By the Rev. Jon Rieley-Goddard

     Dear friends,

    Unlimited grace, total depravity.

    We Presbyterians hold these ideas in acute, critical balance.

    God is dependable, we are predictable.

    God gives, we try.

    We try, then fail, thinking that if we say that we tried before we failed, that it’s somehow OK.

    We assume that we give God fits, that we try God’s patience. Do we?

    Probably not. At least not in the ways that we assume we are trying to God.

    Unlimited Grace means no limits and no scarcity and no quotas.

    Total depravity means that top-to-bottom, and side-to-side, we live to sin, though we were not born to sin. At some point, each one chooses, and each one chooses the same thing.

    Unlimited grace means that if you are paying attention, you are uneasy.

    Total depravity means that if you are paying attention, you are looking for an angle.

    God gives, we take.

***

    Only God knows where some stuff comes from, like this rhyme:

    If the ocean was whisky and I was a duck,
    I’d swim to the bottom and never come up.

    At first it sounds like a blessing. All the drink you can stand, and then a little more. As they say in Texas, Too much ain’t enough. On second thought, though, you realize the tradeoff – you never come up. Bliss for a moment or two, followed by gasping agony and death.

    Who but the totally depraved would do such a thing?

    What’s your tipple?

***

    If the church were a boat, I’d build a beautiful boat that would float. If it were a matter of throwing energy at a problem, I would draw the plans, buy the boards, and grab a hammer. I’d work each day until I could no longer stand, and in the fullness of time I would be done and the church that I built would bob in the water. Beautiful.

    Strangers would gather, praise on their lips, asking permission to come aboard.

    But the church is not a boat, or even a duck. The church is the church, and throwing all your energy at the church, in hopes of seeing change or growth or improvement, doesn’t yield anything more than desolation.

    At the end of the day, you are tired to the death.

***

    Total depravity clouds the mind and befuddles the senses. We occupy the poles, one then the other. If total effort won’t work in the church, then let us try total passivity. We could call it waiting on the Lord.

    Doesn’t work.

    Waiting on the Lord works. Passivity doesn’t.

    Waiting on the Lord means knowing that God provides. Waiting on the Lord means knowing where to train your eyes and ears and feelers, so you will know when the time comes to act in God’s bounty.

    Waiting on the Lord is good, hard work, done in great joy. Those who wait on the Lord exercise their minds and mouths, with study and prayer, and song.

    Those who wait on the Lord mount in their minds like eagles on the wing, soaring in spirit while God waits, in God’s time, for God’s good purposes.

    At the end of the day, you are tired but happy.

***

    My mentor, a wise and generous man, once said to me that in the church we ministers have subtle ways of telling people that they are not OK.

    Subtle?

    Maybe it’s just me, and the wrinkles that my visage bears, but it sounds like the roar of a lion to me sometimes, the inner voice of You Can’t Do Anything Right, Can You!

    And what is the Lion’s Share? Whatever the lion wants.

    Without God, I lose all and the lion feasts on my bones.

    With God, I live, and the lion lives, and the lion shares.

    Left to my own devices, I would hold a kangaroo court proceeding and find myself guilty, guilty, guilty – of what it doesn’t matter.

    Just plain guilty.

***

    I battle with these inner voices of legalistic decisions, and for my sins God calls me to be a pastor.

    God does have a sense of humor.

    My task is to listen to the inner conversation, and turn down the volume of what I myself say to my brothers and sisters.

    My task is to learn where I stop and you start, and to use my self-awareness to both understand you and to also know that you are different, that the voices in you are different than the voices in me.

    Maybe that’s why a pastor can excel in one setting and crash and burn in another. It takes a community of like hearts and minds to make a church, I believe, and a church has its druthers.

***

    I found myself musing the other day about churches, and I wondered if churches have always been insular and standoffish. I scanned my knowledge of scripture and came up with little. Paul certainly was busy writing letters to churches with conflicts and problems and standoffish ways. The Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years, grumbling the while.

    Maybe the church in the air, the one that Christ built, is a thing of perfect power and faultless beauty.

    The church that Jack built is different – like family, usually in the worst ways, and like-minded and self-content, uneasy about incidentals, and slow to warmth when it comes to strangers who are different.

    Musing more, I looked for the blessing in this picture. I found that I wanted to affirm the way churches are on the ground instead of inviting church members to feel somehow not OK because they were not like the perfect church in the air.

***

    I live on the ground, and I’m happy on the water.

    I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.
And I have been refined by God’s fire; I know the hot coal that touches the unclean lips.

    I know the fear and the excitement of the one who has said, and will say again,

    Here I am; send me.

    My prayer for you is that you, too, know this experience and have made this rash promise. I don’t care what else I am, or you are, because together we are the church, the one on the ground, the one that Jack built after listening to his Lord and Savior, and observing his handiwork and adapting the perfect design for all time to the demands and fears and hopes of some here-and-now.

    OK?

    OK.