Hello, I'm Philip Yancey.
I'd like to invite you to join me on a journey, a journey that has the potential to change
your life.
As an author, I work with words every day, and I've come to believe that one of the most
beautiful words in our language and one of the most powerful Christian concepts is grace.
Will you join me in this journey to define, to understand, and to practice this amazing
Sometimes.
If someone's coordinated, smooth, they're graceful, I guess.
How about a disgrace?
Does that count?
I don't know.
Well, amazing grace maybe, the hymn.
You forgive somebody when you do blame him.
In this series of ten programs, we'll explore the meaning of grace, how it touches us, inspires
us, confounds us.
You'll hear the stories of grace from people who've experienced it, wrestled with it, and
work every day to make it manifest in their own lives.
It is like a Christmas present that you didn't work to get.
Grace is the guarantee that God loves me in spite of everything.
The unbelievable and yet true news that you're accepted though you're unacceptable.
I think generally the nature of grace is that it's surprising.
Grace is a desire for another person's welfare regardless of whether that person has earned
it.
It's fair for everyone to give, you know, and yeah, there might be a cost for us to
give it, but for the receiver, it's a very wonderful thing.
I don't think that anyone can ever be reassured enough about the power of God's grace and
God's ability to change our lives.
Our stories of grace are amazing in their own right.
A modern day prodigal's homecoming, forgiving the unforgivable, healing the wounds of racism,
extending grace to those with whom we disagree, or to our brothers and sisters in Christ,
and also to ourselves.
What is so amazing about grace?
In this series of ten video and discussion sessions, we'll find out together.
Grace is
what you give when you're being your best self.
On your best day when your hair's right and your attitude's right and your heart's right,
but something bad happens and you're still able to dig down deep and find that golden
part of you that somebody needed.
Hello, I'm Philip Yancy, and I'm going to be your host on what I hope is an enriching
journey toward grace.
I wrote a book called What's So Amazing About Grace, and now that I look back, I see that
I underestimated just how amazing grace can be.
I've since heard from thousands of readers who have responded with their own stories
of grace.
I'm convinced it's the most beautiful word and concept in the English language, and I'm
also convinced that the future of the Church depends on how well we master this notion
of grace.
I'm especially pleased that you're studying grace in a group setting.
A hermit on a desert island wouldn't have much opportunity to practice grace.
It applies to relationships, to a brother and a sister, a broken family, a feud between
neighbors, a prodigal son or daughter, a dispute between nations, and therefore, a group setting
is the very best place to study grace.
I hope you feel free over the next weeks to express yourself openly and honestly, to raise
some of the questions you have to discuss what puzzles you and maybe even angers you.
Think of your group as a training ground for grace.
You can learn some principles here in this group that could well transform your life.
In these video introductions, we'll give you some examples, some opinions, and some
provocative stories to get your discussion started.
I found this remarkable thing called grace is often revealed better in stories than through
definition and lectures, real examples from real people.
In the next ten weeks, you're going to meet some remarkable storytellers of grace.
They'll bring their own insights, experiences, and revelations to our discussion sessions.
As we begin our study together, I'd like briefly to introduce you to six of them.
You'll hear a mother's story of a modern prodigal, a wayward daughter who tests a family's ability
to give their compassion, understanding, and grace.
It's been a learned experience in the tough love.
I don't think that that's a good example of a Christian parent to be showing their children
is that, you know, you're unworthy of my time or my love or, you know, unless you're perfect,
I don't want you in my life.
You know, no one's perfect.
We'll visit with Dr. Louis Smedes, a distinguished theologian who's literally written the book,
in fact several books, on the subject of forgiveness.
There are two ways of dealing with being a victim.
One is revenge and the other is forgiveness.
Revenge doesn't work.
It's the sorriest loser's game in town.
It doesn't work because you never get even.
But what about forgiving the seemingly unforgivable?
You'll hear the remarkable story of Debbie Morris, author of Forgiving the Dead Man Walking.
When God looks at me, he doesn't see some beaten down teenage girl who's been repeatedly
raped and abused for two days, who's weak and unsure and full of shame and self-doubt.
God doesn't see that person.
For Dr. Patricia Rabon, overcoming hate and injustice was complicated.
She realized that despite her own strong Christian faith, she had become part of the problem.
It's hard for people to hear it, but it's the truth.
I hated white people and hated white people for 40 long years.
Mel White and I have been friends for over 20 years, despite our agreeing to disagree
over some of our most basic beliefs, and that tests our own sense of grace.
I love the church.
The church is in the process right now of rejecting God's gay and lesbian children,
and I think it's because they don't understand grace themselves.
But once you really appropriate grace, you see, I'm loved, God loves me as I am, then
you can do a whole lot of loving to other people who don't feel loved as they are.
And who better to talk about the conflict between legalism and grace than one of America's
great preachers and teachers, Dr. Tony Campolo.
I think that most religions of the world have a kind of bookkeeping mentality, that God
keeps books, and somehow on Judgment Day, if the good outweighs the bad, you get in.
In one way or another, most religions do promote that, and I think that Christianity is unique
in talking about the grace of God as a gift.
Grace is different from most theological words.
It still has a kind of glow about it.
When I wrote my book, I began noticing uses of the word grace, and hardly a day passes
when I don't see or hear that word.
We talk about graceful athletes, or the United States may catch a spy and deport him, and
when they do that, they declare him persona non grata, which literally means a person
without grace.
I'll let you in on a secret.
The original title of my book was What's So Amazing About Grace?
And Why Don't Christians Show More Of It?
The publisher finally talked me out of that title for two reasons.
First, they said all of those words wouldn't fit on the book jacket.
And then second, they said it wasn't very gracious.
It was too in-your-face.
To tell you the truth, though, I wrote this book because grace is not the first word that
comes to mind when people think about Christians.
That bothers me.
Here we've got the most wonderful gift in the world.
We're commissioned by God to spread the good news about it, but instead the world sees
us as the opposite, as ungracious.
My book tells about a very unscientific survey that I conducted.
While flying on airplanes, I would strike up a conversation with my seatmate.
I'm a journalist, I'd say.
I'm writing a book about evangelical Christians.
Could you tell me the first words that came to your mind when I said evangelical Christians?
Now I don't recommend doing this survey.
Many people would respond with an anti, anti-pornography, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality.
Or they might mention a prominent spokesman for the religious right.
Not once, not once did anyone mention anything remotely resembling grace.
Somehow we are not communicating this grand message that God has entrusted to us.
Gordon MacDonald once said that grace is the one thing the church has that you can't get
anywhere else.
The church can feed the hungry, so can the United Way.
We can heal the sick, but so can hospitals and HMOs.
We can build houses for the homeless, so can the U.S. government.
There's only one thing that you can get only at church, and that's grace.
For whatever reason, God has chosen the church to dispense this amazing message that God
loves sinners.
The rest of the world may view grace as one of those schmaltzy sentiments that you learn
in church.
It's not schmaltzy at all.
As we go on this journey together, you will see that grace is tough, it's hard as nails,
and it's powerful.
Every so often, we see grace break out on a global scale, and when we do, the world
falls silent.
Just in recent times, we've seen some remarkable demonstrations of grace.
We live in a world of power, of threats and violence and war.
Pick any era of history and you can read about war and conflicts of power.
Yet in one year alone, 1989, one-third of the world was set free with barely a shot
being fired.
We saw grace lived out in Eastern Europe when communism toppled and the Berlin Wall came
tumbling down, brought down in large part because of Christians who marched through
the streets holding candles, not guns, and singing hymns.
We've seen all these things on the global scale and also on the personal scale.
As I said, after writing this book on grace, I heard from thousands of readers.
I've got a file drawer at home full of those letters.
They tell of parents who had drummed a child out of their family because of something she
did 20 years ago and are now reaching out to her in love.
They tell of gay neighbors whom everyone on the block has shunned and gossiped about
and now Christians on that block believe that they should show grace even to people they
disagree with.
They tell me of growing up in a racist environment like the one I grew up in, in the Deep South,
and then feeling God's Spirit at work inside them, breaking down those walls, melting feelings
of prejudice.
I even heard from President Bill Clinton.
He read my book after a White House staff member, a young Chinese American Christian,
gave it to him.
I've had to learn a lot about grace, Mr. Clinton wrote, and we all know why.
Never ever underestimate the power of grace.
It's a gift from God, and it holds within it a supernatural power.
I've seen its power again and again, and I've felt it in my own life.
I hope and pray that you will experience the power of grace in our next few weeks together.
Grace is a gift, it's free of charge, it's on the house.
You only have to do one thing to receive a gift, open your hands.
I pray that you will have open hands to receive this wonderful, amazing thing called grace.
Hey, it's easy.
You're good, you go to heaven.
You're bad, you know where you're headed, done deal.
What about justice and in fair play?
It doesn't seem fair that everybody gets forgiven.
You either deserve grace or you don't, if you ask me.
I don't know.
If it's free, then everybody should be able to get it, shouldn't they?
Welcome back to our study of grace.
I mentioned in our last session that God has chosen the church to communicate the shocking
message that God loves sinners.
Frankly, I don't think most people believe that.
They think that God loves us based on how well we perform, on how good we are.
That assumption makes sense, it's logical, but it's definitely not biblical and it's
not the message of grace.
All you have to do is follow Jesus around and see who he hangs out with.
When I was writing a book about Jesus, Jesus I Never Knew, I noticed a consistent pattern.
The more ungodly, unrighteous, undesirable a person was, the more that person felt drawn
to Jesus.
And the more righteous, together, and desirable a person was, the more that person felt threatened
by Jesus.
It's the opposite of what most people think.
A prostitute, an unclean person with leprosy, a moral outcast, a Roman centurion, a half-breed
woman with five divorces, these are the kinds of people attracted to Jesus.
Meanwhile, the Pharisees, the upright citizens with their proper theology, the ruling establishment,
they were threatened by Jesus.
Now I don't for a moment think that sinners felt coddled by Jesus.
They knew he disapproved of their immorality, he spoke against it in the strongest terms.
Yet somehow, Jesus had mastered the ability of loving people of whose behavior he disapproved.
That's a lesson that the church has not been so good at learning.
Let's consider some of the stories that Jesus told.
Whom did he make the heroes?
Jewish priests?
The clergy of his day?
No.
A good Samaritan?
One of the half-breeds with mixed up religious beliefs?
Or a housewife so poor that she searches frantically for a single lost coin?
A shepherd, an occupation that in Jesus' day had about the same prestige as a garbage
collector does now?
A tax collector, not a Pharisee?
The poor man Lazarus, not his rich master?
What many people consider Jesus' greatest story is called the Prodigal Son.
That story features two sons.
One is upright and obedient and responsible.
The other is a regular scoundrel.
Who makes the hero?
The prodigal, of course.
To tell the truth, though, I think that story is mistitled.
I don't think the prodigal son is the hero at all.
I believe Jesus told us the story to teach us about God and about grace.
Perhaps we should title that story The Prodigal Father because it tells of a heavenly father
prodigal with love who lavishes grace on the least deserving of his creatures.
If you want to better understand Jesus' parables, I can recommend two helpful ways.
One is to transport them into a modern setting.
I tried doing this in my book on grace, and if you read it you'll find Jesus' stories
retold as a Manhattan bum who wins the lottery and the most unusual wedding banquet in the
history of Boston and a prodigal daughter in Traverse City, Michigan.
There's another way, though, and it may be even better.
We can try to transport ourselves back into Jesus' time to put ourselves in the place
of the listeners who heard these stories for the very first time.
What did the story sound like to them?
What details stood out?
What did they notice that we might overlook?
One man, a scholar named Kenneth Bailey, did just that.
Dr. Bailey worked in Lebanon for 40 years as a missionary.
As he traveled around, he observed that the common villagers in rural Lebanon lived very
much like the villagers of Jesus' own day, had lived just a few miles down the road in
Galilee.
They threshed wheat, they plowed with oxen, they tended sheep, and drew water from village
wells.
Twenty centuries had changed very little in everyday life.
Yet some of these villagers, being Muslims, knew little about the New Testament.
Dr. Bailey began a practice of reading to these people the stories of Jesus.
Tell me what strikes you, he would say.
What details stand out to you?
You know what he found?
As he read the story of the prodigal son, two details jumped out to the villagers.
First, they said, when the younger brother said, give me my inheritance now, he was really
saying, I wish you were dead, old man.
No self-respecting father would take that from his son, they told Dr. Bailey.
The second thing they noticed was that the father ran to meet the prodigal son.
That wouldn't happen, they said.
In the Middle East, your social status is shown by the pace of your walk.
The higher the status, the slower, the more dignified you walk.
Rich people wore robes, and they would never pick up their robes and run.
It's the lackeys who have to scurry around to do the work.
God, however, is not a Middle East patriarch, but a God of grace.
The story of the prodigal is as old as history itself, and as modern as the story we'd like
to share with you right now.
You know, in the back of your mind, you fear the phone call.
You fear the phone call that she has been killed or that has been hurt, and that actually
did happen, and I got a phone call in September of 98, and Rochelle had been in a pedestrian
hit-and-run accident in Denver, Colorado.
I was asked to come to the hospital immediately, and she had been very seriously hurt.
After three years of hearing nothing from her, Susan Spitkowski was at last going to
see her daughter, Rochelle, again.
Rochelle, from the time she was about 14 years old, has struggled with addictions, with alcohol,
and I think starting with marijuana to using heavier drugs, extremely heavy drugs, and
has been in and out of my life many times over those past 11 years, 10, 11 years.
Caught in a vicious circle of addiction, treatment, homecoming, and then back to life in the streets,
Rochelle has tested her mother's love, patience, and grace.
This prodigal daughter didn't return home.
Her mother had to fly to another country to retrieve her.
Yes, I've been angry, and yes, it's frustrating, but I really feel it's a responsibility for
me as her parent to let her know that I made a promise and that I'm a promise keeper and
that I will love her unconditionally, and I mean, that is the promise of grace, is that,
you know, I, you know, that's a gift.
Dear Mom, how are you?
I'm okay.
I miss you, but I'll survive, I guess.
I had a bad week last week, but today I got up for the early morning meeting at 7 a.m.
They say the one that wakes up the earliest has the most sobriety, so I've been doing
that whenever I can.
It starts my day off good.
I love you too, more and more every day, Rochelle.
And then in July of this year, she returned to her life on the street, and it's like someone
had taken the wind out of my sails once again, and I've experienced a lot of different feelings,
you know, anger, disappointment, but I still remain very hopeful that she'll be able to
kick this.
Eventually, Rochelle returned home yet again, this time emaciated and in a wheelchair.
She was met at the airport by her mother, who welcomed her home with her arms, and her
heart opened.
I have to be honest with you.
Grace to me was something that I said before a meal, a woman's name, like I really did
not have a clear understanding of what grace was all about, and it's one of the greatest
gifts that God could ever give you, and I miss that somehow, you know, so maybe by
sharing my story about Rochelle and about hanging in there, you know, someone else will
be aware of this wonderful gift.
In a version of this parable in the movie The Color Purple, the prodigal daughter, a
torchy nightclub singer, comes down the aisle of a church to hug her father, the pastor,
who's played by James Earl Jones.
Jones stands there with his arms crossed, glowering, but that's not how it happened
in Jesus' story.
Jesus told us about a father overflowing with love and forgiveness.
Not only does God let us say, I wish you were dead, he actually lets us kill his own son
on a cross, and he doesn't stand there with arms crossed, glowering, rather he scans the
horizon every day wondering, will this be the day?
At the first sign of repentance, God picks up his robe and runs to greet the wayward
prodigal.
That is God.
That is grace.
I want to tell you about a letter I received from a man who understood the message of grace.
The man is a prisoner, but I didn't know that until I got to the very end of his letter.
Usually I can tell in two paragraphs when a letter comes from a prisoner, because they're
often asking for free books, not this letter.
He wrote very eloquently about his church and its need to exercise more grace, especially
because there are many homosexuals who had begun attending.
Only on page two did he explain that the church met behind bars.
He had read my book on grace and had taken great comfort in the message that God loves
us, not because of who we are, but because of who God is.
Reading along, I got to the point where he signed his name.
First he typed, a condemned murderer.
Then in ink, he crossed out that line and wrote, one whom Jesus loves.
This murderer, this prodigal, grasps the message of grace.
It comes not to people who think they deserve it.
They're too proud, too caught up in themselves to admit need.
It comes rather to people who know they don't deserve it.
For that reason, they open their hands to receive God's free gift.
I know forgiveness isn't the Bible, but isn't revenge in there, too?
Get even, man.
Get even.
That is my philosophy.
Somebody accidentally runs into me in the hall.
I forgive them, okay?
But what if it's something really serious?
Sorry, I feel if I forgive something too easy, I'm a wimp.
It's like saying, oh, that's no big deal, you're forgiven.
In my book on grace, I tell the story of a rather spirited discussion I had with my
wife.
The topic, some of my faults.
In the middle of this discussion, my wife came out with a brilliant theological statement.
I think it's pretty impressive that I forgive you for some of the dastardly things you've
done, she said.
Now several people have written in to ask me details about those dastardly things.
And if I ever write a book on sin, maybe I'll disclose them.
But I was writing about grace.
And what stood out to me in my wife's statement was its realism, its harsh truth.
Some people think of forgiveness as a sweet, sentimental thing.
I forgive you, we say, like spraying perfume around the room to make things smell better.
But it doesn't work that way.
Forgiveness is hard, as hard as any human action I know.
It hurts.
Even when my wife forgives me, it still seems unfair to her.
I shouldn't be able to get away with those dastardly deeds just by saying, I'm sorry.
Sigmund Freud nailed this truth when he said, one must forgive one's enemies, but not before
they have been hanged.
If you know anything about Freud's life, you know that he found himself unable to forgive.
When his students, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, parted ways from him with some of their own
theories, Freud wrote them off, treating them ever after like enemies.
Freud did what comes naturally to almost all of us.
When someone wrongs us, we want them to pay.
It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, not a dog-forgive-dog world.
I know of nothing harder than forgiveness and also nothing more urgent.
Jesus was blunt.
Your father will forgive you, he said, as you forgive others.
Christians repeat that phrase every time they say the Lord's Prayer.
What a scary phrase when you think about it.
For God to forgive us as we forgive others?
It's that important, says Jesus.
Why does Jesus demand such an unnatural act, and how do we go about it?
To answer these questions, I want to introduce you to Dr. Louis Smeeds, a man who has pondered
forgiveness as much as anyone I know.
Dr. Smeeds is a theologian who has written two excellent books on the subject of forgiveness,
Believe and Forget, and the Art of Forgiving.
I sometimes think that God is much better off for having forgiven us.
Think of how awful it would have been for God to say the hell with them all.
That's the way they're going to treat me, they can have it.
And so he wallops us and destroys the relationship forever.
How would God, in all eternity, have felt about having done that?
He would have been one sad God.
And I think that's true of people, too.
These days, my friend Lou Smeeds and his wife Doris are enjoying retirement in the California
sunshine.
According to Lou, the most common question he still gets about forgiveness is that it
seems fundamentally unfair.
If you've been wronged, you need to get even.
How about being fair to yourself?
You've got that really painful memory, so tightly inside of your soul.
You bear the burden of a bad memory, of something bad that somebody did to you.
And it's a terrible burden, because every time your memory of it rekindles itself, you
feel the pain all over again.
So paradoxically, by refusing to forgive the person who wronged you, you give him a free
ticket to wrong you over and over again.
That's not being fair to yourself.
Dr. Smeeds says four things happen when you forgive.
First, you surrender your right to get even.
Nobody feels that he has a right to hurt the other guy, like a victim feels.
This is why victims are often dangerous.
You're so self-righteous when you're a victim.
How could he have done that to me, of all people?
And you take that and you surrender it.
The name of the game no more is get even.
Second, you revise your picture of that person.
You give your enemy's humanity back.
What happens to you when you become a victim is this.
You redefine the person who hurt you in terms of the hurt he caused.
You say, Fred, oh, he is the SOB who did me in, period.
And through history, that's how nations get each other to make successful war on each
other.
The Japanese said, Americans, they're nothing but savages.
Americans said, the Japanese are nothing but monkeys.
Nothing but, that nothing but that we reduce a person to is the reason why we justify our
hatred of that person.
When you forgive, you begin to see that person who hurt you so badly as a fallible, failed,
painful, struggling human being, not all that different from you.
Third, when you forgive, you gradually get the freedom and the power to wish that person
well.
To me, grace is a desire for another person's welfare, even if the other person hasn't
earned it.
And finally, you are willing to be open to whatever God wills for you in that relationship.
Don't define it ahead of time.
Don't think that you've got to have exactly the same relationship that you had before.
If you can live with that person as a brother or a sister in Christ, that may be reconciliation
enough.
People sometimes ask, but what about someone who doesn't apologize or repent?
Should we forgive even that person?
My answer is yes, partly for our own sakes and partly for the sake of the party who did
the wrong.
Remember some of Jesus' final words from the cross.
Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing.
Listen carefully to Jesus.
He didn't say, I forgive you.
Instead, he turned the matter, the crime, over to God, praying, Father, forgive them.
In the cross, we see the pattern, trusting God, not ourselves, with the revenge and justice
issues.
God is a better justice maker than we are.
And forgiveness is a way of transferring that burden to God.
If we can reach that point, and again, it may take a very long time, we can set the
other party free.
I love one scene from Les Miserables, Victor Hugo's great novel made into a musical seen
by more people around the world than any musical in modern times.
Jean Valjean, a thief who had served 19 years at hard labor in a French prison, spent the
night at the home of a kindly bishop.
After everyone in the house had fallen asleep, he stole the bishop's heirloom silver.
Early in the morning, a loud knock awakened the bishop.
Two French policemen appeared with Jean Valjean in tow.
We've caught the thief, they declared.
To everyone's astonishment, most of all, Jean Valjean's.
The bishop replied, this man is no thief, he's my guest.
And don't you remember, I gave you the candlesticks, too.
At the time, Jean Valjean was an embittered, surly ex-convict.
That bishop's singular act of undeserved, unasked for forgiveness, his act of grace,
utterly transformed Valjean.
Take these with you, said the bishop, and become an honest man.
He did just that.
The rest of the novel tells of Valjean's efforts to show the same grace and forgiveness to
others that had been shown to him.
Forgiveness has supernatural power.
It works in the forgiving party, and it works in the forgiven party, like Jean Valjean.
And in an extraordinary act of linkage, it brings those two together.
That, however, we'll have to wait for the next session.
The unforgiveness that I was holding onto, the hate, the anger, was destroying my life.
I was continuing to let these men have control over me.
I was continuing to let myself be victimized over and over and over again, because I was
hanging on to the hate, and I was unwilling to forgive.
Every time I speak on the topic of forgiveness, people come up with some challenging questions.
But what about if you're raped, they ask, or if your child is murdered, how does forgiveness
apply then?
I once spoke at a conference where they'd set up a table for me to sign books.
A young woman came up to me.
She held out a book for me to sign and said, I have a lot to learn about forgiveness.
I replied with a bland answer, something like, yeah, I suppose we all do.
No, she said, I really do need to learn about forgiveness.
I could sense from her intense tone that I needed to stop and listen.
Tell me about it, I said.
Well, it's like this.
My father murdered my husband.
He's in prison now.
I want to forgive him, because I don't want my children to grow up without a grandfather
as well as without their father.
But so far I can't.
First he stole my past.
My father abused me in childhood, and now he's stolen my future.
What do you say to someone like that?
How does forgiveness apply?
Tell me about it.
I believe the best way to learn about forgiveness is by seeing it in action, by hearing its
stories.
In this session, we're going to encounter a couple of people who ran head on into the
need for forgiveness.
I believe that what they learned has much to say to the rest of us.
Now not all of us will confront the issues of forgiveness in quite such a dramatic fashion,
but these people have plumbed the depths of forgiveness, and they have much to teach us.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Dr. Tony Campolo tells this story of an act of seemingly impossible forgiveness.
When the war ended, World War II, they took the Nazi soldiers out of the jail in Moscow
and marched them down the street to the train station to be sent back to Germany.
The citizens of Moscow lined the sidewalks.
It took all their energy for the police to keep them from running forward and tearing
these Nazis to pieces.
We lost 425,000 people in World War II.
That's the United States.
The Russians lost 40 million citizens.
There wasn't a family in Moscow that wasn't touched.
The hatred was overwhelming, and they're screaming and they're yelling obscenities.
The first group down the line are the officers who had evidently been fed.
Their tunics buttoned up high, and they were marching in semi-Gustav fashion, showing that
the imprisonment had not broken them, and the people screamed and shouted, and then
All of a sudden, everybody went silent for coming behind the officers, where the enlisted
men, skin and bones, diseased, broken, raggedy, not marching in Gustav, just about dragging
themselves along the street, dead silence.
Then one woman broke through the line and ran up and gave some bread to one of the Nazi
soldiers, and then it started happening up and down the lines.
People coming through the police and bringing food to the enemy.
The German soldiers that told me this story said, I couldn't believe it.
Grace, unexpected concern and love, and in a sense, forgiveness.
And he said to me, as that happened, all I could think is that they must be looking at
us and realizing that we're not the enemy, we're just somebody's little boy, sick and
dying and far away from home.
As he said that, I think we would all be gracious if we could look at each other and not see
the enemy, but see that each of us, in his or her own way, is somebody's little kid,
sick and dying and far away from home.
Grace.
What incredible power, the linking of the forgiver and the forgiven.
In the truest acts of forgiveness, the wounded party eventually becomes a minister of love
and a dispenser of God's grace.
I believe, in fact, that this act of linkage is one of the main reasons why God sent His
Son to earth.
He became one of us.
He stood by us, side by side.
When Jesus prayed from the cross, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they
are doing, He meant those words with all His heart.
Because Jesus had been here in person, had linked up with us, He could truly understand
that we don't know what we are doing.
Forgiveness is hard.
It's hard for God as well as for us.
It cost God the death of His Son.
But in the end, it allowed God to get His family back.
It brought God and us together.
The next story involves an even more daunting act of forgiveness.
You probably remember the movie Dead Man Walking.
Starring Sean Penn, it told the story of a brutal crime and the execution of the man
who did it.
Well, the press and the film gave a lot of attention to Sister Helen Perjean, a compassionate
nun who visited the murderer on death row.
But behind the scenes, away from the spotlight, a quiet drama of forgiveness was being acted
out.
You know, I know now that there's no such thing as unforgivable.
And I've learned that mostly by taking little steps at a time and feeling the benefit in
my life.
Debbie Morris is the author of the counterpart to Dead Man Walking, a powerful story of
forgiving the unforgivable.
When I was 16 years old, I was kidnapped by two men.
And my boyfriend and I were kidnapped by these two men.
And during the course of 36 hours, these two men shot my boyfriend, tortured him and shot
him and left him for dead.
And then they raped me repeatedly before they finally let me go.
And I guess, you know, so many people would consider that alone unforgivable.
And then, you know, after I was released, I found out that they had also kidnapped another
girl three days earlier and they murdered her.
And so when you look at some of the things that these two men did, most people would
put them in the category of unforgivable.
And that's how they were categorized in my life for years as unforgivable.
Debbie wrote her story down to help her healing process, but also to help others see that
there are healing steps beyond mere justice and retribution.
I think that many times people in my situation think that justice is what is going to heal
them.
And I thought that.
In fact, I kept looking towards certain milestones, you know, that were going to heal me.
When these two men were captured, everything would be all right.
When the trials were over, you know, when their sentence was handed down and justice
was served, that everything would be all right, I would feel healed.
And I was disappointed time after time because justice was not fulfilling.
And I don't mean to say that there's no place for justice, you know, as far as our legal
system is concerned.
You know, there needs to be a way to be able to punish offenders, violent offenders especially.
However, what we get confused about is the healing effect of justice.
Justice is not what heals us, and it certainly didn't heal me.
I don't think that was ever any more clear to me than the morning after Robert Lee Willie,
one of the men who kidnapped and raped me, was executed.
I thought surely this would be the end, and I would feel completely satisfied and completely
healed.
But what happened was in the weeks before his execution, I was feeling very anxious
about it and uncertain.
And I would reflect constantly on my role in his execution, you know, my testifying
against him, all in the name of justice.
And I realized then that there's no such thing as justice here on earth for what that
man did.
He could have died in the electric chair five times, and it wasn't going to be justice
for the parents who lost their 18-year-old daughter.
It wouldn't be justice for what I lost as a 16-year-old girl experiencing that kind
of terror and sexual assault, and, you know, my life was changed forever.
There is no justice here on earth for things like that.
The only justice is going to be when God gives his final judgment.
There are lots of people out there who like one true crime story after another, and some
people can't get enough of that kind of stuff.
But I feel like the power in my story is in being able to show other people how God's
grace changed my life, and that's the story that I was willing to tell.
Before I got to that point, I wasn't even willing to share with people I knew what had
happened to me.
There was still so much shame involved in it, and, you know, when I was able to forgive,
not only did the hate and the anger and the pain go away, but the shame did too.
Debbie's story and her book are eloquent testimony to the power of forgiveness, even
forgiving the unforgivable.
When I chose to forgive, there was a prisoner that was set free, and I realized that that
prisoner was myself.
I hope and pray that none of you watching will ever have to go through the wrenching
process of forgiveness that we've seen in this session, but I do know that all of us
will face our own mountains, large or small, of forgiveness.
It may involve a wayward child, or a parent who wronged you, or a neighbor, an employer,
or someone else who deeply hurt you.
I hope that together with your group, you gain some further understanding of this most
amazing act of grace, forgiveness.
It's hard.
It's among the hardest things we ever do.
In the end, though, forgiveness sets us free.
As long as people are different from each other, there's going to be bigotry and racism.
I hate it, but it just seems to be human nature.
What about the Holocaust?
What about Dr. King?
How do you forgive for slaughtering people because of their race or their religion?
How do you forgive that?
Some of the most intolerant people I know are Christians.
I'm sorry to say that, but it's true.
I came across a scene in the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, a Jew who survived the Holocaust,
wrote about it eloquently, and later won the Nobel Prize.
Wiesel tells of a time when he was a young journalist in his mid-twenties.
He was trying desperately to get an interview with the new Prime Minister of France and
decided the very best way was to interview Francois Mariak, who had won the Nobel Prize
for Literature and knew everybody important in France.
Wiesel went through the motions of the interview.
He grew more and more irritated, though, because Mariak, a devout Catholic, kept talking
about Jesus.
This is what Wiesel says.
Every reference led back to him.
No matter what topic he brought up, Mariak found a way of relating it to Jesus.
When Mariak spoke his name, his smile seemed to turn inward.
Once started, he had no wish to change the subject.
Finally, Wiesel had had it.
He had grown up in a Christian country, Poland, yet had suffered cruel anti-Semitism from
his neighbors.
Then he lost most of his family in the Holocaust, conducted by the supposedly Christian country
of Germany, and barely survived Auschwitz himself.
Sir," he said to Mariak, you speak of Christ.
Christians love to speak of Him, the passion of Christ, the agony of Christ, the death
of Christ.
In your religion, that's all you speak of.
Well, I want you to know that 10 years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children,
every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ
on the cross.
And we don't speak about them.
Can you understand that, sir?
We don't speak about them."
Mariak, an old man seated on a couch with a blanket wrapped around him, went pale.
Wiesel stalked out of the room, closing the door of the apartment behind him, and went
to the elevator.
Suddenly, Mariak appeared beside him.
Gently, he took his arm and asked him to come back into the apartment.
When the two had sat down, Mariak said nothing but simply began to weep.
After some time, he asked Wiesel why he had not written of these Jewish children, why
he had not spoken of his own experience at Auschwitz.
Mariak encouraged him to write the powerful book called Night.
Mariak helped him get it published and even wrote the foreword for it.
Later, Wiesel understood.
He said it was because Mariak loved Jesus that he defended Jews.
He began to see that although Christians may build walls between races and people, the
real Jesus tears down those walls.
In this session on grace, we will open up one of the most contentious and important
problems of all history—racism.
The issue is especially urgent in the United States with our history of slavery and our
bold experiment to blend people of many ethnic backgrounds.
It saddens me to see the role that the Church has played in racism.
Elie Wiesel experienced it in Christian Europe.
I grew up in the Deep South, just as the civil rights movement was getting underway,
and I heard straight racist doctrine preached from the pulpit.
I've had to repent of my own share in that, and ever since, I've tried to come to terms
with this evil—there's really no other word for it—that afflicts our planet.
Not just Christians are guilty, of course.
Anywhere you go in the world—India, East Timor, Rwanda, Yugoslavia—you can see the
deadly effects of this evil.
As a white American, I must say I feel a bit like Francois Mariak talking to a Jew.
My most appropriate response is to keep silent and listen—in my case, to African Americans
who've been the primary victims of racism in America.
So I'm going to spend the rest of this session listening to the eloquent testimony of a woman
named Patricia Raban, who has been gracious enough to share her story with us.
Patricia has written a remarkable book called My First White Friend, and it's a remarkable
story that she tells.
I thought that I was writing a book to make peace with white people.
I was writing a book to make peace with Patricia and to re-create my relationship with the
Lord.
Patricia Raban teaches journalism at the University of Colorado.
She grew up in a largely white Colorado suburb, where she endured subtle—and not so subtle—racism.
But me and a couple of other children were white, and I was the oddball and got treated
that way.
I remember the first day on the school bus, getting on, and absolutely nobody willing
to sit next to me.
And then when I sat down by someone, that person screaming and giggling as if the alien
had climbed aboard the bus.
And then, in that setting, here comes 14-year-old Carrie Monroe, going against her age, going
against the times, going against the cultural climate, going against everything that we
understood at that time about race relations, and offering me her friendship.
That says a lot about the character.
Think about that, the character of a 14-year-old child who had enough inside of herself that
she could reach out to me and offer herself as a friend.
Patricia recalled that incident on the bus, and the adolescent friendship that grew out
of it.
The story of her first white friend helped her confront her own hate and ungrace, and
it became the germ of her book.
How can you say you love God whom you have not seen, and hate your brother who you see
every day?
That person's a liar, and the truth's not in them.
And I was living a lie, and needed to figure out a way to get right with God so I could
get right with myself and get right with people around me, black and white.
Race relations is about human relations.
It's about one person reaching out to somebody next door or across the room at work.
It's about how solid my relationship is with the white woman whose office is next to mine.
And that's the only way to frame this issue, or that's the first way to frame this issue
of race relations in America.
So the question is, how are we getting along, is the wrong question.
The question is, are you my neighbor?
Am I my brother's keeper?
Am I my sister's keeper, no matter what color she is?
And if each of us posed that question to ourselves, the larger question would be irrelevant.
I love what Mother Teresa said.
Somebody asked her, how do I spread love and forgiveness and peace and grace in the world?
And she said, go home and love the people there.
If you can love those folks at your house tonight at the dinner table, then tomorrow
you can walk across the carpet in the office and say good morning to somebody who doesn't
look like you.
Like so many others who've experienced this miraculous process, Patricia felt the two-way
power of forgiveness.
When you forgive, you rediscover the humanity of the other person.
But even better, when you forgive, you rediscover the humanity in yourself.
It sounds on the surface, forgiveness can sound like a cop-out.
Being gracious to somebody can appear that you're letting somebody off the hook.
Oh no, what you're doing is recreating that person and their potential.
Isn't that, I mean that's a powerful gift to give somebody.
It's not, there isn't enough money in the world that can equate with what that gift
means to somebody who needs it.
Paul said in the book of Ephesians, put away bitterness and hate and anger.
Put that stuff behind you.
And then when you do that, you become focused and effective.
Look at Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Those guys, it's not that bad things, hateful things didn't happen to those guys.
They did not lose themselves when they did.
They responded with the gracious way.
Paul said, I will show you the better way.
And now I show you the better way.
And the better way is grace.
From Patricia and others who've shared their stories of grace and forgiveness with us,
a final reminder, these glorious results are one with years of effort, commitment and passion.
Forgiveness is hard.
Being gracious and offering grace to people is hard if you try to do it on your own, in
your own strength.
I like what my pastor said.
He said, when you talk to people about grace, tell them to ask the Holy Spirit to help them.
Because it's not natural.
It goes against every moral and natural law in the universe.
So you're going to need some godly help to forgive.
But you know what?
That's okay.
The power of grace to penetrate racism is the same power that it has to tear down our
other walls.
In a world that's so divided at times, grace is a powerful bridge.
It's a linkage between ourselves and others.
I think we have a bad rap.
I think that evangelicals are not as bad as their reputation.
But their reputation is very bad.
In this session, we're going to talk about legalism.
Now, I'll tell you what I don't want to happen.
I don't want this session to turn into a contest.
My church was stricter than your church.
My family was stricter than your family.
I doubt that would be very helpful.
And in fact, the issues of legalism have changed a lot since I was a boy growing up in the
1950s in the Deep South.
Nowadays, I see Christians who dance, who listen to rock music, who wear jewelry, go
to movies, and even drink wine without a trace of guilt.
These were all big issues in the church when I grew up.
Things have changed.
You might even wonder whether we should have a session on too much freedom instead of legalism.
Why then did I devote a chapter in my book to this archaic word, legalism?
I did it for two reasons.
First, the church swings on a pendulum back and forth, and inevitably it will swing back
toward legalism and strictness.
Just read a little church history.
One of my favorite saints, for example, is Saint Peter of Alicantra, who's the patron
saint of insomniacs.
For 40 years, Peter never slept more than an hour and a half per day.
That was how he proved his devotion to God.
He did many exercises to keep himself awake all this time, and he lived in a cell only
four and a half feet long so that he could never stretch out.
At any point in church history, you can find folks like Saint Peter, who literally torture
themselves as a sign of their spirituality.
You know, that can have the effect of turning people away from God rather than toward him.
Martin Luther, a monk raised in another strict environment, said,
Love God, I hated him.
The second reason to talk about legalism is that Jesus saw it as an important issue.
In fact, it's fascinating to compare the sins that we worry about today with the sins Jesus
seemed concerned about.
We hear a lot about sexual sins, premarital sex, lust, pornography, homosexuality.
These are all important, to be sure, but if you look at the Gospels, Jesus had relatively
little to say about sexual sins.
He had much to say, though, about the sins of pride and hypocrisy and a love of money,
and he had a lot to say about legalism.
Legalism can seem harmless.
What difference does it make if a group of Christians decides to wear all black or use
buttons instead of zippers?
It may not matter at all, depending on their attitude, yet Jesus pointed out that their
very strictness poses some huge dangers.
First, there's the danger of thinking they have arrived.
That was Jesus' main complaint about the Pharisees.
They felt that if they kept all 613 laws in the Old Testament, then they had gained God's
approval.
They had arrived.
As a result, the Pharisees tended to look down on other people as impure, as less spiritual,
as inferior.
Legalists can do that.
The old one that I grew up with, which is unmerited favor.
My friend, Dr. Tony Campolo, is never shy about expressing his opinion, especially about
the effects of legalism on today's church.
A world-renowned evangelical pastor and teacher, he even personally carried the message of
God's grace to a recently impeached president.
Well, I have this role as kind of a spiritual counselor to the president as he's come through
this very, very difficult time in his life.
I have been shocked, absolutely shocked, not just at the president's behavior, but at the
reaction of the Christian community to all of this.
One of the letters that I received from one of our leading evangelicals in America had
a statement that I don't think he read a second time.
It read, this man does not deserve the grace of God.
Wow, how does one deserve the grace of God?
I mean, nobody should make a statement like that.
It shows a complete disregard to what the biblical message is about.
I think that the evangelical community has been so seduced into conservative politics
that they have confused their political beliefs with the biblical message.
We are all in the sense, like the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees of old,
that take the scriptures and then begin to spell out what that means in detail.
And then we begin making very serious judgments about anybody that violates our understanding
of the rules.
For 13 years, I attended a church in Chicago that taught me much about grace.
It was an inner-city church.
It opened its doors on Sunday morning and served breakfast to senior citizens.
Sometimes drunks would come in, eat breakfast, and go upstairs into the warm sanctuary where
they would stretch out on a pew and snore loudly through the service.
Strange characters came to this church.
One man liked to throw things.
Once he threw a spiral football pass at the pastor, just as he was praying, over 300 little
communion glasses.
One man would pray aloud, prayers like, Lord, thank you for Whitney Houston and her magnificent
body.
Somehow, that church found a place for these unbalanced characters, even as various doctors
in the church worked hard to regulate their medication.
Actually, two churches met in that 100-year-old building.
I attended the one on Sunday morning.
On Tuesday evening, another group met in the basement, Alcoholics Anonymous.
And several times, I attended that group, too, with an alcoholic friend.
I was blown away the first time I attended AA.
They seemed like the New Testament church.
They greeted each other with hugs and smiles.
They sat around and confessed their sins and told their stories.
They prayed to a higher power and pledged to help each other with any problem.
At any time.
If you were tempted to drink at 4 o'clock in the morning, all you had to do was call
another AA member and he or she would come to you right away.
Every week, they repeated 12 steps together.
And as I listened to those 12 steps, they seemed to me to boil down to two big steps.
One was radical honesty.
These alcoholics and drug addicts could smell a fake a mile away.
They learned to be brutally honest about their flaws and failures.
The second step was radical dependence.
They knew they could not make it through another day without the help of their friends and
without the help of God.
Each week, they confessed their faults and prayed for help.
It occurred to me, as I sat there listening to the alcoholics and drug addicts, that the
church upstairs could use a refresher course on those very two steps.
Radical honesty.
Radical dependence.
It's easy for people to fake it in church.
How's it going?
Oh, fine.
I'm fine.
When really a marriage is falling apart, a teenager has run away.
Need any help?
Oh, no.
No.
Everything's fine.
Several times I asked folks in AA if they had ever thought about coming to our upstairs
church on Sunday morning.
Oh, no.
We'd never do that, they said.
Why not?
Well, those people upstairs, they're so together.
They dress nice and have families and jobs and their lives work out.
Our lives are a mess.
We'd rather sit here in our blue jeans and t-shirts and smoke cigarettes and be honest
with each other.
In fact, one alcoholic made a poignant observation.
He said that in church, if someone comes in late, people turn and stare at the latecomer.
Some people scowl, some smile a self-satisfied smile.
See, that person's not as responsible as I am.
In AA, though, if a person comes in late, everyone jumps up to greet them.
They know that that addict was experiencing temptation to pull away from the group and
may have decided to come just at the last minute out of desperation.
You see what happens.
The church upstairs, as full of grace as any church I know, has somehow communicated we
have it together.
Believe me, if your life is totally together, I can think of a lot better ways to spend
your time on Sunday morning than going to church.
I know of only one good reason to go to church, and that's because I desperately need it.
Jesus told a story about two men praying in the temple.
One was a righteous man, and he took pride in his superior moral character.
God, I thank you that I'm not like other people, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like
this tax collector.
I fast twice a week, and I give a tenth of everything I get.
He was a legalist, a very good one.
The other man was a sinner, and he could barely find the words to pray.
God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
You see, the Pharisee was comparing himself to people around him, whereas the tax collector
compared himself only to God.
The Pharisee rejoiced at being holier than thou.
He kept all the rules.
The tax collector compared himself not to other people, but to God.
He recognized his need for help, his need for grace.
He held his hands wide open to receive God's amazing free gift.
Jesus left no doubt as to which one God accepted.
I'm old-fashioned.
If you can't say something nice about somebody, zip it up.
But politicians, they're fair game.
Christians and politics.
Hmm.
Boiling water.
That's a tough one.
I try not to mix the two.
I guess my feeling is you have to respect another person's point of view.
Even if you disagree with it, you have to keep people talking.
From a religion, freedom of speech, there is going to be conflict.
In my book, What's So Amazing About Grace, I tell about a rather startling phone call
I got one day from the White House.
It came early in Bill Clinton's presidency, and it went something like this, Mr. Yancey,
you're invited to the White House next week for a private breakfast with the Clintons,
the Gores, and 12 religious leaders.
We need to know your Social Security number for a background check, any food allergies
you have, and you'll have five minutes to answer this question for the president.
Why do Christians hate me so much?
Now I knew most of the other people invited, and some of them joked that they really wouldn't
need a full five minutes to answer that question.
You see, President Clinton had already angered many Christians early in his term with some
of his policies, especially those regarding abortion and gay rights.
At that breakfast, President Clinton said he felt like a spiritual orphan.
He had grown up Baptist, he'd gone forward at a Billy Graham rally, and he'd always
attended church, singing in the choir.
Yet in Washington, when he went jogging, he would see a bumper sticker that said something
like, a vote for Bill Clinton is a sin against God.
He'd turn on the radio, and he'd hear the head of Operation Rescue call him and his
wife Ahab and Jezebel.
A little later, I heard a very different kind of story from Hillary Clinton.
She was invited to a Bible study, attended mostly by the wives of congressmen.
Some of us are Republicans, and some of us are Democrats, some of us are liberals, some
conservatives, said the inviter.
And we've got one thing in common, we all love Jesus.
Well Hillary Clinton said she rolled her eyes when she heard that.
I've met some of those people, she said.
I felt I should go for political purposes, but I should go loaded for bear.
She prepared position papers on all the hot topics of the religious right, and she attended
the luncheon.
She was ready for anything, she said, anything except what happened.
The moderator, and I believe it was Susan Baker, the wife of former Secretary of State
James Baker, began by saying, Mrs. Clinton, we're so honored to have you with us this
morning, but before we begin, I'd like to say something.
You know, there are many Christians who have not treated you as Jesus would want us to.
We've gossiped about you, we've slandered you, told jokes about you.
We haven't treated you with grace.
And I'd like to start by apologizing.
We're sorry.
Will you forgive us?
As Mrs. Clinton later recounted that story, she told us, I was ready for anything, but
that, I was totally disarmed by grace.
By the end of that luncheon, I was asking those women if they knew of a similar group
I could take my daughter Chelsea to.
You see, she hasn't met many grace-filled Christians.
Now completely apart from politics, I ask you, which approach do you think communicates
best, those who yell and call names and wave placards, or those who approach with humility
and grace?
Which do you think got through best to the Clintons?
Those of us who follow Christ will always live in a world that displeases us in some
way.
We may be caught up in culture wars, sometimes over issues so important that we must stand
up for what we believe.
And yet we dare not let our noisy involvement in power struggles drown out our primary message,
that of love.
I love one phrase used by the Apostles Paul and Peter in the New Testament, where to
be administers of God's grace, they say, or as some translations have it, dispensers
of God's grace.
When I hear that phrase, I think of a perfume bottle.
Grace can work like perfume, you spray a little in a crowded room and it can change the complexion
of the whole room.
A lot of Christians, though, convey a very different kind of image.
I call them moral exterminators.
They're like the Orchid Man, oh, there's a spot of evil, whoosh, whoosh, I got it,
oh, there's another one.
For people who feel obligated to clean up all the evil in the world, I have a word of
encouragement, relax.
That's not our job.
Not even Jesus attempted that.
We don't have to worry about pulling up all the evil, leave that for God, Jesus said.
If you start pulling up weeds, you'll probably damage the wheat along with it.
Instead, we're asked to broadcast the remarkable message of grace that God loves sinners.
Anything that gets in the way of that message gets in the way of God's will for this world.
I know this raises a lot of questions.
Some of you are involved in important and even essential political causes.
You should be.
I would never, for a moment, discourage you.
I would simply ask that whatever cause you're involved in, conduct yourself as a grace dispenser.
Christians who oppose homosexual practice will have a very different reception, I guarantee
you, if they're also the ones who volunteer first to bring meals on wheels to those suffering
from AIDS.
Christians who oppose abortion have already shown their commitment by stating bluntly
there is no such thing as an unwanted child.
If you carry your baby to term, we will find a loving home for that baby.
Now I want to introduce you to a friend of mine named Ann Spangler.
Ann is a committed Christian who has great concern over the abortion issue.
I've asked Ann to tell us about one incident that happened as she was living out her commitment.
A little prayer that you'll be blessed with all that makes you happiest.
Happy birthday of Uncle Bob and Aunt Sandy.
Isn't that nice?
Yeah, your birthday is on Monday on Valentine's Day.
Ann Spangler is a single mom who lives with her two daughters, Katie and Lucy, and also
their au pair, Erica.
It's quite the international household.
The two little girls adopted from China and Erica, a student from Mexico living in America
to perfect her English.
Several years ago, I don't even remember how many, maybe probably 16 or 17 years ago,
with a group of friends, I started a pregnancy counseling center in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
I had a real, I think, sense of grief for a lot of what was happening in terms of the
spread of abortion through the country, and really struck by the situation that, you know,
right-to-lifers were caring so much about babies, which was important, but we weren't
really expressing our care for the women who found themselves particularly in a situation
of having an unwanted pregnancy.
Anyway, we started a center which was intended to be an alternative to women so that we could
provide them with practical help and emotional support in order to help them make a choice
to keep their children.
And center prospered, but it also attracted considerable pro-choice protests from the
nearby university.
During one especially nasty demonstration, a colleague suddenly suggested that they
turn the tables, share some of their coffee and doughnuts with the protesters on that
freezing cold Michigan morning.
I felt really ridiculous going out there, you know, with trays of coffee and doughnuts,
but I thought, well, you know, we need to try this, we need to extend to them respect
as people.
They have opinions, and it would be, you know, it would be right to listen to them, it would
be right to try to talk with them.
And it was really a very wonderful situation because there was, you know, just kind of
shock on the people's faces that they didn't know what to do, and some of the organizers
were going around saying, don't drink it, they're trying to poison you with caffeine,
you know.
But many of the, I think it was disarming to many of the students that were there, and
I ended up having a couple of good conversations with people, and when they knew that I wasn't
just categorizing them, labeling them, or treating them as objects, and I think a number
of other of the board members who were out there doing the same thing had similar experiences.
And I think, you know, grace looks at every individual with respect and with love and
with the realization that they have the ability to know God, you know, that there's something
marvelous about the fact that they're a human being with the ability to make choices and
think and so on, and I think a lack of grace, a legalism, objectifies everybody, it makes
them into objects, you know, it labels them, you're over here, you're over here, and there's
a safety in legalism that's, I suppose, very appealing to us on a human level, because
we feel like, well, we know what camp we're in and we know what camp they're in, but it's
really devastating, I think, to the gospel.
And I think this was a wonderful moment at the center because there was a surprise quality
to what happened, and I think anybody that was there that day, no matter what side you
took, came away with a different view of what was happening.
That's one tiny glimpse of how grace can intervene even when people have strong disagreements
on important issues. I've seen it again and again, and I truly believe that Christians
in politics will be effective to the degree that they can practice their politics in the
spirit of grace.
Think about it. Grace is probably what allowed the Christian Church to take over the entire
Roman Empire. Christians cared for the sick and the poor and the unwanted. In some places,
they actually organized teams of wet nurses to nurse the babies abandoned along the roadside
by parents who did not want them. Watching such acts, the Empire eventually embraced
the Christian faith. And that principle percolates down on all sorts of levels. I heard about
a church in Minneapolis that feeds expired parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets,
feed the meters, and then put cards on the windshields that read, Your meter look hungry,
so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call. When you discuss
these issues in your group, by no means do I want to discourage you from involvement
in the wider society. As we face a new millennium, the United States desperately needs the influence
of Christians in our schools, our halls of Congress, and our justice buildings. I believe
we'll be most effective if we can carry a message into those places, the message of
grace. Be a grace dispenser, not a moral exterminator.
Thank you.
If I had never been able to forgive, I can't imagine what I would be like, but I think
what scares me the most is, like in a practical sense, outside of my relationship with God,
is the kind of mother I would be. Because, you know, I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old,
and I know that they learn when we're not watching, and they learn what they see and
what they feel, not what we tell them. It's the way that we live, and I can't imagine.
It's hard for me to even think about what I would be teaching my children. What is easy
for me to see is how we pass hatred and unforgiveness on from generation to generation to generation,
and how eventually we come up with a generation of people who hate and they don't even know
why. I wouldn't ever want to do that to my children.
We were not to know it, but the bomb which the IRA had placed was just on the other
side of the wall and directly behind us. And at once, of course, the wall began to
collapse and did fall on top of us and all of the folk who were around about. And indeed
the fact of the matter is that five, indeed six of the seven people who stood within five
feet of where I was standing died in that bomb.
We were not to know it, but the bomb which the IRA had placed was just on the other side
of the wall and directly behind us. And indeed the fact of the matter is that six of the
seven people who stood within five feet of where I was standing died in that bomb.
I survived. I had some physical injuries to my shoulder and to my arm. Mary didn't die
in the bomb. We finished up on our faces. I finished up lying on top of whoever was
there. It seemed in slow motion almost. Rubble, four to six feet of it, on top of us. And
then somebody took my hand and it was, Mary, is that you, Dan? She said. And I said, yes.
And I remember thinking, thank God, Mary's all right. And then there was this deathly
silence and then the screaming. This was raw, naked terror. And I said to Mary, are you
all right? And she said, yes. And then she screamed. I couldn't understand why she was
screaming when she was telling me she was all right. And three or four times more I
continued to ask her, was she all right? And each time she assured me she was, all the
while holding my hand. And when, for what would have been perhaps the fifth or maybe
the sixth time, I said to her, Mary, are you all right? She said, Daddy, I love you
very much. Those were her last words. And those were the words which changed my life
because she had to know that she was close to death. She didn't, in fact, die there.
She died some four hours later in the local hospital. But she had to know enough to know
that she was very severely injured. And she died, as I say, some four hours later. She
had very severe injuries from the hip down. She would have been at best in a wheelchair
for the rest of her life. She also had brain injuries, they told us afterwards. But it
was her words of love to me that prompted me when I was asked later that evening by
a BBC radio reporter would I tell the story of the morning as I've just done to you.
And then without warning he said to me, and how do you feel about the guys who planted
the bomb? And I said, I bear them no ill will. I bear them no grudge. Dirty sort of talk
is not going to bring Mary Wilson back to life. I shall pray for those guys tonight
and every night that God will forgive them. And I did. And I do.
I chose a video clip to lead this session because it demonstrates the sheer power of grace.
Grace is not some sweet sentimental emotion that Christians feel at fleeting moments.
It's the supernatural force of God set loose in a world ruled by its opposite. A world
ruled by what I call ungrace. The testimony of Gordon Wilson took the United Kingdom
by storm. People wept as they heard it. They flooded the BBC and newspapers with telephone
calls. It just didn't make sense that a father would publicly forgive the very IRA that had
killed his 20 year old daughter. She died while holding Gordon's hand in the rubble
of a bomb blast. A crack appeared. A break in the iron chain of revenge and ungrace that
has ruled Ireland for more than 300 years.
In 1999, a group of Christians finished a long march through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon,
and other Middle Eastern countries. They came on a mission of reconciliation, they said.
In every town and city they passed through, they publicly apologized for the Crusades
a thousand years ago when Christians killed thousands of Muslims and Jews. They asked
for forgiveness. No one knew what to do or how to respond. Grace disarmed them. It caught
them off guard. In South Africa, everyone expected the hostility to explode into civil
war when the black majority finally took charge. Instead, Nelson Mandela said, no, that's not
going to happen here. We don't want another Ireland, another Yugoslavia. We want to be
known as a nation of reconcilers. He invited his jailer to sit on the platform with him
at his inauguration, and he appointed Bishop Desmond Tutu to preside over an official government
body. It was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We must put a stop to the cycle,
said Mandela. Forgiveness starts here. Reconciliation begins now.
We live in a world of ungrace, a dog eat dog get what you pay for world. Grace introduces
something new, an awareness that the greatest things are all gifts. A newborn baby, the
sunrise each day, rain falling on crops, romantic love, beauty. These are all gifts of God,
common grace. More, God's greatest gift is his son. In a world of ungrace took the only
perfect person who ever lived and murdered him as a common criminal. Yet, God even transformed
that horror into a sign of his grace, for God so loved the world that he gave his only
son to die. God took the worst thing that could happen in human history, the murder
of God's own son, and he turned it into a day we now call Good Friday. That's grace.
In the cross of Jesus, God declared a cease fire with the human race. I will bear the
pain, God said. I will do this thing in order to get my family back. Christians have not
always perfectly demonstrated that kind of grace, as we've been discussing throughout
this series. Often we're tempted to rely on the same powers that the rest of the world
relies on, voting blocks, shouting, revenge, anger, violent force. But the most powerful
force that any of us can ever show is the same force that Jesus showed, sacrificial
love. Jesus never expected those people who followed him to perfect the world. In fact,
think of the images that Jesus used to describe the kingdom of God. It was not like other
kingdoms with an army and fortified borders. It works invisibly, crossing borders, infiltrating,
transforming from the inside out. The kingdom is like a sprinkling of salt on meat, Jesus
said. You don't need a bucket full of salt to preserve a pound of meat. A mere sprinkling
will do. He said God's kingdom is like a bit of yeast in bread. Again, you don't need a
pound of yeast in a pound of bread. Just a tiny bit will cause the whole loaf to rise.
The kingdom is like the smallest seed in the garden, but if you plant it, it'll sprout.
It will grow into a great tree, so lush and shady that the birds of the air come and nest
in its branches. That's how the kingdom of God works, Jesus says. That's how the church
works. We are called to demonstrate sacrificial love to the world, to dispense God's grace.
But the world doesn't deserve it, you might say, and that's the point of grace. No one
deserves it. It's free of charge, a gift of God, a counter force against revenge and violence
and evil.
I got a wonderful image of the church from Dr. Paul Brand, my co-author on three books.
Dr. Brand once worked with a surgeon named Dick Dawson, who had been captured by the
Japanese during World War II. Dawson was assigned to the infamous work crews constructing the
Burma-Siam Railroad. Conditions were appalling. The crews had to work in swamps and all the
water was contaminated. Soon dysentery set in, and one by one the malnourished prisoners
fell ill and died. Suddenly one day, while Dawson was sitting in a tent in the midst
of that hellish scene, he had a revelation. He looked out and noticed tall, graceful trees
growing in the midst of the swamp. From the tops of those trees hung shiny green coconuts.
There it was, he thought, a bountiful supply of sterile fluid full of nutrients. From then
on, Dr. Dawson managed to rehydrate most of the cases of dysentery by giving them transfusions
of fresh coconut milk. Even in the midst of swamps, healthy, life-giving coconut trees
can flourish. Dr. Brand took that image as a picture of what it's like for Christians
to live in the world, but not of the world. There's much that will repulse us here.
At times, Christians must lead the way in draining the swamp of injustice and immorality.
Yet, as the New Testament makes clear, we will never succeed completely. In some ways,
the world will grow worse until Jesus comes again to restore fully the reign of grace.
Even now, though, in the worst of times, the Church gives life. We can grow coconuts in
the midst of a swamp. By now, you've spent weeks thinking about and discussing this wonderful
word, grace. I believe that this world, this swamp, is thirsty for grace in ways that it
does not even recognize. My prayer is that you will be grace dispensers to that thirsty
world. I can think of no higher calling.
Thank you.