Grace not Works//Free not Cheap

Grace not works. It’s a catchy slogan, ripe for misinterpretation, ripe for antinomianism, ripe for us to question why we read Ephesians 2:1-10 during Lent and not during Easter. It sounds so much like Luther… and, strangely, I think most people stop listening to Ephesians and Luther at about the same point in the conversation (i.e. when they complicate the slogan “grace not works” with discussions of works). If we just stopped reading at verse 9, it would make life a lot easier. If we stopped reading at verse 9, we only have half of the story, half of what it means that this is Good News, failing to trace what it means to be marked with Christ. Dear friends, we are invited into something much more complex and something much more radical than a simple slogan.

            We read pithy sayings – Christian and otherwise – on bumper stickers all the time. When driving behind cars whose back ends are covered by pithy slogans, we are programmed to create a narrative for that person, who they are, how they vote, what they believe. Our silent judgment or affirmation from their rear view mirror suggests that, based on a few pithy slogans, we can determine a person’s ideology. It sounds pretty primitive (I say as a person who is guilty of nearly tailgaiting people in order to read their bumper stickers). How often does anything we believe in, least of all our faith, fit into a three-word phrase? It doesn’t seem like it happens very often, because under those three-word phrases are larger narratives, constructed over decades, of who and how we are in the world. The little slogan “grace not works,” while it can say a lot about a person, does not tell the whole story. Yet we are conditioned to write people’s stories before they have a chance to speak, to interrupt and tell our own stories before we have listened, to categorize a person quickly and efficiently so we can tell whether they are “us” or “them.” Whether it’s their faith, political affiliation, their sexuality, their socioeconomic status, their occupation, we attempt to carve out our own existence by making little niches for other people. It would be great if they fit into those neat little boxes we have created for them, but those pesky boogers have a way of surprising us and not fitting in the slots where we have placed them.

            Given our propensity to judge others on a pithy little slogan or to categorize them based on one or two of the things that might describe them, “grace not works” becomes more and more attractive. It becomes attractive when we realize that we have judged a person wrongly, when we realize we have sold them short. “Grace not works” is all well and good, until we get to verse 10: “For we are what God has made us, created in Jesus Christ for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” WHAT?!?

            For all of this talk about “grace not works,” verse 10 complicates the matter. If we aren’t saved by works (v.9), what is the point of verse 10? If the cross has set us free from sin, death and even the devil, what need of there is works? Here, Luther is of some help (though there is an equal tendency to quit reading Luther after he speaks about justification and forget altogether what Luther has to say about works and their role in the Christian life): while Luther, again and again, repeats that we are saved by “grace not works,” the result of this salvation is that “a person does not live for him or herself alone in this mortal body to work for it alone, but he or she lives also for all people on earth; rather, he or she lives only for others and not for him or herself. To this end he or she brings his or her body into subjection that he or she may the more sincerely and freely serve others” (“Christian Liberty” (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957), 26).

            In baptism, we become extensions of Christ in the world, but how rarely do we live into this reality! In Christ, we are free, but how often do we use that freedom to bind others who don’t believe or think like us? How often do we decide that “grace not works” must be how and who we are in this world but forget to extend that same grace to the world around us? How often, even if we confess this grace, do we live in denial of it by living more fully into the reality that we are bound to our sin than the reality that we have been freed from it? How often do we refuse to serve our neighbors because we are busy dealing with our own stuff?

            We live, following the ways of this world and the ruler of the power of the air, in the kingdom in which the reality of our sin tells a greater truth than the reality of freedom in Christ. Whatever we spend our time worrying about, thinking about, obsessing about, even praying about, we frequently make these into our gods, and these – truly – are gods made of air. They save us from nothing, but they bring us worry in spades. They curve us in on ourselves, unable to see anything or anyone besides ourselves and our needs. Consequently, we forget about our neighbors. We forget that Christ has set us free in order that we might serve our neighbors out of freedom rather than fear. We forget that Christ has made us brave in a scary world. We forget that Christ has called us to unbind those who are bound, to feed those who are hungry, to give water to those who thirst, and to be Christ for that person.

            Good works are our way of life, not because they save us, but because we have been saved. They are our way of life because we live as reflections, however imperfect, of Christ. Ephesians 2 is a reminder that being in Christ draws us into a whole different orientation to life, a whole different way of living. This is the stuff of repentance, which is less of saying “I’m sorry” and more of an invitation to change one’s mind about the world and how it works. Repentance is saying yes to the invitation to live in God’s upside-down kingdom, in which the hungry are feed, the oppressed lifted up, the prisoner set free, and the kingdom in which we realize that this all comes as a gift.

            It comes as a gift, with no strings attached. How can there be no strings if works follow after the gift? I think here is where our “grace not works” slogan gets us into trouble. It would be so much easier if the gift were cheap – so that we could earn it by works – or costly – so that we wouldn’t think that “free” meant “cheap.” “Grace not works” reduces the gift to something understandable, something memorable, something that is easy to contain. But this is not the gift we have received. The gift we have received is a knock-the-wind-out-of-you, laugh-until-you-think-you’re-gonna-bust and cry-because-you-never-thought-it-was-possible sort of gift. We cheapen this gift, making it ineffective, making it the sort of thing that is simply assumed, something that doesn’t really change our lives, something that we can pull out when convenient and use when necessary. I’m not so sure faith works like that. I think it works a little more like someone who has a wake-up call, who receives a new lease on life, who finds love when he or she was least expecting it. There are few things that happen in our lives that make us see everything in a new light; there are few things that remind us that this gift – that these promises – is actually true. And so we pull out our little “grace not works” slogan, trying to divorce it from its narrative.

            But “grace not works” tells a story. It’s a tragedy, a love story, a comedy, a story in which the prodigals come home to parents with open arms. It’s a story that is too good to be true, that refuses to be collapsed into a pithy saying because what it says to and about us is a narrative that has been spun over millennia, told by countless people, for which people have laid down their lives to preserve. This is the story that saves us from ourselves and our self-obsession. This is the story of a God who loved creation so much that God sent the son into the world so that it would not perish but have life. This life, this way, is the way of freedom. This freedom, however, is not only a freedom from, but a freedom for. You have been made free for the sake of the world. You have been made free for the sake of your neighbors. You have been made free so that you can live into God’s promise of a life so abundant no amount of pithy slogans or bumperstickers can contain it. You have been made free that the world might be set free. Welcome to the upside-down kingdom, where the line between “outsider” and “insider” blurs in the love through which Christ draws us to himself and through which we are drawn to our neighbors as Christ’s reflection in the world.