Trusting in God's Transforming Grace

Preparing for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Three Days Before Sunday (Year C)

Scripture

Psalter: Psalm 138

Old Testament: Numbers 20:22-29

Epistle: Acts 9:19b-25

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Prayer

Loving God, you have called forth disciples and prophets to live and speak your word.  Give us ears to hear, lives to respond, and voices to proclaim the good news of salvation, which we know in our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

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Reflection

Saul had a reputation among the followers of Jesus and it wasn’t considered good. As far as the church was concerned, he was Public Enemy #1. Therefore, it’s not difficult to imagine the church’s response on hearing the news that Saul was now a believer preaching Jesus. “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name? And has he not come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?”

There’s an old adage that a leopard never changes its spots. Saul was going to have some work convincing Christians that he had indeed changed. It can be hard to believe in such a stark transformation. Let’s confess we don’t see it all that often. The changes we see in most people are subtle and take place over a long period of time. Some get wiser as they get older. Others get more proficient the longer they are on the job. It seems that a 180 degree turn around is a few and far between experience. Saul was a man so bent on erasing the early Jesus movement that he was willing to go wherever need be to extinguish it. How could it be that seemingly overnight that same Saul had become an advocate for what he so opposed? It seemed too good to be true.

There is a large United Methodist Church in the South that has a vital prison ministry. Through that ministry a hardened criminal, a man with a long rap sheet with serious crimes, was converted through their ministry. When he was paroled, the church hired him as their custodian.

After he had been on the job for several months, there were complaints that he was not completing his work. Rooms were not clean and other duties of his were left undone. The problem, as it turned out, was not that he was lazy, but that he was sharing Jesus with everyone he met at church during the week and it was getting in the way of his responsibilities. Like Paul, he had become zealous about proclaiming Jesus; and also like Paul, many who knew him struggled to believe his transformation.

The Senior Pastor believed they had the right man, but he was in the wrong job. The church subsequently funded their custodian’s seminary education and he went on to do ministry in the very prison where he was incarcerated.

God does not lavish his grace upon us so that we may only soak up God’s forgiveness in order to continue to live as if it’s business as usual. Divine grace is what we need from God in order to be transformed, to be changed, to be re-formed after the image of God incarnated for us in Jesus Christ. God indeed accepts us as we are, but God does not intend to leave us as we are.

We must not use the grace of God as an excuse, as license even, to live as if we are unredeemed. The untenable dichotomy we have drawn between faith and works has often distorted the discussion of God's grace. As theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said many years ago, “The one who believes obeys. The one who does not obey cannot believe.”

We must always remember that God’s grace is what propels us and sustains us on the exciting and wonderful journey of discipleship. Grace is not a boring notion that simply reinforces the false belief that God couldn’t care less about our bad behavior and the neglect of those in need.

The grace of God is transformative. The Holy Spirit can do what seems impossible to mere mortals. It happened two thousand years ago, and it happens today.

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