Thoughts on grace and peace...

NOTE: After a week away in San Francisco, I am back home getting into the church groove again. As you can tell, my thoughts are still exploring a LOT of BEAT images and poetry as I wrestle with preaching/teaching my way through Paul's letter to the Romans this summer. I will be using some of the lectionary texts but emphasizing insights from St. Paul, too. So, here we go on a 16 week adventure. If you are in town on Sunday at 10:30 am, please stop by for worship.


When I was away visiting my brother in San Francisco last week, I spent a great deal of time revisiting the legacy of the Beat poets. I don’t mean the beatniks – they were a shallow caricature of the Beat poets – but rather those writers and thinkers who tried to capture the innovation, rhythm and existential abandon of bebop jazz musicians like Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

• Do you know that groove? It is wild music that plays with rhythm, melody and harmony all at the same time – joyfully breaking rules – while exploring the hidden off beats or the dissonant notes of a song that are always waiting to be discovered by those daring enough to push the limits.

• It is a style of music that was revolutionary when it arrived: it demanded maximum creativity and innovation including the willingness to improvise furiously as well as listen carefully to both the sounds being created by your comrades in music and those yet untapped, captive sounds still inside your soul that lay waiting to be set free.

The Beats celebrated liberation in thought, word and deed, aching to be as expressive in their realm as were their jazz co-conspirators before them. And of all the Beat poets I found myself most curious about Allen Ginsberg – clearly the heart and soul of the movement – who was simultaneously brilliant and disgusting, socially enlightened and self-absorbed, generous and compassionate but also undisciplined, arrogant and emotionally wounded in a hundred tragic ways. In other words, he was a regular human person much like you and me with the exception being that Ginsberg’s brokenness was usually made painfully transparent while we try to keep ours under wraps.

And that may be one of the reasons why he was such a soiled genius: as the Cold War heated up in the 1950s and American paranoia boiled over into McCarthyism and Southern lynching, Ginsberg exposed the social tensions just below the surface like a bebop artist playing with a song’s melodic structure. In his 1956, he put it like this in his masterpiece, “Howl,” that begins:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall…

Ginsberg breathed new energy and jazz-based improvisation into the prophets of the Old Testament, giving birth to first the even more challenging creations of Bob Dylan and then inspiring artists like Bruce Springsteen, the Police and the best hip hop and rap artists of our era to marry social criticism and spiritual transformation with poetry and art.

And this, writes M. Craig Barnes who is the professor of Leadership and Ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, is also the work of the pastor:

To be of service to the Holy Spirit, who is at work in human lives, the pastor can never reduce ministry to servicing parishioners’ complaints about the church… (rather) the work of the pastor is much like the poet… who has been blessed with a vision that allows them to explore and express the truth behind (and below) reality. Poets see the despair and heartache as well as the beauty and miracle that lie just beneath the thin veneer of the ordinary, and they describe this in ways that are recognized not only in the mind, but more profoundly in the soul… What a congregation needs is not a strategist to help them form another plan for achieving a desired image of life, but a poet who looks beneath even the desperation to recover the mystery of what it means to be made in God’s image.

It may well be true that the best minds of our generation are still being destroyed by madness, but what is our still-speaking God saying through that curse? And where is God’s light in this present darkness? And where is the holy within our humanity or the marriage of heaven with earth in our generation?

Well… I am going to suggest that one way to explore all of this involves using the counter-cultural Christian commitments of St. Paul. His wisdom and passion for Jesus – his mystical encounter with grace – and the clarity of his poetry and prose are unique in the Bible. Not perfect, but still essential.

• When the Roman Empire was collapsing all around him in 430 of the Common Era, Augustine of Hippo spent time with Paul’s letter to the Romans and began to find a way through the darkness.

• One thousand years later, when John Calvin was trying to articulate a way of making God’s grace and justice real for the 16th century, he, too, turned to wisdom of Paul in Romans.

• And when Karl Barth was searching for both solace and challenge in post WWI Germany – as well as during the rise of Hitler – it was St. Paul’s letter to the church in Rome that was his inspiration.

So, in our own era of ecological disaster and war upon war upon war – in the midst of a season of economic chaos and profound social pain – I can think of no better nor time-tested book of the Bible to consult in our quest to be faithful than Paul’s letter to the church of Rome. And like our Reformation forbearers, I’m going to work through the whole book of Romans – all 16 chapters – each week of this summer. For I affirm what Eugene Peterson has said about Romans:

As we read Paul’s Letter to the Romans we find ourselves immersed in a classic work of spiritual formation. We note the absence of large abstract truths, on the one hand, and individual anecdotes, on the other. What we find, instead, is a working model of what continues to aid in the formation of souls by the power of the Spirit: submission to Scripture, embrace of mystery, metaphorical language and the insistence on community.

And so let me begin with one essential insight from chapter one of Romans: right out of the gate Paul speaks to us of both grace and peace from God as a key component to the counter-cultural community of Christ in any era. “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

This may not seem all that interesting to the casual reader – and clearly Paul is using a traditional form of greeting at the start of his letter – but remember the poet goes below the obvious to what is truly meaningful. And the combination of the words grace and peace are as revolutionary as bebop jazz or Beat poetry.

You see, with two simple words Paul is speaking about a new kind of community – one in which the wisdom of Greek Hellenism is integrated with and embraced by Hebrew justice – all of which is implied in the two words grace and peace.

Grace, literally charis in Greek, speaks of God’s abiding and healing forgiveness amidst human sin and failure. It is a gift that cannot be earned – nor is it deserved – and more often than not it is bewildering to most of us, yes? Think of the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s gospel: Chapter 15 tells the story of a young man who collects his inheritance before his father dies, heads out to the big city for some fast and wild living and then winds up broke and busted.

• After a period of time – filled with muck and slop and failure – the wounded young man realizes that working as a slave for his father would be better than wallowing in the mud with the pigs. So, he goes home hoping not for forgiveness – which he doesn’t deserve – but merely for a place to flop.

• And two things happen, right? His father embraces him – throws a feast – and forgives him NOT because of anything the child has done but rather because that is what a father’s love does. AND the older brother – who has always been loyal and faithful (but also resentful, too) – explodes with anger because the slacker has been shown grace rather than justice. He doesn’t deserve ANYTHING and now he has been given everything!

Most people hate this story – we tend to identify with the older son – and rebel against the promiscuity of the father’s forgiveness. Which is, of course, why Jesus told it: it is just like what he said to the thief beside him on the cross, yes? Today you will be with me in paradise. You don’t deserve it, you can’t earn it but that is the blessed truth of God in God’s fullness. Today’s psalm puts it like this:

Sing praises to the LORD, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name. For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

Grace is at the heart of God’s presence in our lives through Christ – and Paul wants us never to forget this.

Same, too, with God’s peace: literally shalom, a Hebrew concept, is not just the absence of conflict, but true social justice – the right relations between people as well as people and our environment. Peace is about healing and hope, compassion and renewal; like Marcus Borg once said, the social justice of God’s shalom is the outward expression of God’s grace in the world. No wonder Paul insisted upon integrating grace with shalom. Biblical scholar, Paul Achtemeier, writes that at the very start of Paul’s letter to the Romans:

There is a symbolism which ought not to be missed, for Paul’s combination of greetings signals what is also one of his chief concerns later in this letter – a theme throughout his mission as a whole – namely the universal applicability of the gospel. As in this greeting, so in the gospel, Hebrew and Greek (that is gentile) lose their absolute distinction and without either disappearing are combined into a new expression of God’s compassionate and redeeming love.

That’s probably a good place to stop for today: the marriage of grace and peace – charis and shalom – compassion and social justice. Both are essential for those who live according to the Spirit of Christ. Both give shape and form to Jesus in history. And both are necessary for the formation of the soul of a faith community.

Too often Christians try to play it their own way: some favor forgiveness and in inward journey while others emphasize the work of social justice and ache to change the world. Paul tells us to stop – stop dividing the love of God – stop insisting on one way or the other – stop because you are both right. The love of God in Jesus is all about grace and peace – so let those who have ears to hear, hear.