the church still knows...grace

We live in a world that keeps score. Every paycheck is earned, every reputation is built, every place at the table is justified somehow, and somewhere deep in our bones we carry the belief that people get what they deserve, good or bad. Love is offered carefully, forgiveness comes with conditions, and the idea of something simply given, ​with no invoice attached, doesn't quite fit any category the world has taught us to use. 

The church still knows something different. Grace is the thing that makes no sense by that logic, unearned, undeserved, arriving not because you finally became the right kind of person, but because God is who God is. It doesn't wait for you to get your act together. It doesn't negotiate.

Consider the woman at the well. It's the middle of the day, and she comes alone to draw water from a well outside of town. The timing tells you something. Respectable women came in the cool of the morning, together. She comes at noon, alone, and a Jewish man is sitting there who should have nothing to say to her. But Jesus asks her for a drink, and then says something that has never quite left me, and honestly, might be my favorite verse in all of scripture: "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." (John 4:10).

If you knew. Not if you were worthy. Not if you had it together. If you only knew what was being offered, you would have asked, and it would have been given. Grace arrives before she has done a single thing to deserve it, in the middle of her complicated life, at a well in the heat of the day. 

It's worth being clear about what grace is not, though. Grace isn't cheap and it doesn't shrug at harm or wave away the real ways we've wounded each other and ourselves. It isn't a cosmic dismissal of what's broken. Grace is costly; it moves toward the broken thing rather than away from it. But here is the mystery at the center of it: the cost is real, and it is not yours to pay. Freely given doesn't mean lightly given. 

This is what the church keeps practicing, week after week, almost without thinking about it. We pour water over an infant who has done nothing yet, nothing to earn it, nothing to lose it. We set a table and say come as you are rather than come when you're ready. We speak absolution out loud, into the air, to real people carrying real weight, not because they've suffered enough to deserve relief but because that's simply what grace does. The whole rhythm of the church is built around receiving what cannot be deserved. 

The world says, "earn it." The church says, "receive it." What it would mean to actually live inside that, to let it be true not just on Sunday, but in the ordinary middle of a Thursday, that's the question grace keeps leaving open. Not demanding an answer. Just sitting with you at the well, offering water you didn't know you could ask for. 

The church still knows. 

Peace, 
Travis Segar
Pastor for Care and Community

Image: Icon of St. Photina (the Samaritan Woman), Orthodox iconography.
Artist: Nadahnuti ikonopisac
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons