Bishop David Kendall's Blog

Paul tells Titus that the grace of God that is “salvation-bringing” has appeared for all (see Titus 2:14 and following for the full text).  Here are some “grace notes.”

We will be, must be, a church that lives by and in the grace of God.  That grace must be palpable wherever we are and go.  That grace must be thick in the air—no, it must be the very air we breathe, that gives us breath and keeps us breathing.  If we get other things wrong, we can’t get this wrong—the grace of God.   Paul declares it, celebrates what it accomplishes, and then urges Titus to make it the basis of exhortation and correction, with no apologies. 

Note with me several things about this grace—that make it truly amazing grace.  First, the context prompting Paul’s letter.  I want to draw attention to the kind of world in which Paul writes and the way this world had intruded into the church.

Titus was appointed to bring order to the church and complete the organization of the church (see 1:5f.).  The church needed such order.  V.10 There were many rebellious people who were big talkers, and deceivers …  they are corrupting entire families by their unwholesome teaching.

They remind Paul of the popular press that people of that region often got: Cretans always liars, evil and animal like, lazy gluttons.  That’s what they say about themselves.  Paul says, you can see there is truth in this by the way some of them are acting in the church.  They’ve been won to Christ, but behave like their old selves and it’s wrecking the church.

The worst of the world seems to have crept into the church.  And Paul writes to remind Titus that this is why he has been appointed to serve there:  To deal with the mess, lead the church to her best self, to integrity, to singular focus on their hope, and to the mission Jesus has for them before Jesus returns.

Read the letter and you will see Paul giving specifics, telling Titus to choose leaders well, to warn, to correct, to discipline and all the rest.  But clearly it must have seemed that what the church really needed was a good dose, a second dose, of the gospel that saves people. 

Sometimes those in the church seem just as in need as those outside to get saved, to be filled with the Spirit, to become holy people.  They may have had a “salvation” or even a “sanctification” experience but still the need is there.  They are not spiritually well people.  They complain, they insist on their own way; they are rude.  They major on things Jesus never cared about, at least not enough to become part of his story.  They are just not nice people, though they are in the church.  And, lest you think I am only “picking on” lay people, sometimes even pastors exhibit such tendencies.  Even worse, sometimes pastors act as though they are entitled, as though they should get a medal for all they do for the church etc. etc.  What they need is this grace of God that brings salvation, that works savingly.   They need grace to arrest what is not good, to correct what is crooked, to shed light on the false and true, and to empower God’s people to embrace and become people of truth, goodness, and beauty as these are seen in Jesus Himself.

Note well that Paul does not tell Titus to depend on the law of God, the standards of God, not even the disciplines of God.  He says, it is the grace of God.  You cannot correct people by throwing the book at them, by clearly explaining the rules, or by enforcing the rules.  We have a long and storied past of trying to do so and it doesn’t work.  When you throw the book at them you get Pharisees or inwardly rebellious though compliant people.  No one was ever changed by a collision with the book.

Deep and lasting correction—better re-creation—will come only by the grace of God.  More later.

I’m reading a great book about change.  In one choice section the writers assert that you can help people negotiate change when “you grow them.”  In that connection, they counsel further that we put three questions to them:

1.    Who am I?

2.    What are my circumstances?

3.    What should someone like me do in such circumstances?

Good food for thought!

Who am I?

Image bearer of God.  A work of masterfully creative HANDS, shaping a life that conforms to the ultimate Image—Jesus!  Indeed, the beauty and power of that Image that is now forming in me also reach through me toward others and work their way into the stuff of today.

What are my circumstances? 

Brokenness all over the place, personal and relational poisons working death here and there.  Ugliness masquerades as loveliness; the lie accuses the truth of misrepresentation; and anger determines to set things right, “even if it kills me, or them!”  Loneliness seeks companionship with people who aren’t really there.  Compulsions promise freedom and peace, only to cycle into new necessities.  Image-bearers oblivious to their true identity consume their way to deeper emptiness, entertain themselves to the shallows that numb even as they soothe, gather fullness with bottomless containers, dying to … die.

What should someone like me do in such circumstances? 

Embrace the One whose image I bear and am becoming.  Seek His way as the right, good, beautiful, healing and whole, peace-making, life-generating, fullness-bringing, hope-enlivening, future-creating way for which all people ache.  Seek and live this way in the company of at least a few others, knowing that it’s also in His Company and confident that in such seeking and living the anti-toxins for what poisons a once good world verge on the viral!

In other words, just behave yourself!

Not only people but groups and communities tend to move from one extreme to another—sometimes called the pendulum effect. One nasty sort of pendulum for followers of “the way” relates to gospel and law—with the pendulum swinging between the extremes of legalism and license. Most recognize the error of the extremes. The challenge is to freeze the pendulum in the middle, to reach and maintain balance—NOT legalistic, dominated by rules, and NOT license, driven by . . . , well, nothing in particular.

 

Of course, this represents an impossible challenge because a pendulum never freezes in this way!

 

Inevitably, as soon as you think of the way of Jesus on a pendulum model, you depart from that way and start heading for a dead end, for one of the extremes. That’s because both legalism and license exist on a legal continuum, which implies that the way of Jesus has to do with just enough, but not too much, law.

 

Precisely that, however, is a good statement of the human problem—either too much or too little of the law, and valiant attempts to define “too little” and “too much.” As long as we accept a legal continuum and the pendulum model, we will get nowhere.

 

The Apostle Paul commends another, more helpful model, an “atmospheric” model. An example of an atmospheric model is the common glass bubble which when shaken becomes a country snow scene. Paul says, “We are in Christ.” And, through Christ, “we have access to this grace in which we stand or exist’” (Rom. 5:2).

 

Grace is the atmosphere in which we now live—that’s the model. Thus, we don’t live this way because we have to or else—legalism, nor do we live however and whenever, for whatever—license. No, we have access to new creation by and in grace. Life is gift, privilege, opportunity, possibility and responsibility; life is filled with wonder and mystery.

 

Our manner of life is not a “have-to,” it’s a “want-to.” We live the way we do because we now see how life is and we have the awesome privilege of actually tasting it, drinking it in, consuming it, LIVING it. It makes us say, “Wow!” What a privilege.

 

We actually develop a new desire, a new appetite for what we now know to call LIFE. Before GRACE we wouldn’t have known to call this life, perhaps we would even have called it death. But now we see, and what we see we want, desperately—the grace of life and the grace to live.

 

Therefore, the question of having our way, expressing ourselves, doing whatever, whenever, just because, no longer has appeal. We’re in the sphere—the zone—of grace. Of course, there is structure and order. “The zone” is not “the world” that used to provide basic life-support for us. There are boundaries, if one were to think in such terms. It is possible to identify certain borders beyond which one dare not go—if, again, one were to think about such things.

 

But one rarely does because living in the zone in true living, and when one is truly alive, one does not often think about being barely alive. It is so good to be alive that one enjoys it and, if anything, wishes to draw closer to the center and deepen the joy.    

 

Ironically, life in the zone will appear wrong to both legalists and libertines, and to all who valiantly attempt to hold the pendulum in the middle of the legal continuum. To the legalist people in the zone will appear to be libertine; to the libertine people in the zone will seem like legalists. To the gymnast who tries to keep a balance people in the zone could strike them either way depending on which extreme they’ve most recently reacted against.

But people of the zone don’t mind. They prefer not to define themselves by comparison with others, except perhaps Jesus, and they reject the legal continuum altogether as a fatal way of frustration and failure.  Instead, they delight in the grace of our Lord Jesus that saves and trains them for righteousness, gives them hope, and sustains them in vital God-connected living.

 

It’s really good to be in the zone!

Sorry, but I'm stuck on Easter.  I just can't let it go. Then, again, I guess I'm not really sorry about this, since I am quite convinced we were never meant to let it go.  We were never meant to recover from Easter.  In fact, Easter is the recovery, which makes it possible to live–really to live, to live like we mean it.   

 

As I determine to live this way I am struck and encouraged by the reality-altering impact of Jesus’ resurrection on the original Jesus-people.  Because we know the story so well, our senses have grown dull to its shaper edges.  Think of the most shattering tragedies that could occur, the most complete reversals life could present, the deepest bottom to which people could plunge, and the dark emotional, psychological and spiritual fog left in their wake. (It's not all that hard to think of such things, is it?)  Welcome to the twilight zone between “It is finished!” and “He is risen!”

 

Now, consider the joyful and hilarious boomerang effect of resurrection reality, as The Story reveals it.  Contrast Peter in denial in the courts of the High Priest with Peter in his Spirit-anointed, preaching prime in the Temple courts on the Day of Pentecost. Contrast the disciples huddled in fear behind closed door on Easter night, for fear of the Jews, with the disciples and others gathered in confident prayer behind closed doors, rattled open by earthquake the day after the authorities threatened them. Contrast Saul of Tarsus breathing out curses while conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against followers of  “the way,” with Saul of Tarsus, also called Paul, clarifying the opposition against him by claiming to be on trial for the resurrection of the dead.

 

Don’t these few examples whet your appetite for “living like we mean it”?  The Church preaches the truth—that Jesus’ resurrection makes all the difference in the world, that a Lord back from the dead calls into question the alleged wisdom and power of the world, the “standard operation procedures” of the present age, and the guaranteed future promised by the conventions of the status quo. We say that the fact of the resurrection of Jesus gives hope for every crisis, and power for every challenge of following Jesus from cross to glory.  We invite people to embrace a living Lord, to accept the new order of resurrection reality, to let the Risen One lead us to powerful declaration and demonstration of good news!

 

O Lord God of empty tomb and blood-bought triumph,

 

Let our world be astonished because we’re living like we mean it!

 

Let the incursion of the coming age—where resurrection is the most basic fact of life—be so obvious, so undeniably and beautifully real, that all other ways of living will seem like mere existence, a shabby shadow of the glorious way you have opened before all people.

 

May our walk in that way, your way, be granted a great following in these days, as tribute to your bottomless grace, dimensionless love, and eternal glory,

 

In the name of that One raised by the power of your Spirit, ALIVE foever more,

 

Amen!

I am happy to have spent Easter in a place near the original action—in the Middle East.  How thrilling to think that the turning of the ages occurred very near where I was, and that what occurred on that Holy Weekend generates a ripple effect that doesn’t stop until it is once again, “Very Good” ever where!

 

Much of the time however, we think and talk about what Easter means to me.  And, sometimes these reflections trouble me a bit. 

 

Not that Easter has no meaning.  God forbid the suggestion!  And not that the meanings we often cited are wrong—not at all.  Rather, what troubles me is the starting point, which is our experience.  As though, this special day does have meaning, after all, because I or we had this experience and the story of Easter speaks to me or us in view of our human experience.

 

Certainly the death—resurrection of Jesus has deep meaning for all persons, whether they recognize it or not, and whether they have had experiences that make this meaning clear to them. 

 

That is, when Jesus rises from the tomb, the world received notice.  The world—originally created by this Word-made-flesh, and sustained by his power, though subject to bondage in view of human sin, the world that groans for the full redemption of the children of God, the world even now passing away, but destined for recreation—the world receives notice that this recreation has begun.  The reign of death and decay that dooms the first creation is broken!  The doom of the old signals the dawn of the new.  The first fruit of the New has appeared in Jesus Christ.  Wherever death’s icy grip once held us tight, Life’s warm embrace now engages us.

 

New Start?  Yes, indeed, but more—a whole new order of existence.  Not simply a new start at the same old games, but a new game, called LIFE-INDEED.  A new life under new management, empowered by the Spirit of the Risen One.  A new life to develop patterns—ways of thinking, feeling, acting—that reflect the ever-living One; to live in the primal image, matching the blueprint of our first creating.  A new life of fresh relations with our Father and with our family in His household.  A good preacher could go on and on!

 

My point is that Easter has meaning because it has meaning, because something real, objective, outside me and my wretched human experiences, occurred.  Yes, that real meaning makes all the difference in the world for me—or, rather, makes the world and me altogether different—NEW!