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In church the other Sunday," said the humorist Erma Bombeck,
I was intent on a small child who was turning around smiling at everyone. He wasn't gurgling, spitting, humming, kicking, tearing the hymnals, or rummaging through his mother's handbag. He was just smiling. Finally his mother jerked him around and in a stage whisper that could be heard in a little theatre off Broadway said, "Stop that grinning! You're in church!" With that, she gave him a belt and as the tears rolled down his cheeks added, "That's better," and returned to her prayers.
Early in his new book on grace, Philip Yancey quotes Bombeck to illustrate a troubling anomaly, namely, that while the Christian church's treasure is the gospel of grace, church people don't seem very happy about it. It's not as if they haven't encountered grace. Church people encounter grace all the time. They get their sins forgiven by grace and their lives regenerated. They hear of grace in sermons and receive it by means of sacraments. Their preachers greet and dismiss them with fine little bursts of grace. In between, people in church sing of grace: "Amazing grace," they sing, "how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."
What's amazing, says Yancey, is that, with all this grace abounding, we Christian people are often pretty graceless. We entangle ourselves in fussy legalisms that almost guarantee hypocrisy. We major in relatively minor matters of law and miss the weighty demands of justice (Yancey quotes a church official who, upon his return from Germany in 1934, reported with admiration that Hitler didn't drink or smoke and that he liked to have women dress modestly). Moreover, we are ungenerous in our judgments and sometimes downright nasty. We write appalling letters to people with whom we disagree, demonstrating a combination of resentment and self-righteousness (the elder brother syndrome) that disqualifies us both to receive God's love and also to pass it along to others.
Isn't this odd? If grace is the church's business, why don't churches get about their business? Why don't they try to "outgrace their rivals"? Maybe one reason, says Yancey, is that evangelicals (the main group he has in mind when he speaks of the church) have gotten swept up into power politics. Their idea is not to preach the gospel but to pass a law or elect a candidate. And it's tough to show grace when you are lobbying for a law, or when you are painting a bad enough face on a political opponent that people will reject her. Maybe another reason is that we conservative Christians are full of fear. We think the country is sliding to hell, and that somebody ought to arrest it. We think that indecency is riding high, and that somebody ought to unhorse it. It's hard to be full of grace when you are full of fear.
The result, says Yancey, is that even though its main business is grace, the church spends an awful lot of time "stigmatizing homosexuals, shaming unwed mothers, persecuting immigrants, harassing the homeless," and seeing to it that lawbreakers get properly punished. But what about the courage to call a sin a sin in this lawless and self- indulgent age? Yancey knows the tension between justice and grace very well and speaks of it eloquently. What do you say to a person you love who has done something very wrong? How can you forgive a person who has slain your child? How can you forgive a person that you'd like to slay? How do we handle the phenomenon that Robert Farrer Capon observes, namely, that if we show grace to someone, the recipient may then take this as permission to minimize or even to repeat his offense?
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