I am in the habit of beginning my prayers with thanksgiving, you might have noticed this if you have prayed with me. Offering thanks to God for whatever is at the top of my mind in the moment. I have noticed this about myself, wondered about it a little, but haven’t seriously thought that it was a problem of any kind. I mean, what could be wrong with saying thank you?
Nothing at all, I thought, until I really dug into this little parable. The Pharisee at prayer begins with thanks. “I thank you, God, that I am not like other people…the thieves, the rogues, the adulterers, or this tax collector right here beside me. Thank you, God, for making me better.”
There it is. Our thankfulness can actually be kind of smug, as we count all the ways our lives are great…enviable. We risk the humble-brag – you know, where you say things like, “God is so good to have blessed me with intelligence, beauty, charm, and athletic skill.”
There is a certain pride that may prevent us from getting on our knees – literally or figuratively – and asking for God’s help with the many things in which we truly need help. Our pride prevents us from admitting those things. “It’s all good,” we want to say. “God is good. I’m good.”
And then there is this tax collector, who bows his head, beats his breast, and says, “Have mercy on me, God, for I am a sinner.”
This man makes me feel uncomfortable, because he is so clearly uncomfortable. I instinctively want to move away from the tax collector, lest I catch his angst, his agony. Who wants to feel like that? Nobody.
Really, it is no wonder the Pharisee prays as he does, thanking God for making him unlike the tax collector. He is grateful to not be burdened by so much trouble. He lives his life well, according to the standards he has set for himself.
And when you think about it, you realize that is not hard to do: to live well by the standards you set for yourself.
This time of year the church thinks a little more about these things: about thankfulness, as we approach the season of thanksgiving. And about mercy, forgiveness and grace, as we approach the anniversary of the Reformation.
Next Sunday is Reformation Sunday – the day we mark every year when we remember the man called Martin Luther, who nailed his 95 theses to the church door and set off a revolution. He didn’t quite mean to set off a revolution. He just had a nagging sense that all was not right with his world, and this would not let him settle into complacency.
It all came of a moment of personal crisis for Luther. He was caught between the tax collector and the Pharisee. He was focused on trying to do all the right things, just like the Pharisee did. And while another priest might have prayed how thankful he was to be so good, to be so blessed, to have this unsurpassed peace, Luther could never shake that nagging feeling that he was really not so good. That feeling of being a sinner in need of God’s mercy, just like the tax collector, was something he could not brush off.
Then, in a moment of divine providence, Luther recognized grace. He knew that there would never be anything he could do to justify himself; but God’s grace was free for the taking. The realization gave him the peace he had been seeking. We in the Protestant Church have been seeking the consolation of that peace ever since.
I was brought up in the Lutheran Church, and that sense of God’s grace washed over me like Ivory soap. It was just the way it was. It was always there. I never thought too deeply or critically about it – until one conversation with my father-in-law.
Peter was a Baptist minister, in the Reformed tradition, so his beliefs were not that different from Presbyterian. When they would come to visit us early in our marriage, they would attend worship with us at our Lutheran Church. I could tell it was a little uncomfortable for them, because it was different. But one day I learned a bit more about where that discomfort stemmed from.
Peter told me that when he was in worship with the Lutherans he felt that we relied much too much on God’s grace – and grace alone. He wasn’t wrong about that. But I wondered: was that actually a problem?
Is it wrong to say that we are saved by grace, and grace alone? That there is nothing we can do to pull ourselves up from the muck of sin, that only the grace of God has the power to do that? I think not. But these many years later I realize that there is a real danger of misinterpreting God’s grace, or even misusing it. That, I think, was his concern.
In the old movie Love Story there was a line that said, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” which is pure rubbish. In the church, there is another equally absurd belief, and that is: Grace means never having to do anything different. That is just false. For if we say we are saved by grace and then never even try to live up to that grace in any way, we are squandering it – even profaning it. Truly, it is an offense to God to claim that grace without, at the very least, taking an honest look at your sinfulness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, about what he called cheap grace. He wrote, “Cheap Grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.”
“Cheap grace,” he wrote, “is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Cheap grace enters our world in many ways. When we lack the moral strength to look at our own trespasses honestly, when our frail hearts won’t let us look at the faults of our loved ones, cheap grace comes into our personal lives.
When we are afraid to offend one another in church, we might let cheap grace stand, unchallenged, on a Sunday morning. Because talking about sin and repentance is a downer and people are looking for uplifting experiences. We surely can’t risk pushing them away.
Cheap grace enters our civic lives, when faith becomes a tool of a political candidate, or party. Then words like “I’ve been saved by grace,” can by tossed about to cover a multitude of sins. When we hear them, we look no further because these are the magic words: “saved by grace.” I might be living my life in a way that offends God and the people around me in so many ways, but don’t look at that, because I’ve been saved by grace! We react to these words the way we have been trained to – cheering and rejoicing. We are blinded by the magnificence of this notion of grace. Blinded, perhaps, to the truth.
Because when it is only words, it is nothing but a hollow panacea. It is the candy that gets tossed from a parade float to the children lining the streets. Cheap grace is, at the least, a distraction from what we really need to attend to; it is, at the worst, detrimental to your very soul.
Costly grace, Bonhoeffer says, is the grace of Jesus Christ. It is “the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”
Saved by grace, these are words of incalculable value. It is only through the grace of God at work in Jesus Christ that we receive new life – in all its fullness. It is only by this grace that we find the peace that passes understanding. It is only by this grace that we have the most durable kind of hope you can imagine.
This grace, Christ’s grace, is a matter of tremendous value and great, great cost. Let us not be fooled into thinking otherwise, ever.
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Photo by Ray Shrewsberry on Unsplash
