If Grace is an Ocean

I have spent a good chunk of my time recently thinking about the idea of grace, mostly because the older I get the more I realize how desperately in need of grace I am. There is an interesting progression in the letters of the apostle Paul. By the end of his ministry, as he is penning the letters to his protégé Timothy, he writes that he is the foremost of all sinners, the chief of sinners. In other words, even as his ministry experience, righteousness, and good works increase, he comes to view himself as inadequate, desperately in need of the grace of Christ. Age shows us our brokenness and grace is what heals that brokenness. We also learn that we are weak. Nietzsche, Marx, and the other detractors from Christianity who disparage the faith for its utility as a balm or opiate against a harsh world are precisely half right. Christianity is indeed such a thing, but we are desperately in need of a balm.

There is a line in a recent hymn that tells its singers that “if grace is an ocean we’re all sinking.” I love this line, love this song, and it has pointed me to the reality of grace. Most of us, it seems to me, treat grace as if it were a faucet. We dirty ourselves with sin and then we go to the grace faucet and clean ourselves up. We go back out into the world, get dirty again, repeat.

What I have learned recently is how impoverished of a view of grace this is. This view treats grace as mere forgiveness. And grace, quite simply, is more than that. It is an ocean to drown in, not a faucet to clean ourselves in from time to time. And when you drown in an ocean of grace, sinning or not sinning is no longer the issue, precisely. The issue is giving room to grace, luxuriating in its bounty, its tendency to overflow into every part of our lives. Grace is not something we go to, it is, rather, something we cannot escape from.

There is a passage in the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews that I misinterpreted for nearly my entire life. It says the following:

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (4.14-16)

I used to zero in on that final verse, about approaching the throne of grace with confidence and I completely abstracted the preceding two verses from consideration. How I read this, then, was as follows: when you mess up, you can have confidence to go and get grace from God. So I would sin and then I would take comfort in this verse.

But this passage changes entirely if you consider verses 14-15, verses telling us how our Savior confronted the same temptations we faced when he was a man but refused to sin. It no longer is about grace after sinning, but grace to not sin. Grace to be different. God surely forgives us of the sins we still commit; the authority of Scripture is clear on this matter, but we do grace no favors to rob it of its central power: the power to no longer be held sway to sin in the same way. The power to drown in an ocean of grace. 

Forgiveness could be had under the law, obtained through ritual and sacrifice. But the grace to be different, comes through Christ and his perfection alone. That perfection is our heritage, and that grace our treasure.

Homeownership Round Two

Round One of homeownership had middling results for the Coffman family. We loved our first house, but only owned it for two years and were forced to sell for slightly less than what we paid. Given what others in this country went through with real estate in the same period, I think we escaped pretty well. But it was less than great. An uncle of mine owned a home for around 18 months and made over $100,000 when he sold out. That is great. Good is making money. Middling is what happened to us. Poor and tragic are the other categories, in increasing agony to the seller.

But here we are, general American and youthful optimism still intact, buying another house. This time in Salina, Kansas. It is a lovely house and both of us grin stupidly as we consider the fact that we are about to move in to what we consider a dream house. This post will tell the story of how this hopefully fortuitous event came to be:

When we accepted the offer in Salina we decided that we would be there long enough to merit at least considering purchasing a house. We have rented since we left El Paso, living in four places in that time, and we hate the instability that comes with renting. Moreover, as much as I disliked selling our house at a slight loss, what I hate even more is the idea of sending $650 or so a month in rent right into the furnace every month. So we looked. And we looked. And we looked. And there just didn't seem to be anything that we loved. 

But there was one that we liked. And would have been a fine house. We made a frenzied search of the rental houses in town, but found none that we would want to live in for a few years. So we made on offer on the house that we liked and would have been just fine. We made the offer last Monday and when we hadn't heard anything by Wednesday we were a bit worried. We had made a fair offer. The house had been on the market for close to a year, starting at a price way too high for the house. It took them over four days to get back to us and their offer was hardly worth considering. We promptly reoffered, low again, and they responded that their first counter was their final offer. I was pissed off at this point. We liked the house, but it was certainly nothing special. Certainly not the type of house that anyone in their right mind would pay over the appraisal value to own. But this put us back to square one, really, with about three weeks left until we moved to town. Not fun.

We went back to Salina on Saturday to look at some more houses. And found nothing. I mean, the houses were fine. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to sound conceited or snooty or to imply that we were looking for the perfect house. We really weren't. We're adaptable. Two years ago at this time we were living in an attic apartment with no living room, no air conditioning, and a heater that turned off every time the wind blew. In Kansas. That apartment was luxurious compared to our voluntary month of sleeping on the ground every night that preceded the move to Kansas. But none of the houses felt like they could be our home. And when you have a kid and want to have more and want a dog and chickens in the backyard (more on this later), you are looking for a home. Defeated, we went back to Wichita, debating about which, if any, of the houses we would decide to put an offer on. 

While I parked in front of college football for the afternoon, Clara started looking around in a different price range than we had been exploring before. And she found it. The house. And she knew it right away. In her excitement, she wanted to put an offer on it before we had even physically seen the place. I talked her off that ledge and we called our real estate agent (who has been fantastic through this whole thing) and she set up a showing for us the next morning. We drove up to Salina again and the minute we walked in we both broke out in smiles. This was our house. It was old, built in the 1920s and had all of that, what is the word. . . craftsmanship, that seems to lack in the modern day McMansions that are thrown up in a couple of months. Hardwood floors on the main level and in the bedrooms. A formal dining room with a bay window looking out into a big backyard. A breakfast nook for Owen to play in while Clara cooks. Three bedrooms upstairs. A finished basement with built in bookshelves and entertainment center so that we can put our TV downstairs and not have it be the central focus in our main room. A beautiful sycamore tree in the front yard. An enclosed patio on the side of the house with room for our patio furniture. And a huge backyard with trees and a shed and space for a garden. And then the icing on the cake.

For awhile now we have wanted to keep chickens in whatever house we land in. There are multiple reasons for this, but we don't need to talk about that here. For the purposes of this story, just know that we wanted them. Anyway, so we are in the upstairs bedroom taking our tour of this house and I look in the backyard and see a building that hadn't been on any of the pictures of the house on the internet. And I think, that sure looks like a chicken coop. I will forego keeping you in suspense and simply say it was. Our realtor called it our sign. And indeed it was that, too.

We went back to her office and wrote up an offer, asking for the coop to stay. We got a call back on our way home saying that the offer had been accepted and they would even let us keep the chickens that they currently have. It all worked out. Perfectly. Beautifully. Providentially. And for those of you keeping track at home of coincidences, the house we are buying was listed Friday afternoon. About the same time the other people turned down our offer. I have never been in the school of "When God closes a door, he opens a window" theology, but I do believe he loves to bless us. And that he has done.

Total Depravity, Me, and My Grandpa

Life is hectic and busy this week, leaving me without much time for original posting, so this is a repost. I wrote this almost exactly three years ago (10/06/2009) and this just might be the best thing I have ever written. It is certainly one thing that means very much to me. And reading back through it now it is hard not to miss the young man who wrote it:

My grandpa died last Sunday in a hospice bed in Topeka. Clara and I were out in Kansas at the time. Grandpa Leon had battled throat cancer for over 7 years and in the last month it had turned hopelessly bad. We rounded up the family and were to assemble in Kansas to say our goodbyes. The doctor was ambiguous, as is their custom, unable to tell us with any specificity when death might come. So we flew out from El Paso on the Friday before the Sunday and made it to the care center just in time, as the storybook dictates. He hugged and kissed us and smiled at us and surely knew that we were there. That night his entire family stood around his bed and we cried and told him goodbye and told him as well that it was alright to let go. He held on for another 36 hours or so after that point. Sunday morning, sometime while my mom was in the shower and Clara and I were out on a run and my dad was having a cup of coffee and enjoying a crisp Kansas morning on the cusp of fall, my uncle left the room at the hospice so that the attending nurses could rotate my grandpa in his bed and when they let him back into the room his and my mom’s father and Tyler and me’s grandpa was dead. Just like that; in the blink of an eye.

For those of you unfamiliar I have had a complicated relationship with my maternal grandfather. It is not that he wasn’t a good grandpa; matter of fact that may have been what he was best at. But it is not an altogether uncommon human experience to revere and love someone in your childhood and then to find out at some later point that they are a sinner beyond what you imagined; beyond what your own goodness and righteousness can tolerate. Such was my experience with my grandpa, and though I won’t belabor you with his sins (which is something akin to gossip in this setting), allow me to say that there was partial justification for the disdain I held him in for the past 10-12 years. Partial, mind you.

The last post in this blog was on the doctrine of total depravity, the much maligned tenet of Calvinistic Christianity which says, in layman’s terms, we all suck. This is similar to the doctrine of original sin which says that when Adam fell he dragged down all of creation with him and to this day we are born into sin and not with a blank slate. Augustine popularized the doctrine and Chesterton quipped that it was the single doctrine backed with modern day empirical proof. I myself did not witness the virgin birth or the resurrection, but I do witness human depravity and sin every day. Empirical provability aside, there is nothing more contrarian to the modern mind than this idea that we begin life already dead. This world and its afternoon talk shows are full of people telling us we have an inner goodness and if we follow the six, seven, or eight simple steps outlined in their book we can tap into our own goodness and live at peace with all people. And also get rich. And this is an understandable impulse for the world, but it is bad for the Church and, my goodness, how this has infected the Church as well. Here I refer not only to the simple punching bag of a guy like Joel Osteen whose prosperity gospel is more full of holes than the term paper of an undergraduate philosophy student, but to the more benign form that we find in most Christian churches. There is everywhere a tendency to downplay sin. In order to make Christianity more palatable to the masses we can’t be condemning them with guilt for their sins and then telling them the good news about Jesus. Let’s skip instead straight to the good news: Hey, Jesus died for you. OK, well why? Umm, because you, well, you know, you broke some of the Ten Commandments and lied to your parents when you were a kid. So Jesus had to die for that? Yeah, it is kind of weird, but when you are a Christian you will feel peace that passes all understanding and get to live forever with God. And if I don’t become a Christian? Umm, well, the Bible talks about this place called hell. God will send me to hell for breaking commandments and lying to my parents? Yes, but he doesn’t want to so pray this prayer and you’re in!

I often digress into silly conversations in order to prove a point. In that rendering of the gospel there is nothing to be saved from, really. There is shuddered mention of sin and hell, but it makes God seem like an angry, moody teenager for condemning sin and sending people to hell. There is no notion of righteous wrath and vindication, of man’s deplorable condition in relation to God, of our utter inability to do anything on our own, or of God’s glory and grace in sending Jesus as our propitiation.

And this was my functional gospel for much of my life. Sure I was a sinner, but I wasn’t a bad sinner and now I am pretty good. I was mature for my age, responsible, kept jobs, and impressed adults; I mostly avoided illicit substances and was a good friend to people that I liked. Sure I swore and lusted and didn’t hang out with people who I thought weren’t cool, but I never did anything bad. I surely wasn’t bad in my core, or dead in my sins and transgressions. I was presented the opportunity to be good and for the most part took it and therefore I was better than people who chose otherwise. Now in a convoluted and limited sense this is true. We ought to choose Lincoln’s “better angels” over our inner devils more often than not, but the mistake we make is to attribute this to internal righteousness; it is no such thing. Consciousness of sin, and right and wrong; yes. But right-standing in front of God; not even close.

It is not until we accept our own badness, our own deadness, our own inability to do anything apart from grace received by the gift of faith that we will ever view our fellow man in the proper context and with the proper amount of humility and grace. And this truth hit me like a ten-pound hammer a few weeks ago, in the shower of all places. My mom had booked our plane tickets back to Kansas and I was imagining what I would say to my grandpa, the man I reviled above all other men in my life. The force of my own sin and ugliness was laid on me in that moment and the disrespect and evilness which existed in my heart was exposed as the indulgent self-righteousness of a punk kid. I was disgusted and heartbroken and cried as I stood there and began speaking the words that I wanted to say to him; words for once of grace and truth.

But life, as I have found, is not always as poetic as I wish it would be. I mentioned earlier when we got to grandpa’s room at the hospice house he smiled and kissed and hugged and knew we were there, but those were the limits of his power for his remaining time on earth. He died without having another conversation, the one I intended to have with him included. And I knew as I stood and cried at the foot of his bed later that night that I would never get that chance; that the imagined conversation in all of its beauty and grace would remain as so many other beautiful things in my life- merely a good intention.

And so it fell for me to say them for the first time, and on a one-way street, as I gave the eulogy at his funeral last week. I told the audience assembled that God’s grace had been ever-present in my grandpa’s life and even though he felt like he had a hard lot God had given him many wonderful things. He had given him a wife who remained faithful, despite hardships, for 48 years; a daughter who turned out to be a saint and whose life was spared by her Redeemer two years before; a son who had wrestled his own demons and become quite the man and quite the son; grandkids who grew up strong and happy and loved. He had a horrendous battle with cancer, but alongside of it the entire time was very uncommon grace.

And then I told the audience that I had hated my grandpa in my heart for a lot of my life. I told them I was far harder on him than I had the right to be; far harder than was fair. I told them that my goodness and my grandpa’s sins both landed us in the same place apart from the grace of God. I told them that I didn’t know whether or not my grandpa was in heaven, but that he was just the type of person my God loves to save; a man who has seen the face of his own evil and can lay no claims to his own goodness. I told them; but I never told him.

Commonplacing: Wendell Berry on the Land

Wendell Berry, for those of who may have never had the pleasure, is one of the greatest living human beings, a modern prophet who is also a wonderful poet and a fantastic storyteller. Every time I read something that he wrote I learn something and am tempted to try and figure out how to farm. Plus, his style is inimitable. 

I bought Clara one of his essay collections for her birthday and have been perusing it myself recently. The following is from an essay from 1989 called "Nature as Measure." In this article, Berry is seeking both to dispel the focus of the modern environmental movement on merely protecting virgin wilderness and shift the conversation to sustainable, small-scale farming, as well as writing to argue that capitalism, while doing many things well, of itself cannot understand something like preservation and traditional ways of agriculture. Here is a quote:

"For many years, as a nation, we have asked our land only to produce, and we have asked our farmers only to produce. We have believed that this single economic standard not only guaranteed good performance but also preserved the ultimate truth and rightness of our aims. We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

Competition and innovation have indeed solved, for the time being, the problem of production. But the solution has been extravagant, thoughtless, and far too expensive. We have been winning, to our inestimable loss, a competition against our own land and our own people."

The whole article is worth reading, but I resonate with his point here. Capitalism requires innovation and growth for its fuel, and innovation and growth are not necessarily good things. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they are bad. Capitalism of itself does not possess the tools to make this moral judgment. 

The advances in farming technology in the recent past are stunning. But Berry is right to note that yield, rather than the goodness of the land and its people, have been the primary drive (with most of the grains going to feed all of those cows we love so much to eat and not people anyway) for the crop technology folk. This can have beneficial effects, but our system does not allow us the time to find out whether this new technology will be worth it in the long-term. That will be someone else's problem.