Today in Sunday Adult Discussion we started the topic "What's So Amazing About Grace", based on the We are listening to an audiobook of "What's So Amazing About Grace" by Philip Yancey.
"Mention the word "grace" and what immediately comes to mind for most of us is a bagpipe wailing the solemn notes of "Amazing Grace."
In 1987, an IRA bomb buried Gordon Wilson and his twenty-year-old daughter beneath five feet of rubble. Gordon alone survived. And forgave. He said of the bombers, "I have lost my daughter, but I bear no grudge. . . . I shall pray, tonight and every night, that God will forgive them."
His words caught the media’s ear--and out of one man’s grief, the world got a glimpse of grace.
Grace is the church’s great distinctive. It’s the one thing the world cannot duplicate, and the one thing it craves above all else--for only grace can bring hope and transformation to a jaded world.
This grace is the true message of Jesus. All faiths have virtues and creeds and justice and truth, but Jesus speaks merely of receiving the love that God has for us. Accepting it, not earning it or making ourselves worthy of it. And frankly, accepting something we have not earned or are not worthy of is not an easy thing for most of us.
In truth, grace is both utterly simple and utterly confounding. Little by little, Yancey guides us into a clearer understanding of grace by using stories, in much the same way Jesus did. We read stories of both grace and ungrace at work in people's lives. Sadly, it is stories of ungrace that are more prevalent today, the current culture wars painful acknowledgments of ungrace in our lives as Christians in this country. Yancey helps us understand that ungrace is that state of being in which self-righteousness and pride are a result of thinking that we have somehow earned God's approval and may now stand in judgment in his behalf.
In What’s So Amazing About Grace? award-winning author Philip Yancey explores grace at street level. If grace is God’s love for the undeserving, he asks, then what does it look like in action? And if Christians are its sole dispensers, then how are we doing at lavishing grace on a world that knows far more of cruelty and unforgiveness than it does of mercy?
Yancey sets grace in the midst of life’s stark images, tests its mettle against horrific "ungrace." Can grace survive in the midst of such atrocities as the Nazi holocaust? Can it triumph over the brutality of the Ku Klux Klan? Should any grace at all be shown to the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and cannibalized seventeen young men?
Grace does not excuse sin, says Yancey, but it treasures the sinner. True grace is shocking, scandalous. It shakes our conventions with its insistence on getting close to sinners and touching them with mercy and hope. It forgives the unfaithful spouse, the racist, the child abuser. It loves today’s AIDS-ridden addict as much as the tax collector of Jesus’ day.
In his most personal and provocative book ever, Yancey offers compelling, true portraits of grace’s life-changing power. He searches for its presence in his own life and in the church. He asks, How can Christians contend graciously with moral issues that threaten all they hold dear?
And he challenges us to become living answers to a world that desperately wants to know, What’s So Amazing About Grace? "
Hoping that you will find this discussion relevant to your journey, we invite you to join us next Sunday at 9:15ish in the Nursery Room at ASLC.
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“What’s So Amazing About Grace?” – ASLC Adult Discussion Group
The ASLC Adult Discussion Group meets Sunday mornings about 9:15ish. We have just started a discussion of "What's So Amazing About Grace?" and are listening to an audiobook of "What's So Amazing About Grace" by Philip Yancey*.
What comes to mind when you hear the word “Grace”? For such a short word it is very difficult to define exactly what it is and what it is not. A counselor summed up his career this way: “Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live our God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people… We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that’s not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of race has not penetrated the level of our emotions.”
Does this sound interesting to you? Next Sunday we will continue to explore What Grace is and isn’t. For example, when someone says “When I say the words ‘evangelical Christian’ what comes to mind?” H.L. Mencken described a Puritan as a person with a haunting fear that someone somewhere is happy; today many people would apply the same caricature to evangelicals or fundamentalists. Where does this reputation of uptight joylessness come from? Somehow throughout history the church has managed to gain a reputation for its ungrace.
Do you find any of these statements to be disturbing? One reason that I find grace to be uncomfortable to discuss is that it is given free of charge to people who do not deserve it, while I have this ingrained “Puritan work ethic” that hard work and “virtue” should be rewarded, and the undeserving should get only what they deserve. Those of us who are struggling with the concept of grace need to engage those with differing views. If you suspect that your views on grace may be unorthodox, cynical, or even heretical, then we need you to insure that these discussions are lively!
In future weeks we will be discussing:
Grace in the Bible
Forgiveness: An Unnatural Act
Why Forgive?
Getting Even
Oddballs, Jesus and Me
Loophole
Etc.
Even if you are not interested in joining our discussions, please take a look at the distribution of this note. I copied the e-mail addresses from the ASLC 2007 Directory, and many of those e-mail addresses are either erroneous or missing – e.g. our e-mail address, dwdudich@comcast.net, is not listed. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in participating, please forward this e-mail to them, with a cc to me so that I might include them in future e-mails. And if they don’t have e-mail, please phone them to encourage them to participate.
Dave Dudich
* If you would like a dead wood copy of “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” to read, it is available for free from the Howard County Library, and in paperback from Amazon.com for $10.19
Very nice! Lot’s of interesting discussions on Grace!
A few thoughts…
There are some Christians that do not really understand, or in fact have much of an interest in, Grace. Their mindset is more in terms of what one has to do to be a “good” Christian. And in terms of how we treat others, for some supposed Christians, Grace is non-existent (e.g. supremist groups).
And on the other side of the coin… although some Christian traditions emphasize grace more than others, I still don’t believe Christians have the lock on grace. There are many people in religions that, in spite of the fact that their non-Christian traditions may not really talk about or emphasize Grace, the mature and healthy person of any religion I believe will naturally at some point stumble upon Grace.
So maybe Grace is there somewhere IN all of us and ACCESSIBLE TO all of us, in whatever understanding of God we have… it can be found, it can be seen, it can be experienced.
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