IRRESISTIBLE GRACE, MOSTLY

Begin with Grace

Grace must be where we begin. Before we delve into askesis for leadership, we must have a foundation for such practices. If we are true to what the Church has proclaimed for the last two thousand years, then we can begin nowhere else but grace. God's intervening act in Jesus to redeem humanity on the Cross means that everything else must be seen and understood through that cosmic intervention into human history. And that, of course, means God's intervention of grace must shape how we lead. It makes no sense for us to lead with other stances such as utilitarianism, meritocracy, or social Darwinism that at one time or another seem to be the ruling paradigms in Western culture. If grace is true and it is what God has been up to, and continues to be up to in the world, we cannot proclaim it as the very nature of God and then not practice it in how we lead.

Although I am by no means a Calvinist, I am alert to my own life and to the world around me. Thus, certain aspects of Calvinism's TULIP doctrine make a whole lot of sense to me (especially the Big T: total depravity). I recognize such depraved tendencies in myself and, to be fair and balanced, in others as well. Sin is everywhere and all the time. No part of me and no part of the world goes unaffected by it. As the Office of Morning Prayer in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer states: "There is no health in us."

Well, maybe there is some health. Maybe the prayer overstates the human condition a bit. There is "health" in me. My intentions are good at least 51 percent of the time. I am able to do good. I can be kind, compassionate, and just. But I know that even my best intentions can become an avenue for my sin. Echoing the Prayer of Manasseh, I must conclude: "I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned, and I know my wickedness only too well." (And I know yours too, by the way!)

Still, I understand the biblical witness to be one of God's irresistible grace, mostly. That does not mean we do not resist it. We do in countless ways, sin being what sin is, but God has the last word on humanity's fate. God does not and will not leave us to our own devices. Grace intercedes in our path to personal and communal destruction and snatches us from the jaws of death. And this not only for the "sweet by and by." There is plenty of living death right now all around us as the people of this world live gracelessly. Grace is for now, and not just when we move into the "larger life" with God. In other words, we live knowing how the drama of the human story ends: with the New Jerusalem of John's Revelation coming to earth. And, as we say in the Lord's Prayer, God's kingdom will come one day to this earth "as it (already) is in heaven." God's grace in Jesus makes this possible. The human family, who has seemingly bought a one-way ticket to death and destruction, gets its destiny rerouted by God's intervention on the Cross. Our human trajectory changes from death to life. This is God's final word to humanity.

God's grace, then, should not be seen as God meeting us anything less than all the way. It is not as if God reaches half of the way to us and then waits patiently for us to come to our senses and then we reach the other half of the way. Our good works, our insight, our cleverness, or even our faith do not make up the other half so we can meet God somewhere in the middle. God through Jesus steps into the cesspool of our lives and brings us out all the way. We do not help one bit.

A favorite icon of mine is one I believe is called the "Harrowing of Hell," where Adam and Eve are emerging from prison-like square boxes (like a jack-in-the-box) as the chains fly off those boxes. They are reaching up with their arms from out of the boxes and God's arms appear in the top half of the icon. In a cursory look at the icon, you might see that these two first humans are holding hands with God. But if you look closer, then you see that God is not giving them the "right hand of fellowship." God has them both by the wrists and is literally yanking them out of their imprisonment in death. Neither Adam and Eve, nor we, meet God even part of the way. Martin Luther, it is said, once responded to a man who was bragging that he had accepted Jesus Christ as his "personal savior." Luther asked him something like this: "If someone came up to you and dropped a bag full of gold coins in your lap, would you then go around bragging about how clever and faithful you were in accepting the gold coins? Of course, you would not."

Grace and Human Choice

A few years ago as I was driving home one late Sunday evening, I saw a church sign that read: "Choosy Moms Choose Jesus." It was dark and late and I was not sure what I had read, so I stopped my car, turned around, and went back to double-check. Yep. My hunch is that the person who came up with that message, however unaware, was using an old marketing strategy: be timely and draw on the comfortably familiar to promote your message. It was, after all, Mother's Day and the message related emotionally to a successful ad campaign for a peanut butter brand a few years back. Those two ingredients made the message work. Except it's horrible theology.

The idea that you or I or anybody else chooses Jesus is arrogant and gives us way more credit than we deserve. Such a claim presumes that a person has done her market research. She has tested all the other possible saviors or gods out there, weighed their strengths and weaknesses in providing the value she desired for her and her family, and then she chose Jesus, because, of course, she only wants the very best for herself and her family. Jesus then becomes the choice she makes to maximize her return as the choosy consumer of salvation that she is. Like I said, arrogance.

Jesus says in John 15:16 that we did not choose him, he chose us. It is egotistical for us to conclude anything else. As a disciple, I did none of the market research described above. I did not survey the salvation-market landscape and then conclude Jesus was the highest-value alternative among the choices. What actually occurred was quite different. Jesus worked his way past my pride, my self-centeredness, my presumption that I knew best about my life, and met me in the truthfulness of my pathetic, sinful weakness. His grace on the Cross gave me something I had no power to give myself, namely, forgiveness of my sins. I did not choose God's forgiveness. God forgave me in spite of myself.

That church sign manifests a larger cultural distortion of the Christian faith that syncretizes Christianity with modern capitalist presumptions about human behavior. It reflects the commodification of Christianity as just another transactional choice we make. But I had no hand in the construction of the Great Narrative of Redemption. Through this narrative, God in Jesus has grasped my life and has compelled me into a drama I had no hand in creating. Any other claim is, as I have said, clearly arrogant. As...