Resilience and Costly Grace

My friend Peg called it “facile”, something I said to encourage her, something about the love of God or the resilience of the human spirit.  She was right.  It was too easy.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer might say that it was too cheap.

We have the term “a cheap shot”, meaning hitting someone when they don’t expect it, delivering a blow in such a way to minimize getting hit back.  We remain on the outside, out of danger. 

Hitler’s annexation of Austria, dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and invasion of Poland were done with facility. It was a “cheap shot” that started World War II.   After making a “look the other way” treaty with Soviet Union’s Stalin, he was free to use overpowering force.  With the German people continuing to suffer economic depression in soup lines, he created a scapegoat in the Jews, and the churches agreed to look the other way. 

While the leaders of Christian churches bought freedom to preach about the relationship between their members and their God, a bright young scholar was becoming certain that Christianity was about participating in the sufferings of God in the world.  It was about being in the middle of the mess with others.  It is too easy to say the inspiring word, tell the good story from the safety of churches whose thick walls muffle the sound of breaking glass and the smell of burning synagogues.  Bonhoeffer called that “cheap grace”, to dole out the good news from an endless store of forgiveness without repentance.  To be a Christian, he countered, was to know the cross from being on it with the suffering in the world. 

It was “Costly Grace” that Deitrich Bonhoeffer called Christians to, not averting our eyes or staying in the safety bought from Hitler by a handshake.  He was driven by this truth to establish a seminary to train priests in this kind of church, and it was his work of preaching this kind of truth that led to his imprisonment and hanging.

I spoke of Peg’s calling my comment facile.  And I used the word resilient to describe the generous store of human talent in each of us, calling it the human spirit.  I think that what I meant was that Peg would be OK, that she had within her all that she needed, an endless store of sustenance without substance.

I think of our friends Bill and Billie, whose walls are thin, whose tiny house is filled with neighbors whose hopes are woven from each others’ lives, whose windows frame views of community gardens growing between burned-out houses.  Their life teaches me that resilience, like religion, is really found only in relationship.  It is amid the wreckage of the world that we find grace, in the company of those who plant in soil enriched by sacrifice, who nurture what they have planted and share what results. 

And yet there remains in most of us the temptation to look the other way, to stay in our safe churches and homes, to survive on cheap grace at the expense of feeling much of anything, to dispense facile encouragement devoid of generosity.

Tomorrow – Johannes and his spirals

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.