A Great Grace Awakening~ A good friend of mine, William Jones shared some grace words from Bono on FB this morning. I was reminded of some words on grace by Cathleen Falsani, an award-winning religion journalist and the Faith & Values columnist for the Orange County Register in Southern California: “Rather than a Third Great Awakening I believe we are standing in the threshold of a Great Grace Awakening. It’s a move of the Holy Spirit drawing people away from legalistic and fear-based beliefs to a place some of us would call grace. On the surface, it may seem to fly in the face of some traditional Judeo-Christian ethics. But it is aligned with a broader, more universal ethic that seems to be developing around genuine Christian love and grace — the very essence of Jesus’ ministry and what makes it so revolutionary — as guiding principles. Grace is the reason for the incarnation. God became human and walked in our sandals because God knows us and wants us to be known. Grace says that there is nothing we could ever do that would make God love us less. And grace tells us that there’s nothing we could ever do that would make God love us more. You are loved simply because you are and for all of who you are. Full stop. Grace is more than mere equality. Grace is a gift available to all of us. We can’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. But we get it anyway. Abundantly. Audaciously. Without caveat or qualification. That doesn’t make much sense to our human understanding of justice. It doesn’t seem fair. It isn’t fair. And that’s precisely the point of grace. Sometimes, by not just “accepting” but by loving without limits, we extend grace to one another. We give each other the space to be known, valued, and cherished for the beautiful and wondrously made people we inherently are. When asked, “What is grace?” I often answer this way: Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. And grace is getting what you absolutely don’t deserve. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his baccalaureate address at Wesleyan University in 1964, famously declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Amen, we say. May it be so. Might I humbly suggest that the long arc of history surely does bend toward justice and, perhaps, beyond it — toward Grace." Yes to a Great Grace Awakening inside us, in our circles of love and care, in our world.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 14:14:01 +0000
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