Week of December 13, 2009

  • Pastor Duane Cross
  • Dec 14, 2009

The Grace of Christmas

Jay Phelan is the president and dean of North Park Seminary and a close friend.  He writes a monthly article in The Covenant Companion that is consistently outstanding.  In the December, 2009 issue, he comments on the grace of Christmas.  I would like to share it with you.

In Luke 1:28 the angel Gabriel brings startling news to an obscure young woman named Mary.  In the TNIV Gabriel says, “Greetings, you who are highly favored!”  The phrase “highly favored” is an interesting one.  Its stem is the same as the Greek word often translated as “grace.”  According to the angel, Mary had been showered with grace.  God’s generosity, favor, and love were washing over her.  Mary was not entirely convinced.  She was “greatly troubled at his words.”  It seemed odd, perhaps, that God was interested in a peasant girl living in the backwater town of Galilee.  Not surprisingly she “wondered what kind of greeting this might be.”

The story of Jesus begins as a story of grace—as the overflowing of the generosity of God.  And throughout the story God seems to choose the oddest and most unlikely people to carry his message:  obstreperous fishermen, lepers, beggars, and prostitutes, and an arrogant, intellectual Pharisee.  As that Pharisee, Paul, would put it to the Corinthians:  “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27).  Grace, underserved favor, and divine surprise have marked the gospel from the beginning, starting with the announcement to Mary.  As John would put it, “the law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).

The summer 2009 issue of the journal Pietisten contains a letter from David Norling.  A seminary student at North Park in the 1960s, he recounts an interchange with the late Professor Henry Gustafson.  “I was sitting in the back row in a Nyval Hall classroom and Henry was lecturing on Paul’s staggering encounter with grace.  He said it’s all gift, you can’t measure up to it, it’s on the house…He then said, ‘God loves Bridget Bardot as much as he loves my wife.’  Given B.B’s sexual escapades I raised my hand and asked:  ‘But is that fair?’  Reading me like a book, he said, ‘No, Dave, it’s not fair.  Grace isn’t about fairness.  You can only lean back and receive it.’”

When I first discovered the CovenantChurch, I was a refugee from fundamentalism.  I was committed to the authority of the Scriptures, the deity of Christ, and most things that evangelical Christians had in common.  But I was troubled by the rigidity, the fearsome expectations, and the theological anorexia that plagued fundamentalism.  In the EvangelicalCovenantChurch I found grace.  Grace was beyond performance—but it opened the way for obedience.  Grace offered freely the love of God—but produced the service of God.  Grace set me free—but as a result I accepted the yoke of the kingdom.  Grace enabled me, as David Norling put it, “to relax and let God embrace” me. 

In spite of this message of grace the evangelical world is still a culture of accomplishment.  Our values are still the values of the world around us.  As Paul warned, we have let the world squeeze us into its mold.  The important things are always big and bold and exciting.  No obscure Galilean peasant girls for us!  No mariners reeking of fish and stale sweat!  No arrogant intellectual Pharisees!  In fact, no intellectuals at all.  Who needs thinking when you have an ideology or a proven technique?  Why do we need grace when we have a good business plan?  This is not to say that God is not working in the big and bold and exciting.  Of course he is.  That too is part of the grace of God.  But God’s greatest works of grace often occur in obscurity, among marginal people, in unexpected places.  While Americans pumped out sure-fire plans and elaborate approaches to mission, the church in Latin America, Africa, and Asia grew and flourished without many of the resources we take for granted.

In the end Mary didn’t understand what was going on.  How could she?  All she could do was lean back and trust God’s grace:  “I am the Lord’s servant.  May it be to me according to your word.”  Mary was showered with grace and ever since, we have been showered with grace.  But we have tried to make sure it was all “fair.”  We have wanted to make sure that God and everyone else knew that we earned all this.  It was our hard work; our planning that did it all.

Wisdom, hard work, and planning are necessary.  But in the end, when all is said and done, it is grace.

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 May you experience the grace of Christmas.

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