When Scriptural Truth is Found, Grace Prevails

When sports teams fall on hard times they often get back on course by going back to basics. In football that would be blocking and tackling; in basketball, defense and rebounding. If you’re failing with the fundamentals, nuanced systems and fancy plays aren’t going to help.

Going back to basics could be good advice for the Christian faith at this moment in time. Lord knows change was needed even before conservatives started pointing fingers over their exclusive little manias. We took a step closer to the breaking point this week as angry Anglican conservatives met in Africa to stomp their feet over gays in the church and women in the pulpit. They claim to be doing this in the name of Christ, but as one prominent politician said recently, “Some people aren’t reading their Bibles.”

I don’t remember much from my college class in Principles of Biblical Interpretation (insiders call it hermeneutics to scare off lay people), but the one principle I do recall is really the only one worth recalling: Rule No. One -- “Let scripture interpret scripture.” This means that any individual verse or point of belief has to be understood within the comprehensive message. As I said, when in doubt, go back to basics.

I suppose not everyone is going to agree, but it seems to me the main defining ingredient of the Christian faith is grace. Some people, following the footsteps of those who opposed Paul’s message, hate that fact. They would prefer to give obedience to the law equal standing in a kind of offsetting tension which keeps us from going overboard. Unfortunately, that’s not the Bible’s message. That’s the message of men who lack faith in the message. The message of scripture is freedom, not constriction. God asks us to have faith that freedom will lead to better behavior, that grace and freedom will transform us into spiritual beings with a new capacity to follow the fundamental commands: to love God and our neighbors as ourselves.

Unfortunately, while many have faith in God they lack faith in other men and women. So just in case grace doesn’t get the job done, they start making rules such as no women in the pulpit and no gays or lesbians at the communion rail. I guess they figure Jesus -- and God -- must be so naïve that they need a little help understanding just how bad these humans can be. Still others, desperate to justify their human doubt, try to find little passages to support themselves, or attribute grace to Paul and say Jesus never mentioned it. To those people I repeat, you aren’t reading your Bible. Grace is there from cover to cover, and certainly in the teachings of Jesus. To illustrate how grace is central to Jesus’ teaching, this quotation from Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Assurance of Grace:

“… The knowledge and the certainty of God are a gift to those who strive after perfection without the illusion of having attained it — the ‘poor in spirit,’ and those who ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’ (Matt. 5:3, 6). Those who imagine themselves righteous are consistently condemned. Those who strive after pure spirit are consoled in the inevitable frustration which attends their striving, because in their very search after perfection they are initiated into the true character of spirit and realize that perfection is love and not justice. Thus they obtain mercy while they learn to be merciful.”

As I said, back to basics: The message of God’s word is trusting love over justice, knowing we have the gift of God’s mercy and the power to pass it on. In the shorthand of our faith, we call it grace.

I’ve been on sports teams where players who insisted on being divisive, who ignored the fundamentals and did things their own way, were allowed to say goodbye and go their own way. With the doubters gone, the team was able to pursue its true potential.

So, let them seek their twisted little pathways. I plan to stick with the basics and walk in God’s grace. If God has a better road to success than the one in scripture, wouldn’t we have been told of it?