Category: Grace

They called him “Skipper,” and I was his Gilligan. Ed Black was six feet two inches and weighed in at some three hundred and fifty pounds. He worked security down at the Port of Portland, and anyone who encountered him, at work or on the street, was intimidated by his presence. Especially me. With his cigarette in hand, he unbashfully used his words to increase his intimidation, words often reserved for the sailor. For years he frightened me. His wife, Sandy, on the other hand, was a gentle soul who couldn’t hurt a fly. Their daughter was a childhood friend of my sister and me. They called Ed, “Skipper,” not just because I was his little buddy, but because he dwarfed over me. As a child, I was all but fifty pounds of raw nothing. His shadow weighed more than me.

Ed took a likin’ to me. To this day, I don’t know why. Maybe I was the son he never had, or maybe I was cheap labor. Your guess is as good as mine. He hired me out to do odd jobs around his house. Sometimes it was mowing his lawn, in which his big power lawnmower outweighed me by a ton, and mowing his bank felt like I was mowing on a slope at ninety-degree angles. He was meticulous about his lawn, and in the end, he’d mow most of it himself. Sandy had me weed her garden, and I worked hard at pulling all the weeds. All of them. I was well into adulthood before I confessed to her that I had mistaken the bulbs for weeds, to which it now made sense, she realized, why those flowers never sprouted. Once I was positioned on top of his house with a sprinkler hoping to cool the temperature of his home. He was barking orders. I did the best I could, but it just sounded like a trombone and Shultz never offered subtitles to me. Rigging the sprinkler failed, no doubt in part because of my lack of ingenuity to carry out his vision for creativity.

Conventional wisdom said to cut me loose. I wasn’t worth the time or the effort. I made the jobs harder for him to complete, not easier. Yet he kept bringing me back, giving me a list of chores to complete. All the way through high school, he’d have me over at his house to work. And at the end of the day, he paid me. He paid me well. While the going rate for the minimum wage was $3.25 an hour, his generosity was at $5.00 an hour or better. Nothing I did told Ed to pay me so well. But whether Ed understood – and I don’t think he did – he paid me according to grace.

At the climax of the first National Treasure movie, Nicolas Cage’s character, Benjamin Franklin Gates, finds himself face to face with the law. The trail ended with the treasure located ten floors below Trinity Church in Manhattan. Sitting in the sanctuary with the fugitives – including his father Patrick Henry Gates, love interest Dr. Abigail Chase, and loyal friend Riley Pool – Gates began negotiations with FBI Agent, Peter Sadusky. Gates voluntarily returned the stolen Declaration of Independence, demanded Dr. Chase’s record expunged, and wanted the credit of the treasure-find to go to the entire Gates family with the assistance of Riley Pool. Finally, in confessional tones, he admitted, “I’d really love not to go to prison.” Agent Sadusky, shook his head, lamenting, “Someone has to go to jail, Ben.”

The harsh reality of living in this world is the conventional wisdom that someone must go to jail. Do the crime, pay the fine, and do the time. And when that motto spills over into our spiritual lives, it gets messy very quickly.

Some act like their lives is spot free of sin, though it’s likely a front for the evil they’re covering or hiding. They are haughty, proud, and arrogant. They have simple answers to difficult and complicated questions. They are quick to judge and have the stones ready to throw at those who fall. Like the man praying at the temple, they say, “Thank you, Lord, I am not that guy!” (Lk. 18:11). It’s not that they’re free of sin, they’re not. They are actually overcome with guilt and shame but are too arrogant for humility. Someone has to go to jail, and with a raised eyebrow, they know who.

Others live with false guilt. What they have done is bigger and “badder” than anyone in the history of the world, believing they live beyond the reach of God’s mercy. They walk through their day carrying the baggage of shame from the wrongs committed throughout their life. They are the ones who, if they do pray, open their words like the other guy at the temple, saying, “I beg you, God, have mercy on me” (Lk. 18:13). Someone has to go to jail, and with a defeated disposition, they know who.

As I sit here, I feel the tug at war within myself between the one who condemns others with the one who condemns himself. Does someone really have to go to jail? Isn’t there another option on the table? Isn’t there a way to flip the script so that we can operate according to grace?

Paul finds another way.

As he engages the church in Corinth, he could choose any path or write any script. Why not? The Corinthians had hardly taken the high ground with the apostle. They accused him of breaking his promise to visit (2 Cor. 1:15-17). They embarrassed and shamed him at his last visit (2:1). They claimed he was too fragile to be a good leader (4:7). They charged him with being two-faced, bold on paper but timid in their presence (10:1). All those bad events happening to Paul couldn’t really mean God is with him (11:23-29). They had their tape measure, and Paul wasn’t measuring up. What is Paul to do? They were burning bridges, and if it was up to me, I’d say, “Let them burn.”

Instead, Paul begins by letting them in on his secret. Knowing they are all about bragging rights, Paul reveals that he likes to boast as well. Except his boasting is not about himself, not in this case, it’s about them. Like a parent bragging about their child, or a coach boasting about her team, or about a teacher knowing her students finally got it, Paul is the pastor who loves his church and treats his church in holiness and sincerity (1:12).

Stepping back to see the larger picture, Paul points to the end. In Judgement Day-like language, his end goal is a mutual boasting, where they brag about their pastor, and he brags about them. I can image all of them gathered at the feet of the Lord, hugging and holding each other, telling the Lord how each has blessed and benefited from each other. He captures that statement when he writes, “. . . you will come to understand fully that you can boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of the Lord Jesus” (v. 14b).

By pulling back the perspective to see the big picture or the end-product, then we can begin to view each other not through the lenses of the daily cycle, but through the lenses of the end-product. The ebb and flow of life is filled with ups and downs, good and bad, bonding and breaking, harmony and dissonance, clarity and vagueness, cohesion and friction, and attainment and disappointment which tend to distort life. One bad moment in time is all that is needed to destroy and wipe away a relationship years in the making. It happens, at least in part, because we act in accordance with the “go to jail” mindset instead of according to grace. One way to act according to grace is to look at the final day of the Lord where full reconciliation, restoration, and restitution are realized and start acting now like we will act then. Instead of looking to see who has to go to jail, start looking to pay people according to grace.

Jesus might say it like this: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt. 6:10).

Imagine for just a minute if our mode of operandum was derived from “according to grace” instead of “someone has to go to jail.”

The Civil Rights movement has clear markers that can be traced in its history. Those markers bleed with a “someone has to go to jail” mindset. On a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to vacate her seat to a white passenger. At the New Orleans William Frantz Elementary School in 1960 Federal Marshalls escorted six-year-old Ruby Bridges to the all-white school. Between those two markers was the Little Rock Nine who in 1957 tested the new desegregation laws at Little Rock’s Central High School. The students, escorted by the 101^st Airborne, entered the school by the crowds calling for lynching and told to “go back to Africa.” Throughout the year, these students were punched, spat upon, and hit with eggs and vegetables. As I said, someone needs go to jail.

One of the victims was Elizabeth Eckford. A famous picture was taken on that first day of school with fifteen-year-old Hazel Bryan over the left shoulder of Echford.  Bryan’s face was blood curdling angry and appeared to be spewing all sorts of hateful and discriminatory comments. Bryan became the face of the racist deep south Jim Crow era. She was also a Christian, a member of a local church, active in her youth group. Somebody needed to go to jail, and it wasn’t Eckford.

At the end of the school year, Elizabeth Eckford moved to St. Louis but returned to Little Rock when she was 21. While visiting the city, she received a phone call from Bryan. Instead of the hateful speech, Bryan had a change of heart offering an apology to Echford for her behavior in 1957. The picture of her screaming such vile words was a constant reminder of her own guilt and shame. It was not the picture she wanted to be remembered by history.

 Either lady could have continued to play the “someone has to go to jail” card. Instead, at least in the moment, they reconciled and acted according to grace. And grace is a far better marker for your life than the condemnation of jail.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

Dear John letters are break-up letters. Finding traction during World War II, when the most popular male name was John, too many servicemen received such letters from the ones who vowed fidelity to them. The greeting was all the man needed to read before he knew the content of the letter. Instead of being greeted by “My darling,” or “My sweetie,” or whatever nickname was used, the formality of reading “Dear John” was all the man needed to know that what was coming next wasn’t good. With enough letters making the rounds, filling in the plot-holes was an easy step to make. “I was lonely. He was here, when you weren’t. We’re getting married.” Whatever the details are, when the words “Dear John” appear at the front of a letter, the recipient is fixin’ to get dumped.  

Long distance relationships are hard to manage. Distance may allow the heart to grow fonder, but the isolation and loneliness wants companionship to fill the void. My wife and I dated much of our two years while I was attending college in Arkansas and she was working in Middle-Tennessee. We wrote letters to each other, reserving phone calls for the weekends when the rates were their lowest. And for the all the letters we wrote – letters written in the mid-eighties still preserved in boxes in our garage – no temptation arose to write the “Dear John” letter. Dating from afar is hard and tests your metal. Somehow, we came through it.

Today’s use of long-distance relationship is eased because of the affordable access of phone calling, texting, and FaceTime. Though technology helps bridge the gap, nothing can replace holding hands, hugging, gazing into one another’s eyes, and experiencing the gentle kiss. Besides, some conversations must be had in person, and “Dear John” letters should be avoided.

Paul could have written a “Dear John” letter to the Corinthians. He could have. They wanted a break-up. He was absent and accused of breaking a promise to visit them (1:15-17). Gushing over what they believed to be better leadership for the church, they were enamored with perceived success stories like letters of recommendation, oratory skills, and charisma. With Hank Williams playing in the background, they were slow dancing to the song, “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Paul could have written a “Dear John” letter to the Corinthians. He could have, but he didn’t. Instead, he held out hope for reconciliation.

Following the standard letter writing structure of the first century Graco-Roman world, Paul composes his epistle in the vein of such correspondence. Ancient letters included identification of sender and recipient, a greeting, a thanksgiving or prayer section, the body of the letter, and final greetings. All of which is found in the Pauline epistles.

Paul identifies himself as “. . . an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God” (1:1). While two thousand years of church history has blunted the statement as a no-brainer cast-off, that opening phrase makes a bee-line to the issue at hand. The Corinthians are questioning Paul’s leadership, which would include his calling as an apostle of God. Paul not only states his title and role, but also reinforces that his apostleship and all his so-called “perceived weaknesses” is by the will of God. Paul’s inuendo is that Corinth is not just rejecting Paul, they are rejecting God’s ordained apostle. They are rejecting God and his gospel.

The recipients of the letter are not just those in Corinth but all the saints in Achaia. Known as a regional letter, Paul is addressing a crisis hardly contained in one place, but one that has spread from the city church in Corinth to the entire region.

Some might call on Paul to dump them, to write the “Dear John” letter, to break up with the church – he certainly had just cause. Instead, he writes a love letter. He does so by showing his cards in the greeting section of the letter found in verse 2. He drops two words, typical in most of his writings, in which the subtle and nuanced message and meaning are all but lost in translation and over time.

The first word is grace. In the Graco-Roman world, when someone wrote the greeting to a letter, they used the word charein, which simply means, “hi.” We do the same or something similar in our letters today. We say “hi” or “hello there,” or even more casual, “What’s up?” My high school English teacher was often dramatic in her speech and would address people with a huge smile and boisterous, “Greetings and Salutations!”

Paul, on the other hand, baptized the formal greeting with a pun by substituting charein for charis, which we know is “grace.” So, instead of saying “Hi,” he says, “Grace.” Sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? By wrapping his greeting in grace he is rooting their lives, and this letter, in the love that God has for all of mankind. Everything, in life and in church, is surrounded by God’s infinite grace.

The second word he drops is peace. The Jewish word for peace was shalom and was the standard greeting in writing in everyday conversation. While Paul uses the Greek form in his letters, the rich meaning of shalom is behind the Greek. Offering shalom to someone is offering peace that is beyond the common conflict encountered every day. The peace that Paul, and his fellow Jews, offered was a peace that found its origin in God himself which then flowed over into their lives. When one is at peace with God, one can find peace in any circumstance or relationship.

“Grace and peace” was the normal greeting Paul offered to churches. When Paul wrote letters, he was dealing with a church conflict and the offering of grace and peace at the beginning of the letters he helped lay the foundation for what he hoped to accomplish in the letter itself. Mainly, Paul was leading them through their conflict to find a resolution. For the Corinthians and the church of Achaia, offering grace and peace was Paul’s means to avoid writing the dreaded “Dear John” letter.

For the past couple of years, a comic has circled around social media showing Paul sitting at a table writing a letter. The look of exasperation is all over his face as he writes, “To the church in America . . . I don’t even know where to begin.” The comic appeals to our sense that something is wrong with American churches, even if we can’t agree on the exact nature of the problem. The comic leaves us feeling like this is Paul’s last chance at redeeming the church in America before writing his “Dear John” letter. It does leave one to wonder how the church can be redeemed.

A friend of mine shared a story about a preacher who was pastoring a church. The board wanted to move forward with a building project. They needed new classrooms and an area for fellowship meals and receptions. The preacher opposed the construction, believing instead to focus on building up the people. He was convinced that discipleship should overrule the felt need of a building project. Despite his warning, the board ignored his plea and wanted to move forward with a church-wide vote. They brought the matter to the church and began deliberations. The board outlined their vision, the cost, and more importantly, how they could build most of it themselves, which would save on long term cost. They had the manpower of carpentry, plumbing, and electrical workers to complete the project and keep the costs reasonable. The preacher still opposed the move and made his case that the kind of building needed at their church was spiritual in nature. The church voted against the preacher and for the building project.

If you were the preacher, what would do? You have strong values, beliefs and a sense of what is right and wrong. Your insights are rejected, and your vision for the church is now clouded with a heavy fog has settled that may never lift. What do you do? You write your “Dear John” letter and break up with the church. You explain that if the church will not heed the voice of their pastor, then the church needs to find another voice. Make sure you let them down gently, but you let them down.

On the Saturday morning when that church broke ground on the new addition, the first person at the site was the preacher. He was wearing his work clothes, his tool belt, and gloves. When the members saw him, they marveled at him, wondering, “Why are you here? You were opposed to this building project.”

The preacher, never entertaining the thought of a “Dear John” letter, and in seeking peace and grace amidst the congregation, replied. “I am a member and part of this congregation.” And laying aside his ego, he continued, “I will do everything I can for my church.” It’s no wonder that he stayed at that church for thirty years.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)