The Unlikely

Did you figure out the connection from yesterday’s offering? I hope so. I’ll give you this much. There are those who stretch the notion of grace to the outer limits such as the dear friend of which I spoke yesterday. Yet, central to his life, in spite of the many barnacles he collected over the years, stood this teaching from the Gospel of John. He loved people. He would do anything for anyone at anytime. He listened without judgment. He attracted to himself the down and out. There was no pretense about him.

It is unsettling for some of us to countenance such rough stock believers. They don’t fit the pattern, the norm, the ethos, the lowest common denominator of whatever it takes to join the Christian club. That is revealing. Whatever lowest common denominator we might come up with, Christ can go lower. Whatever lofty standard of righteousness we might codify, Christ can go higher. It is well to think often of such possibilities. If we don’t, we might fail to hear Jesus speaking to us from unlikely sources. That would be a shame.

I leave us with this, from Brennan Manning, to consider as we greet the new week.
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“Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.

But how?’ we ask. Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ There they are. There we are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.” ~Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out