The Grace Guy

I was asked to give a last-minute presentation at a regional denominational gathering last weekend. The guest speaker was ill, so a bunch of pastors were tapped to plug the gaps. 2025 has been designated as the 500^th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement so this was a focus throughout the weekend. How we mark these things is, of course, at least somewhat arbitrary. The people who make such decisions have designated the beginnings of our branch of the Christian tree as the date of the first believer’s baptism in Zurich in 1525. But of course, threads of Anabaptist thought run throughout Christian history. And to whatever extent “Anabaptism” can be spoken of as a monolithic movement, the 2025 version looks very different than whatever was bubbling up in 1525. History is poorly behaved and stubbornly resists our desire for clean lines and unambiguous markers. Thus, has it ever been, I suppose.

At any rate, at our little regional 500^th birthday party, I was given the topic of reconciliation. I probably took things in a different direction than the organizers had expected. I chose to focus less on reconciling in the relational sense and more on reconciling an ideal to reality. Anabaptists have always been idealists (sometimes in wild and misguided directions, it must be said; and sometimes in inspiring and faithful directions). We’ve at times been pleased to imagine ourselves as the most Jesus-y of Jesus’ followers. We’re the ones who take Jesus seriously. We’re the ones that try to follow his most demanding teachings around love of enemy and simplicity and justice and costly discipleship. We’re the ones who believe that Jesus didn’t come to produce a theology textbook full of abstract doctrines but a way of life.

What we haven’t always been great at is grace. I heard this a few times around tables last weekend. We Mennonites have a lousy (or nonexistent) theology of grace. We’re good at telling people that Jesus expects better from them. Like our Protestant brothers and sisters, we’re pretty good at dividing and separating over differing interpretations of Scripture. We’re good at weaponizing implicit and explicit purity tests, whether in the personal holiness or social justice spheres, depending on the flavour of Anabaptism in question. We’re good at sort of giving the impression that Christianity is a joyless exercise in denying ourselves to make Jesus happy. Grace? Well, yeah, we sort of know it’s a thing. But we’re suspicious of it. We don’t want people getting any funny ideas and slacking off.

Well, as it happens, I rarely tire of preaching grace. And so, I talked about it this weekend. I urged us to try to reconcile the ideals of Jesus with the reality of the mess of our lives, the church, and the world. I talked about how I have encountered God in countless situations where I tried to accept the real instead of demanding that it live up to my ideals. Whether in the jail (where the real is light years from the ideal) or in ecumenical conversations and projects or in making space for people in church whose faith and understanding of Jesus wouldn’t pass many Anabaptist theology tests, or even in my own (many and varied) failures, I have consistently discovered Jesus in spaces and situations where reality seems to be underperforming. And where the sledgehammer of the ideal would have been wildly counterproductive.

So, yes, I spoke about grace. I urged us to lean more into what unites us than what divides us in the next 500 years of the story, to care less about brand fortification than about the ways in which Christ is moving in and through his whole church. I urged us to embrace a more honest theological anthropology that acknowledges that we can never follow Jesus’ teachings well enough, that we are all sinners and will remain so. I said that that the gospel is not that Jesus gave us a bunch of awesome teachings that we are tasked with implementing in a sufficiently competent manner to change the world. Rather, the gospel is that God, in Christ, gives his life for all. That God does for us what we cannot and could never do for ourselves.

Later, I was talking with a colleague who mentioned that he was at a table where someone from my church happened to be present. This person said something to the effect of, “Oh yeah, he’s always going on about grace.” I felt a tiny twinge of… I don’t know, something. Is that what I am? The “grace guy?” The “you know, Jesus’ teachings are pretty hard, so just don’t worry about it” guy? I shuddered as I thought about my 22-year-old self reading and enthusiastically nodding along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer railing against the “cheap grace” that permeated the wartime German church. “God help me if I am just the latest compromiser hawking cheap grace,” I thought on my drive home Sunday.

As always, the jail on Monday is the theological corrective for Sunday’s lingering anxieties and obsessions. I spent the first part of my day dredging the depths of what human beings inflict and endure. One man told me of seven foster families between ages 1-11, of sexual and physical abuse, of running away constantly, of riding the bus alone as a five-year-old looking for the mother who couldn’t care for him, of finding her and then starting again somewhere else. “I really hoped the last family would adopt me,” he said. But they didn’t. And he was on the street as a pre-teen. I heard of a father whose young adult kids were all homeless and on fentanyl. Of a pregnant teenager having a foot amputated due to frostbite. Of violence at every turn. How can this world be so utterly awful and in so many ways? I prayed “Christ have mercy” more times than I could count.

Then it came time for the chapel services. I had printed off a bunch of copies of a piece of art to share with the guys (see above). It’s an attempt to combine two stories, the story of the lost son and the thief on the cross. It’s a heartsick father waiting at the gate, ready to embrace a son who had failed in more ways than he could probably enumerate, who was drowning in shame and self-loathing. It’s the crucified Christ welcoming a guilty sinner who could muster little more than a raspy “remember me” as he was splayed out on a Roman cross. We pondered this image for quite a while. We read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion from Luke 23 and marvelled at the words, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” Because we so often don’t, right? And in such wildly destructive ways. Yet Christ does, indeed, have mercy.

Whatever this grace is, it’s not cheap. And I’ll keep on preaching it. Not as an alternative to following the way of Jesus, but as the vital context within which to locate our attempts.

I told the guys around the circle yesterday to put the painting on the walls of their cells for the rest of Lent or the rest of their time in prison. I told them that this is how God treats them, how God treats each one of us. A few of them asked if they could take one or two more copies with them. I gave out as many as I had. But I saved one for myself.

Image source.