Text: Since we are headed into a few days that will deal with the law and how Paul sees it being used, I will again interject another reading so that several days needed to deal with the size of the Galatians text will be continuous. So...from Between Noon & Three by Robert Farrar Capon.
In a follow-up comment on the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32): Let me refine that a little. I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase shoud be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over - until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on the Sin of the Elder Brother.
The notion of "one single hope of moral reckoning" is always a temptation. It is always what we think will make things well. It is easier to be a proponent of "moral living" as the way of fixing our status before God than to trust that our status is set - by God alone. Of course, this does not mean the end of morality. On the contrary, it is much like the "law" that comes after the promise to Abraham and his seed (yesterday in Galatians). Morality helps to keep things in order...but that is not the final nor the first word. In fact, I would submit that it is the promise - taken and held onto as though it is our life (which it is!) that truly transforms our everyday lives to be that which we commonly call the life of the body of Christ. A grace-filled living that will be like nothing the law on its own can bring. Self-giving love that comes out of our understanding that we are dead and only alive by grace, cannot be legislated. It is a gift that cuts through the curtain of the law so that God is truly visible in the midst of us.
Connection: What power grace can have for the living of this day! We are free to be agents of graceful living even when there is no command to be such agents. We are free to give beyond the limit of the law or the demands of the law. We can be graceful even in our driving. Free to obey the orange barrels and free to give gifts of gracefulness to other drivers as we tool along the road in a day when road rage seems to rule. Ha!
O God of grace and orange barrels, lift up our hearts by your loving kindness and mercy. Show us the path of your beloved, Jesus, that we, in this day, may walk within that grace and love. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment