United in Our Need for Grace
Friday, August 15, 2025
Brian McLaren reflects on Paul’s challenging task of implementing Jesus’ inclusive message in a growing spiritual community:
Paul wasn’t trying to define or explain the gospel at all; rather, he was trying to clean up a mess that Jesus had created through his gospel. By mess I mean Jesus had quite effectively ruined the tidy conventional categories of his religious community. In his mind, some prostitutes and tax collectors were closer to God than some Pharisees and priests—and the greatest faith Jesus could find in all Israel was found in the heart of a political enemy who belonged to another religion (Matthew 8:10). Similarly, Jesus broke the rules about clean and unclean, and he kept raising wild and revolutionary new proposals—about the Sabbath, about what’s kosher…. How do you work out a deep shift like this in a community of faithful people who have always defined themselves in exclusive ways?
McLaren highlights Paul’s Letter to the Romans as an example of Paul’s unifying message:
Romans aimed to address a more immediate, practical question in the early Christian movement…: How could Jews and gentiles in all their untamed diversity come and remain together as peers in the kingdom of God without having first- and second-class Christians?…
Paul, like Jesus, is not a modern Western linear-argument type of guy. He’s Middle Eastern. He thinks in circles and speaks in parables. Paul is … the kind [of poet] who understands the power of imagination and has a way with words. His letter (contrary to dominant readings) is no more of a well-reasoned, linear, logical, analytical argument than Jesus’s sermons were. And that’s not a bad thing….
What we have is not a premeditated work of scholarly theology, edited and reedited, complete with footnotes. Rather, Paul is dictating a letter to some people he loves on a subject he loves, expressing the honest, unedited, natural flow of his thoughts and feelings…. If we read Romans keeping these realities in mind, I think we will become more sensitive than ever to the wonderful dance of the Spirit of God and the mind of a man in the context of a community in crisis. Together, the Holy Spirit and Paul make move after move toward the single goal of justifying the gospel as good news for gentiles and Jews alike….
Paul asserts that God doesn’t play favorites. All human beings are on the same level, whatever their religious background. All violate their own conscience, all fall short of God’s glory, all break God’s laws. None can claim an inside track with God just because they have mastered a body of religious knowledge, avoided a list of proscribed behaviors, or identified themselves with a certain label. In this way, Paul renders every mouth silent and everyone accountable to God (Romans 3:19). There is no us versus them, no elite insiders and excluded outsiders. There’s just all of us—Jews and gentiles—and we’re all … united in our need of grace.
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“We have all our beliefs, but we don’t want our beliefs.
God of peace, we want You.”
– Four Word Letter (pt.2) by mewithoutYou
mewithoutYou has been in my top 3 bands for most of my life. I am hard-pressed to say it, but I think they might be my favorite band of all time.
Sonically, they are all over the place. There are elements of post-punk, but also orchestral pieces with ranting poetry over them. Lyrically, they are mystical and experiential, and I love it.
2.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
– Earnest Hemingway, American Author
Yes, I have written five books now.
However, I rarely consider myself a writer or author.
Why?
Call it imposter syndrome? I have no idea.
That said, there is serious truth to this idea that to write is a matter of bleeding. My first attempts at writing lacked my voice. They were my attempts to teach something about life, but it was an attempt to do that without bleeding, without sharing myself, without being vulnerable.
However, the best writers are the ones who are ruthlessly honest about their own experience of life. Yes, they may have an impressive vocabulary, but the real je ne sais quoi is the life they pour out of their veins and onto the piece of paper in front of them.
Ironically, writing is the easiest and most challenging thing.
3.
The spiritual journey is like an archaeological dig through various stages of our lives, from where we are back through the midlife crisis, adult life, adolescence, puberty, early childhood, infancy. What happens if we allow that archaeological dig to continue? We feel that we are getting worse. But we are really not getting worse; we are just finding out how bad off we always were. That is an enormous grace.”
– Fr. Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
An archaeological dig, huh?
I like that.
For Keating, healthy spirituality is a matter of Divine Reparenting. It is allowing God to heal the life wounds we inherited at different times throughout our lives.
Of course, it is all well and good to think that the Christian life is about service to others and living a moral life, but what if we are doing those things out of a distorted need to prove something? What if wounds and trauma taint our motivations for living out the Christ-life?
It is for this reason that many of us are terrified of doing legitimate work in the spiritual life. Understandably, we might be averse to doing an “archaeological dig” back through different seasons of our lives to figure out and heal what needs healing.
4.
“Follow your dreams. Unless they are stupid.”
This one just made me chuckle.
I just had to pass it forward to you.
5.
“You have only one master now…But with this ‘yes’ to God belongs just as clear a ‘no.’ Your ‘yes’ to God requires your ‘no’ to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor, to all ungodliness, and to all mockery of what is holy. Your ‘yes’ to God requires a ‘no’ to everything that tries to interfere with your serving God alone, even if that is your job, your possessions, your home, or your honour in the world.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran Pastor and Martyr
Bonhoeffer was the first Christian theologian I ever read.
I can distinctly remember the summer after graduating college, sitting in the backyard by the lagoon with a Heineken in one hand and The Cost of Discipleship in the other.
And so, it is fair to say that Bonhoeffer’s approach to ethics is firmly set within me. With Bonhoeffer, there is no middle ground between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to anything else. No nation, political party, figure, or ideology can or should ever stand equal to that of Christ. If anything, loyalty to Christ demands an inevitable disruption of all other loyalties and ultimately a dismissal of them.
Bonhoeffer teaches us that anything that rivals our loyalty to Christ is an idol that deserves to be smashed.
In our day and age, some people have conflated loyalty to the nation, political party, figure, and/or ideology with being the same thing as being loyal to Christ, which is an insidious and misleading heresy.
In the words of Bonhoeffer, our “yes” to God demands a solid “no” to everything else.
