The scripture referred to is Exodus 17:1-7.
During one of my summers in college I was working with A Christian Ministry in the National Parks, and I was
assigned to Roosevelt Lodge in Yellowstone Park. I had a secular job
but when off-duty I worked with a seminary student and his wife
arranging Bible studies and worship services at the lodge and local
campground. There was another employee who claimed to be a Christian
but certainly didn't act like one. When the discrepancy came up he invoked
what Paul said about our salvation depending on God's grace and not
our works. No matter what I said, he said that obeying commandments
was an attempt to attain righteousness by our works. Besides they
infringed on our freedom in Christ.
At
that time I had not read Dietrich Bonhoffer's critique of what he
called “cheap grace.” In The Cost of Discipleship, he wrote,
“cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring
repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without
confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without
the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” What people hear preached
often goes like this: “Of course you have sinned, but now
everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the
consolation of forgiveness.”
In
other words, it is the preaching of one half of the gospel, ignoring
the whole “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus”
part. It is misunderstanding what salvation is. It is thinking that
good and evil are static states and that being saved is simply being
moved from one position to another, there to stay. But as in physical
life, in the spiritual life one either grows or deteriorates. You are
either becoming more Christlike or less so.
Bonhoffer's
description of the world of 1937, written from the heart of Nazi Germany,
sounds very much like the 21st century: “The price we
are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organized
church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace
available at too low a cost. We gave away the word and the sacraments
wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation
without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which
is holy to the scornful and unbelieving...But the call to follow
Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.”
God
saves us without our help but he never tells us to be passive. God
always requires our participation. In today's Old Testament lesson we
see an example. The Israelites are thirsty and once again grumbling
against God and Moses. God agrees to give them water but doesn't make
it rain or lead them to a spring. He tells Moses to strike a rock
with his staff. Then the water comes out. It is the same staff God
told Moses to hold over the Nile and turn it to blood. Is the staff
magic? Or is God making a point of involving humans?
We see similar
things throughout scripture. The Israelites must march around Jericho
and blow their horns before God makes the walls fall. When Naaman
comes to Elisha to be cured of leprosy, he has to bathe in the Jordan
7 times before God heals him. When Jesus gives Peter and the not yet
disciples a spectacular catch of fish, he doesn't have the fish jump
in the boat or enter the net they already have in the water; he has
the men throw their nets on the other side of the boat. When Jesus
heals the man with the withered hand, he tells him to stretch out his
hand. When he feeds the 5000, he has the disciples check for what
food they have at hand, which is 5 loaves and 2 fish, and uses that
to feed everyone. But couldn't Jesus have made do with nothing?
The
principle seems to be that even when God could do something without
our help, he nevertheless involves us in the process. Is he just
showing off? No, I think he is doing what my wife does when she lets
little Nicholas help her bake. She could probably do everything
faster and better without him. But she includes him for 3 reasons.
First
of all, he wants to help. The best time to get kids into helping with
chores is during that period when, as toddlers, they want to help you
and want to imitate what you do. New Christians are often the same
way. They want to get out there and do God's work. They may need
training and guidance, which takes time, but it's a mistake not to
let them help. It helps them feel a part of the church and of God's
kingdom, where what we do on earth is what is done in heaven. So you
may not have them take over running the Sunday School or managing the
soup kitchen or heading up the Altar Guild but you do let them join in
and help at any or all of those things, rather than worry that
they'll mess things up or not do things precisely the way you'd like
them done. As my wife does with Nicholas and will do with our
granddaughter when she gets to that stage, you let them do what they
can. And that's one reason God lets us do stuff he could do without us:
to let us show our love for him by helping him and imitating him.
The
second reason my wife lets Nicholas help her bake is to teach him how.
A motivated student is a valuable resource. Most people have a hard
time learning things they don't care about. But when they want to
learn, it would be foolish not to teach them. My kids went to my wife and asked her to teach them to cook because they didn't want to be
like me. (In my defense I can cook anything in the world...provided there are microwave instructions on the box.) So she let them help her and taught them how to increase
their skills in the kitchen. God lets us be part of what he is doing
because we are supposed to be in the process of growing
into the likeness of Christ. He will do the heavy lifting but he
involves us so we learn about him and so we learn to be like him.
Disciple, after all, simply means student. God believes in learning
by doing.
The
third reason my wife lets Nicholas help her is that she loves him. When
you love people you love doing things with them. It's fun when someone
shares their knowledge and skills with you. God loves us and wants to
share his wisdom and gifts with us. One of the things Jesus did was
make it possible for us to be reconciled with God and so enjoy his
love. There is a time to simply spend time with someone you love,
gazing at them and thinking about them. We do the equivalent in worship and in
our private time with God. And then there is time to do things with a
loved one. We shop or go to a movie or go for a hike or do a project
together. God too wants to spend time with us, doing things together:
sharing his word with others, helping people out, taking care of his
other creatures as well as his creation, learning the wonders of
expressing his love through our work and through our talents.
A
saying attributed to St. Augustine summarizes God's penchant for
involving us in his plans thus: “Without God, we cannot; without
us, God will not.” After all, he reveals his will to us. He invites us to
enter his kingdom, become his children, become co-heirs with his Son.
He commissions us to tell the love story of God and his creatures. He
gives us the ministry of reconciliation. Why? It's not like he needs
our help. Maybe he is trying to show us that we always need his help.
The
paradox of how God works with us is captured in Philippians 2:12-13,
where Paul says, “Work out your salvation with fear and
trembling...” which makes it sounds as if it all depends on us, but
then it goes on to say, “for it is God who is working in you, both to desire
and to fulfill his good purpose,” which makes it sound like it all
depends on God. It is in fact a collaboration but one in which God is
in charge and a lot of our job is getting out of his way and
following his lead. It's like working with tech support to fix your
computer: you have to do what they say, shut down programs you were
running, and then let them take control of our cursor and screen, delete stuff
that is harmful, and put on a security program to protect you in the
future. In the same way, we have to do what God says, shut down some of our
own pet projects, let him take control of life, let him eliminate our
destructive habits, and fill us with his Holy Spirit. We are
cooperating with him but it is not an equal partnership.
That's
the key difference. When Paul writes of our salvation being a matter
of grace and not works, he means we cannot save ourselves but he
doesn't mean we do nothing. He just means we are not in charge; it is
not our initiative but God's. But we still must respond to God's
offer. After all he says in 2 Corinthians 5:20, “Therefore, we are
ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore
you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” Our part is to say
“yes” to God: to his gift of grace and then to all that follows
from that. Which means obeying his commandments. Not because they
make us righteous but because they are what people made righteous by
Christ do.
It
is all about what kind of people we are and are becoming. Are we
becoming more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more patient,
kinder, more generous, gentler, more faithful, more in control of
ourselves? Because that is what the Spirit is trying to make of us.
And we can quench the Spirit, just like a child can bring a planned
family outing to a grinding halt by refusing to cooperate at all. Or
like a person can sabotage his recovery from an illness by not taking
his meds or not doing his rehab exercises or not giving up the foods or
habits that are bad for him. Sometimes people so hate being told what
to do that they will refuse to do it even if it means they will
remain ill rather than get well again.
I
wonder what happened to that employee who felt he could call himself
a Christian while still doing whatever he wanted. Did he eventually
give up the pretense of following Jesus? Or did he come to see that
what he thought of as freedom in Christ was an excuse to indulge in
behavior that was ultimately self-destructive? Did he ever come to
see that the whole point of following Jesus was to be transformed?
Did he ever realize that such a life promised him more pleasure and
contentment than his self-centered life of seeking new sensations,
regardless of the personal cost? Or did he stay entrenched in his
habits despite mounting negative consequences?
I
don't know. That was a summer job nearly 40 years ago. But I hope he
did have a moment of clarity, an epiphany, a falling of the scales
from his eyes. He was a charming and intelligent man. He had a lot of
promise and, I hope, a long life ahead of him. I hope it has been a
good life, in every sense of the word.
God
is not looking for perfect people. He is looking for imperfect people
who realize what they are and want to change, want to change enough
to surrender to God, to let him have control of their lives, and who
are willing to not only pay lip service to being Christians but to
actually deny themselves, take up their crosses and follow in Jesus'
footsteps. It's not that we can do anything to save ourselves but
having been saved by him, we receive the power of his Spirit to think
and speak and act like him more and more day by day.
And
that is true freedom in Christ: the freedom from the enslaving habits
of sin that keep us doing the same things over and over while
expecting different results. The freedom we receive in Jesus is the
freedom to enjoy God's gifts and use them as he intended. Real
freedom is having the ability to choose what is good for you, with a clear
mind and a clean conscience. Only then can you discover that what is
good in the sense of being morally right is also good in the sense of
pleasurable. Because then we will be in harmony with God our creator
and so with with all our fellow creatures as well as with ourselves.
We will be free to be the person God created us to be, not limited by
our past but facing a future as boundless as God's love.
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