Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Theologian Richard Beck considers how the apostle Paul challenged the ancient world’s understanding of gift and grace as something one had to earn and repay:

Over the last two thousand years our definition of grace has flip-flopped and under­gone a 180-­degree reversal. Grace was once merited; today it is unmerited. Back then, grace was deserved, now it is undeserved.

So what happened? How did grace get flipped inside out? Answer: The apostle Paul…. Paul’s­ great accomplishment was starting the revolution of grace….

This was Paul’s ferocious contention that grace was given to ­those who did not deserve or merit the gift…. This view of grace flew in the face of all that was reasonable and sane. Gifts must not be wasted! But ­here was Paul suggesting that the unmerited nature of grace was precisely what made God’s gift so perfect. This was an audacious and unpre­cedented reversal, a complete inversion of the ancient imagination. This paradigm shift concerning our understanding of grace was Paul’s great legacy….

As Paul would provocatively announce, grace was given to us while we were enemies of God…. God had, in sharp contrast to the Roman elite, showered gifts upon the undeserving, ignoring our merit, worth, and desert. And it was precisely this incongruity between gift and recipient that made the gift so gracious and magnanimous. So perfect. That was the revolutionary heart of Paul’s message. And what was perverse and shocking for Paul’s audiences has become definitional for us. The entire modern world has been converted to Paul’s gospel of grace. Every­one has­ adopted Paul’s upside-­down definition of grace…. Grace is grace because we don’t deserve it.

Beck explains how the small churches or ekklesia that Paul founded were able to exist only because of this radically new understanding of grace:

Gathered around the message of grace, Paul’s churches were diverse collections of people from every conceivable walk of life and social strata. Rich and poor, Jew and gentile…. In a world divided by class conflict, religious prejudice, and ethnic animus, Christian communities tore down the wall of hostility that existed between social groups so that the single family of God—­pluralistic, multicultural, and diverse—­could emerge….

Grace, declared Paul, ignores hierarchies of worth. Grace destroys social rankings based upon value. In the eyes of God ­there are no inferior versus superior­ people.

Paul’s preaching about the incongruity of grace was social dynamite, blowing to smithereens every attempt to rank­ human persons on a scale of value and worth. In the hands of Paul, grace became a tool of social leveling, creating capacities for egalitarian and demo­cratic forms of social life….

Since Christ had welcomed the early Christians, unconditionally and irrespective of worth, they ­were called upon to extend that same unconditional welcome to each other. As Paul would ask of them, “Welcome each other, as Christ has welcomed you.” Despite their differences, grace had made them a ­family. No one would be honored or elevated over another. God had loved them all, fully and equally.

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Hello! I have a thing for trees. I am utterly captivated by them. There is something about standing beside a tree that has been growing for somewhere between 200 and 800 years that offers me perspective. About myself and the world that God sustains. The trees of which I am speaking are colossal in stature, towering above my comprehension of how they have come to be. And indeed, my curiosity of how they have developed holds me most spellbound. And how have they come to be what they are? Simply by remaining where they are, receiving the nourishment provided them.  Year after year. Without fanfare. Without striving. Without needing to prove anything. They do this silently. Faithfully. They have slowly become magnificent over the accumulated decades and centuries of time. Standing beside them, I find myself returning to Psalm 8:4: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

I am a vapor. To read those words in the spirit of shame can feel diminishing. But to imagine them in the context of being deeply known and loved brings me, somewhat counterintuitively, a keenly, abiding sense of liberation. To know that I am a vapor is to remember that I am not God—and therefore do not carry the weight of responsibility that God carries. I do not have to work to be wantable. I am able to exhale and imagine Jesus saying, “When you’re anxious, the answer is not, ‘Work harder.’ The answer is, ‘Come closer.’” Because God is God and I am not, I am able to become who he longs for me to become. There is a great sigh of relief in that. And I sense that sigh as I place my hand on a tree like the one you see here. Perhaps we are meant to become more like these trees—not in size or strength, but in our willingness to simply be where we are, rooted in the spaces God has given us, allowing time and faithfulness to shape us. Year after year after year. Becoming who we were created to be. And perhaps this is part of what it means to walk the path of oncoming beauty: trusting that God is at work in us even when we cannot yet see what we are becoming. Warmly, Curt

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