Preaching Grace in Our Time
On the Feast of Pentecost, I took some time to name that the world around us today feels like a place that is characterized by feelings of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The four characteristics of how the world might feel to us in a certain moment gets shortened into the acronym VUCA, which then leaves us feeling like there is no possible way for us to counter the feelings of the world or to show people another way into life in the world as it is and as it feels today. Instead of really thinking about the ways that we can respond to the world, we might simply say, “Welp, it’s just a VUCA world. What are you going to do?” For most of us, we have simply thrown up our hands at the way the world is spinning away from anything that even remotely resembles a place in which we can thrive and flourish through the very gifts God has given to us to find that abundant and flourishing life. Instead, we get messages from almost every channel that reinforces the zero-sum nature of life and the ways that we need to be sure to get our own lest someone else gets it before we do. The messaging that we are getting is the antithesis of what it means for us to love our neighbor as part of the self; the neighbor is the competition that we have to beat in order to find the flourishing that we yearn to experience in our lives.
All of this takes us, ultimately, to a place feeling dead tired in the depths of our bones because the pressure never seems to let up. We are the hamster who is stuck on the wheel without any option for getting off the wheel for a break or a sip of water or a munch of lettuce. If we stop for a rest, it is likely that we get passed by the very people we currently see as our competitors, as the people we have to fear, if we are going to get enough, whatever enough actually means these days, in order to know the flourishing life that God has always been holding open to us. So, at the end of the day, if we buy into the acronym VUCA, we are simply perpetuating the problem that creates distance between ourselves and our neighbors. We can only see the world through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We haven’t any room to see the world through a lens of grace and blessing and wonder and awe. We are listening to the wrong voices far too often to actually remember that this place in which we live is part of God’s creation filled with God’s majesty and calls us to sit back and be in awe of what God is doing around us.
And this brings us to the claim that I made on Pentecost: we, as the body of Christ, are the antidote to the view of the world as this place that is filled and defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. When we live according to the ways of Jesus, we see a neighbor - any neighbor - as the most holy, most divine subject we will encounter outside of the blessed sacrament to paraphrase C.S. Lewis. Living out our lives according to the ways of Jesus is going to look like being a people who bear the fruit of the Spirit precisely because we are always remembering the grace and love that created us and the whole of creation in the first place. We are going to live out our Christian discipleship in the world in a way that invites people to also see the world as this place of majesty, of awe, of grace, and of wonder. The neighbor we encounter is no longer the very subject that I have to beat in order to get to this place of so-called enough but rather is a subject for me to encounter, to create a relationship with, to celebrate, and to be in wonder of the story that they have to tell. We are the antidote when we live lives of faith, hope, and love in spite of the myriad of voices telling us to live lives of scarcity. The Gospel invites us to live lives of abundance: lives of abundant faith that overflows and influences others, of abundant hope that continues to witness to the awe, wonder, and majesty of creation, and of abundant love that encounters the neighbor as someone who has something to teach me about the image of God.
In his book Being Disciples, Rowan Williams writes, “When St. Paul refers to ‘life in the Spirit’ - as of course, famously in Galatians 5 - what he talks about is not a set of ‘spiritual’ activities but a series of very direct and simple challenges about the kind of humanity that we are living out - about virtues, if you like. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Being Disciples, 77) It seems that the fruit of the Spirit shows up in us when we tend to this very practical way of living in the world; we do not have to have the mountain top experience every single day to live out spiritual lives that are shaped, defined by living a life in the spirit. Instead, as Williams goes on to say, spiritual ecstasy is no substitute for ordinary kindness and practical generosity. We become the antidote to VUCA in the ways that we seek to patiently live out the fruit of the Spirit in our own lives and by consistently preaching grace to the world around us.
For reflection:
Write down the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.) on a notecard. As you encounter feelings of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, or ambiguity, offer a prayer that is simply reciting the fruit of the Spirit. How does the fruit of the Spirit begin to show up in your life simply by become it more aware of it?
Who are the voices in your life preaching grace to you? How do those voices help you remember the awe, wonder, and majesty of God’s creation?
Spend some time in prayer asking God to show you the person in your life who needs a reminder of God’s loving grace. How might you be able to preach grace to them through simply human goodness?
