means “gift.” And this is the New Testament’s way of saying that at the very center of life there is a God who is not a punitive judge or a scolding parent, but a God who gives gift after gift after gift. That’s grace.
Dr. Thomas Long is from Atlanta, Georgia, where he is Professor of Preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Tom is a Presbyterian minister and the author of several books on the art of preaching. Read the Entire Sermon
May 28, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Without realizing it, while serving in my first congregational call, I began to use the phrase “grace abounds” often. It wasn’t until others started saying, “As Pastor Rachel says…” that I even knew I said it. I would use it when we made mistakes, when the wrong hymn was printed in the bulletin, when somebody lost the Sunday School curriculum, when the chair of the committee forgot about the meeting. I said it, not to diminish the consequences of our mistakes – we still had to come up with new curriculum, and we still had business to conduct. But for me this was to say that we could move on, that these were not an impediment for God doing God’s will, nor should it be for us doing God’s will. “Grace abounds.” It’s all good. I forgive you. God forgives you. I forgive myself. God forgives me. Let’s keep doing God’s work and not get caught up in the cycle of guilt and shame.
When I first moved to Chicago, I was living with housemates who, for the most part, were not religious. One housemate forgot that she was in charge of fixing dinner one night, so several of the rest of us pitched in and got dinner ready. It wasn’t until dinner time that she came home and was reminded that she had been responsible. She was extremely apologetic and embarrassed that she had neglected this obligation. When she apologize to me and told me again and again that this was not normal for her. I thought, “No worries” and said, “Grace abounds.” She paused and responded, “I have no idea what that means. I know what each of those words means, but I don’t know what you mean putting them together.” Here was an Ivy League educated woman, who worked for the Joffrey Ballet (she knew about grace!), who didn’t get what I was saying. This revealed to me how much we, as the church, have code words and catch phrases that people outside of the church just don’t get. So how do we take this concept of amazing and uncomfortable grace and translate it for the world sot hat we can be faithful in our call to “make disciples” and to equip and empower others to participate with us in doing God’s work in the world?