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THE SCIENCE OF GRACE #2
CATCHING GOD ON A GOOD DAY
By anybody’s account it was a bloody bad crime. Robert Lee Willie and Joseph Vaccaro, two young punks who were invariably drunk and drugged up, went on an eight-day spree where a teenager named Faith Hathaway was killed. They raped her, they stabbed her 17 times in the neck and upper chest, and then left her to die out in some woods. It took over a week before search-and-rescue teams found her decomposing body. This bright young girl had just graduated from high school two weeks earlier, and was planning to join the Army and travel abroad for her country, learn a foreign language. But not now.
Following that, the half-stoned killers abducted a young couple from Madisonville. They took turns abusing the girl as they careened through five states, stealing four cars along the way. The girl survived the repeated rapes, but her boyfriend didn’t fare as well. The two criminals tied him to a tree, then stabbed and shot him repeatedly, leaving him for dead. It was a miracle he survived, even though he ended up paralyzed for life from the waist down.
This tragic story is told in the death-row saga, Dead Man Walking, by Catholic nun Helen Prejean. You may remember a film by the same title, where Susan Sarandon won an Oscar in the title role.
Our topic in this extended radio series is grace, and you certainly might be wondering if a story like this one shatters all the boundaries on heaven’s gift of forgiveness. It’s a fair question, but that’s not really our point of consideration today. Instead, there’s an interesting twist when it comes to the sentencing of these two killers. After being apprehended, both man were tried in federal court and each sentenced to three consecutive life terms. However, the state of Louisiana cried foul, insisting that they get a shot at convicting them under their own jurisdiction, and where an electric chair was all fired up, ready and waiting to mete out justice.
But here’s the rub. Robert Lee Willie went to court, was assigned an “indigent lawyer,” and received the expected death sentence. His partner in crime, who participated in full – and who may actually have been the mastermind – went into the same courthouse, at the same time, also with an indigent lawyer. But he happened to be on a different floor than Willie was. Everything else the same, but one man was tried on the second floor, the other killer on the third. And Joseph Vaccaro, instead of going to Death Row, got off with just a life term in prison. One man lived, the other did not. All because the elevator stopped on a different floor.
How often does a person face the judgment bar, or their day in court . . . and their fate really depends on what floor their trial is held on? Or whether the court clerk just happens to assign them to the “hanging judge” instead of the friendly one? Or on whether the jury that particular morning got out of bed in a good mood and had a delicious breakfast and a traffic-free drive to the courtroom?
Yesterday we rejoiced together in the biblical reality that this miracle we call grace is FROM GOD. Oh, true, Louisiana gives out its own form of it by way of an occasional pardon, or a random bit of legislative mercy. You might be lucky enough to catch the governor on a good Monday right after the Saints have won a big game. But when a man or woman faces the “chilling hand of death,” as the gospel song goes, “Where could I go but to the Lord?” Only the Lord can give an undeserving person eternal life.
And the good news is this. Friend, not only does grace come from God . . . it is also WHAT HE IS. God is grace all the time. He doesn’t just put it on occasionally, or adopt it as a temporary creed based on extenuating circumstances. Grace is part of what defines Him.
Yesterday I shared how in my own faith community, a recent issue of our official church journal was completely devoted to the doctrine of grace. And I was so “blown away,” as we say, by the lead article written by Jan Paulsen, the denomination’s president.
“Our God is the God of grace,” he writes. And then this: “Grace is part of His divine CHARACTER. Grace means that God turns His ‘bright happy countenance’ toward us and blesses us with undeserved gifts or favors.”
It’s just like where we say “God is love.” Not “God sometimes loves.” Or “God occasionally is in a loving frame of mind.” No, God IS love. He is love from first to last, from head to toe, in all corners of His realm and in every line of His Magna Carta towards us. You don’t have to worry that you might catch God on an un-loving day; that could never happen because God IS love. Friend, it’s the same with grace. To grant us “unmerited favor,” to forgive us, is, pure and simple, what He is. John 1:14 describes Jesus coming down to this earth in the form of a baby. How?
“The glory of the One and Only, who came down from the Father, FULL OF GRACE and truth.”
I like how the text notes reveal that the corresponding Hebrew terms for this expression, “full of grace,” carry the idea of “unfailing love and faithfulness.” And if you get a good concordance and just scan down through the many, many references to grace, you discover that it is perennially the grace OF God. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The “exceeding” grace. The “overflowing” grace. The Bible writers give us this consistent picture of grace as a constant, reliable, faithful attribute of God.
There’s a colorful line, often quoted, and used now in Internet sermons from all corners of the theological map. Herod has a speech in W. H. Auden’s masterpiece, For the Time Being. And this person who loves to sin, and who revels in his own naughtiness, makes this flippant remark:
“I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.”
And you know, that is not the heart cry of a truly thankful Christian. But it IS true that forgiving, extending grace, showing mercy are what God “likes” to do. More than that, it is simply His divine nature to shower grace upon us. How a humble, penitent, mature Christian should reply to that gift is something we’ll study together in this series. But I’m thankful that grace is one of the pillars in God’s nature.
In the foreword to Hannah Whitall Smith’s autobiography, The Unselfishness of God, a Fred Bauer remarks on the journey of her self-discovery:
“Herein lies the central message of Mrs. Smith’s faith story,” he writes: “the personal revelation that God is not an oppressive, self-centered tyrant, but an UNCONDITIONALLY LOVING AND BENEVOLENT PARENT.”
But all through this fascinating book, we share Hannah’s baby steps toward the goal of lasting happiness. For years she believed that her own behavior, her spiritual achievements, were the main factor in determining whether or not she would “catch God on a good day” and enjoy His approval.
“In vain,” she writes, “I tried to work myself up into what I supposed would be the sort of feelings acceptable to God.”
Then, as she came to understand the Christian message and the plan of salvation, it was impressed upon her that all of us are sinners and that all of us deserve condemnation. Which is certainly true. But that because Christ died for us, we might be saved. True again. But then the deadly trap was sprung, where she came to believe that an angry God had His wrath “propitiated” or turned aside by blood sacrifices, and that a God who didn’t really want to put on a “grace hat” relented in His anger. That a God who didn’t really love us cooled down and learned to sort of “love” us because Jesus had suffered on the cross. That grace was what God was forced to cave in and accept because of Calvary.
And friend, you know, we continue to struggle with this. “Propitiation” is a hard word in the 21st century just as it was in Hannah Smith’s horse-and-buggy days. But the Bible record is plain that grace is in God’s nature from first to last, that the sacrificing of Jesus on the cross was God’s own idea, His own gift, the foundation of His government.
And once Hannah came to this reality, that God WAS a wellspring of grace, that grace defined His heart and soul and very being, she went from that confident joy and penned bestsellers like The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life.
In Love, Acceptance & Forgiveness, Pastor Jerry Cook points out that the church should simply BE love . . . all the time. It should be eternally THAT. No questions asked. No revolving door of mercy and forgiveness; no. Always love. And as he explains the mysteries of what the Bible calls agape love, he says this:
“Just as you can’t buy apples at an auto parts store you can’t get agape anywhere but from God. He is the exclusive source.” A bit later he adds: “I am pleading for an ENVIRONMENT of forgiveness in our homes, where people don’t have to wonder or endure some painful interlude before they can be forgiven.”
Isn’t that good? And friend, once we comprehend the truth that God simply IS grace, we’re going to feel a lot safer showing up at His courtroom.
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