The Ethics of Grace
Romans 6:11-23
26 June 2005
6th Sunday After Pentecost
There was a problem in the early church that we don’t talk about
much. The problem for some of the earliest Christians was that
the Good News was so good that they couldn’t handle it responsibly.
They got the thrilling message that in Christ God forgave all
sin. They got the message that in Christ God was declaring
amnesty and the end of religion. No more trying to win God’s
favor or trying to keep it by saying the proper words and doing all the
right things. The word for this astonishing new reality is grace
– God’s grace giving us what we can’t give ourselves: freedom, total
freedom from fear, from guilt, from the whole dreary, dumb game of
proving ourselves to God or to the world.
That freedom is powerfully good news. Some of the early
Christians took it up and ran with it, and kept running with it until
the good news they were running with had long since crossed a line into
bad news. They took it too far. Starting with the news that
because of grace God has forgiven all that we think or say or do, they
ended up acting as if it doesn’t matter what we think or say or
do. Starting with the principle of personal freedom, they ended
up in a wasteland of personal and communal dysfunction. They thought
themselves mature and enlightened. In fact, they were naïve and a
terrible danger to themselves and to others.
It’s a problem by no means isolated to the first century. We’ve
got new incarnations of it today. We ourselves may be in danger
of becoming unfaithful incarnations of it. Are we not the ones
for whom being Christian is a concept in orbit around our central sense
of personal freedom? Do we not think of ourselves as the more
enlightened ones? Let the fundamentalists be concerned with
particulars of thoughts and behaviors. Let them live under their
religious law. We’re beyond the tyranny of religious law.
We’re progressive. We get grace. We celebrate our freedom.
Which brings us to our text today. Most of what Paul wrote to the
churches was aimed at one side or the other of this issue.
Sometimes he took on Christians who feared freedom, people who kept
clinging to rules and laws as the way to God. But he also took on
those who were so in love with their freedom that keeping in right
relationship with God and with each other had ceased to matter nearly
enough.
So here he is in the sixth chapter of Romans saying, “Should we
continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no
means!” And several verses later, he says it again, “Should we
sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”
The reason is this: what we’re inclined to think of as freedom quite
often turns out to be just another tyranny. A random, rootless,
aimless existence, an existence circumscribed only by one’s own wishes
and wants, is not real freedom.
Joan Baez made something of the same point in a song called “Tumbleweed.” She sang,
I feel like a lonesome tumbleweed
Rollin’ end over end.
Once I pulled all my roots free,
I became a slave to the wind.
The point is, we have to belong to something. Paul speaks of it
here as a choice between slavery to sin or slavery to God [or
righteousness]. The language of slavery worked for Paul’s
audience in a way that it doesn’t for us. Think, instead, of the
idea of belonging. As humans we have to belong – we will always
and invariably belong -- to something or to someone. It may
be that all we belong to is the wind that blows us about. Or it
may be that we belong to our own appetites, enslaved to the desires
that drive us at the most basic level. Or maybe we belong to a
social group that demands and expects a certain conformity of behavior,
of thinking, of possessions. Maybe we belong to our jobs or
to our fantasies of financial freedom. Depending on what we
belong to, belonging can be just another form of bondage. From
that, Paul reminds us, we have been set free. Free to be rooted
and grounded in something more, something that holds us beautifully
while giving us our finest, most authentic freedom to bloom, to bear
fruit, to make a difference in the world.
The question is: if we know we’re free from the law, how can we truly
live that freedom and not be destroyed by it? What’s the
alternative to the old split between, on the one hand, being legalistic
and, on the other hand, being adrift? The alternative is the word
that we started with. The word is grace. Grace means gift,
radical gift. To live believing in grace is to live grounded in
gratitude, radical gratitude. Gracias. Grazie. This
is the source of right living, the ethics of grace.
Gratitude changes how we live. It moves us from the kind of duty
that is just drudgery to the sort of living that is true and right and
responsible and lively. We aren’t used to thinking of
responsibility as a kind of gladness, but in Paul’s theology it
is. Because it has as its source grace and gratitude.
Notice that at the center of all his talk about obedience and slavery
to righteousness Paul has this outburst in verse 17 - “Thanks be
to God!” What would your daily living looks like if that one
sentiment – “Thanks be to God!” - resided at your core?
You wake up on Monday morning. The day looms. There are
deadlines to meet, emails to answer, projects to complete. So
much to do in the 16 or 17 hours you have before you will crawl back
under the covers again. As you stumble out of bed, you can
already feel the anxiety rising in your throat. In those fragile
first moments, your whole day can be made or broken, depending on how
you choose to greet the morning. What if, from your core came
this one little sentence – “Thanks be to God!”
For what? For morning light. Fresh coffee. A good
night’s sleep. A partner to love. A child or a pet or a
spouse or a parent who needs you. A job to do. Clean
water. Fresh air. Forgiveness. Grace. Take your
pick. There’s a lot to be grateful for. What if you started
your day that way – “Thanks be to God!” What if, later in the
day, when some small resentment crept into your heart, or some anxious
thought buzzed at the back of your brain, or some mild annoyance made
you want to speak in harsh tones, what if then you stepped back again,
and from your core came again this one single claim – “Thanks be to
God!” And what if, as you settled down in bed again that night,
with a list of things you didn’t get done, and a headache from all that
you did do, and a pile of clothes on the floor or papers on the desk or
dishes still in the sink, and a sense of the unrelenting nature of
life’s demands, and as you turned out the light you paused for a moment
and from your core came these words – “Thanks be to God!”
“Thanks be to God!” This central affirmation has the power to
change everything – your outlook on the world, your feelings about
yourself, your sense of responsibility towards others. Have you
ever known anyone who was grateful who was at the same time
small-minded or cold-hearted or mean-spirited? It is hard to have
a grateful heart and at the same time live a clenched life.
Gratitude expands a person. Gratitude grounds our living.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who, with Thomas Merton,
helped start a renewal movement in Catholic spirituality, has written
that the spiritual problem that most characterizes our time is
uprootedness, and that the spiritual work we most need to be about is
re-rooting ourselves. He goes on to offer that the way we
do that is through gratitude. “Gratefulness is the great task,
the how of our spiritual work, (he writes) because, rightly understood,
it re-roots us.”(1)
Part of how gratefulness does this is that it bonds us to the giver,
who is God. We find ourselves belonging not to the realm of sin,
and not merely to the wind or just to ourselves, but to the God who
gives all good things, especially grace in Christ. Gratitude for
such boundless grace roots us to God and compels us to live rightly and
responsibly. Gratitude helps us live into our freedom without
being destroyed by it.
A few years ago, a couple of scientists conducted a study entitled the
Research Project on Gratitude and Thanksgiving. Several hundred
people, divided into three different groups, kept daily diaries.
The first group just wrote about the events that occurred during the
day. The second group recorded their unpleasant
experiences. And the third group made daily lists of things for
which they were grateful.
What the scientists discovered was that the people engaged in the daily
gratitude exercises demonstrated higher levels of alertness,
enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy than the others.
They were less likely to experience depression and stress, they
exercised more regularly, and they made more progress toward their
personal goals. And, (most interestingly), they were more likely
to help other people. The researchers observed that “gratitude
encouraged a positive cycle of reciprocal kindness among
people.”(2) And they declared that anyone could increase their
sense of well-being and their contribution to society just by regularly
counting their blessings.
What those scientists learned is something that great philosophers and
great religious thinkers like the Apostle Paul have always taught –
gratitude is foundational to a good life. “Gratitude is not only
the greatest of virtues,” Cicero said, “but the parent of all the
others.”
It is from this sense of gratitude that we find the freedom to gladly
choose responsibility towards others, towards God, towards the good
earth. Not out of dreary obligation, but out of happy
choice. Have you ever had a duty reframed like this for
you? You dread doing what you feel you have to do, you feel
burdened by the demands that are mounting up, you grow resentful of the
people around you who seem to need so much from you. And then one
day, you suddenly wake up to the fact that you actually have a
choice. You could walk away if you wanted. Uproot yourself
from this life. Shirk off the responsibilities that have piled up
and step into a completely free existence. As you contemplate the
possibilities, you are suddenly flooded with waves of feeling – love
for those children, that spouse, those pets, those coworkers, who all
ask for so much; gratitude for the givenness of it all – your job, your
family, your home, your life. When you realize you have the
freedom to choose, you may be surprised to find yourself choosing it
all again. It is what Paul calls being “obedient from the
heart.” Having realized we have all the freedom in the world, we
are, in gratitude, compelled to choose love, to act wisely, to live
responsibly.
In the beginning, we were created good and we were created free.
But we didn’t trust it, and we didn’t trust God, and we turned away,
and we found ourselves in bondage to our addictions, our obsessions,
our sickness, our sin, our death. Then God sent Christ and set us free
again. And this time, our freedom is the freedom of belonging –
we belong to the realm of grace, we belong to God, we belong to each
other. All our old fears have no power over us. The dread
and the anxiety that threaten to suck us dry have no claim on our
lives. We are free from all that old burden, all that dreadful
duty and numbing obligation.
The only reason to do anything now is gratitude. We choose to
love our neighbors. We choose to care for the earth. We
choose to play with children and to honor the elderly. We choose to
tend to creatures great and small. We choose to provide for the
poor and to extend hospitality to the stranger. We choose to work
for peace. We choose to live ethically and responsibly. We
choose to give our offerings and say our prayers. And we don’t do
any of it out of cheerless compulsion. We do it because at the
core of who we are is the realization that everything is gift and that
our whole response must be gratitude and that gratitude shows itself in
right living.
Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
(1) http://www.gratefulness.org
(2) http://www.acfnewsource.org/religion/gratitude_theory.html. McCullough and Emmons.
