Now when you take all this wild, unpredictable and unimaginable love and acceptance that God bestows on us way by His grace and turn it out towards others … that’s when the fun really begins.
You can care for someone who doesn’t care for you. That’s Grace turned Outward.
Who can understand God’s Grace? Who can fathom its depth? Who can stretch as far as it can? Who can know what it is going to do? Who can plan on it showing up?
On one hand, there is cause and effect; sowing and reaping; an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; truth and consequences; every action and its reaction; even karma. We understand these principles; they seem to be built into the framework of the universe. We can count on them working. And then along comes Grace and cancels them all. What?
We’ve been forgiven, so we forgive.
We’ve been loved, so we love.
We’ve been freely accepted, so we accept others freely.
We’ve been given mercy, so we are merciful.
We have escaped judgment, so we do not judge.
We’ve been welcomed in, so we welcome all.
The door was opened for us, so we left it open to others.
We are different people from what we were;
We are Grace Turned Outward.
My wife pointed out to me yesterday that we don’t always forgive; we don’t always love; we don’t always accept others freely; we aren’t always merciful; we often judge; we are not always welcoming; and we sometimes close the door behind us because we don’t want to let just anybody in. I realized what I had created in this list was the ideal — the perfect. I should have mentioned that.
Just like Grace Turned Outward, all God’s gifts change us permanently. They not only affect something in us, they affect the way we see and treat others around us. Grace doesn’t just stop with my receiving it; it goes on in the way I give it out. The way we are treated will affect the way we treat others.
This is an important part of receiving from God; it changes us. You can’t receive God’s grace without giving it out to others. You can’t receive what you don’t deserve and then go out and make everyone else pay.
So I’ve learned about two things this week that it would be best for me to avoid writing about: racism, and either one of the candidates during an election year. I don’t know enough about either to act like an expert. So my apologies if I offended anyone. As much as I would like to think of myself as a social commentator, I am not. And I especially apologize for coming off like I know what I’m talking about when I don’t.
There is a mean-spiritedness prevalent in our society today and we need to counter it as Christians in the marketplace. Donald Trump’s success is not because of Donald Trump, it’s because his message and bullish attitude has connected with a large number of people who are not happy with the way things are and feel powerless to do anything about it. That now-famous line from the movie Network seems to capture a widespread sentiment among many people who feel threatened by terrorism, immigration and the huge cultural changes that are shifting away from white control to a multicultural, multiracial reality: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Well, welcome to the new world. You can throw your window open, stick your neck out and yell that to your heart’s content, but it’s not going to change anything. The forces of change are already in motion. We’re not going to go back to a simpler time — to the way things used to be. We need to adjust to a changing world, and reflect a different attitude from the prevailing “kick some butt” approach.
Everyone’s welcome. This is another aspect about the Gospel of Welcome we want to focus on today. Everyone’s welcome. And we mean everyone. Every color, every race, every religion and none, every sexual preference (LGBT and you can add XYZ if you want to — they’re welcome, too) every nationality, every disability — everyone, including any category of humanity I’ve left out. Everyone’s welcome.
I commission you all today as ambassadors of the Gospel of Welcome. What that means is that you are representatives of a message of good news about God. This is important because most people have an impression of God as bringing bad news to us all in the form of judgment. This is unfortunate because God has been improperly represented for quite some time. But that is precisely why you are so important. You are changing that.
Marti pointed out that I may have been a little too hard on Chandler in my Catch last Friday, especially in light of so many of you who have followed his story and loved him and cared about him from a distance. It is Marti and I, not Chandler, who should be owning our failures. It’s not that Chandler was being good and now he’s being bad; it’s that we all have something to learn here and we have only just begun.
As much as I would like to convey the impression that everything is just dandy with our son, Chandler, and that he returned home an entirely different person with none of the former addictions or behaviors anywhere in sight, I cannot. And if I could, some of you with experience in these matters would probably have reason to question our supposed full disclosure. But it’s been hard, because our story had such a happy ending. I’m beginning to realize that was just one chapter of our story, and most of it has yet to be written.
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John Fischer The Catch 