Done and Left Undone

Grace in the Meantime of Ministry

Scott Anson Benhase

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780898690637
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

An original and thoughtful approach to a grace-filled theology of leadership. In a post-Christian culture, parish clergy can find themselves at a loss, ill-equipped to deal with a reality for which seminary did not prepare them. As a result, the Church and its clergy can seem to flounder from one "program" to the next or get enamored with secular self-help strategies. To learn to lead well in this new context, the Church needs to help clergy refocus on what both works and is true to their tradition and theology. Enter Scott Benhase, whose Done and Left Undone proposes an ascetical theology of leadership based in St. Benedict's Promise of Stability, Obedience, and Conversion of Life. The Promise helps clergy move forward from their inward identity to their outward askesis (discipline), their inner life experience of resting in the mercy of God's grace in harmony with their outward role in the church. Benhase believes parish clergy can lead faithfully and well without following a program or leadership style that does not fit them. Leading from ascetical grace does not require parish clergy to be something they are not. It invites them, rather, to a way of being and an askesis that will help them be both faithful and effective in parish leadership.

1

IRRESISTIBLE GRACE, MOSTLY

Begin with Grace

Grace must be where we begin. Before we delve into askesis for leadership, we must have a foundation for such practices. If we are true to what the Church has proclaimed for the last two thousand years, then we can begin nowhere else but grace. God’s intervening act in Jesus to redeem humanity on the Cross means that everything else must be seen and understood through that cosmic intervention into human history. And that, of course, means God’s intervention of grace must shape how we lead. It makes no sense for us to lead with other stances such as utilitarianism, meritocracy, or social Darwinism that at one time or another seem to be the ruling paradigms in Western culture. If grace is true and it is what God has been up to, and continues to be up to in the world, we cannot proclaim it as the very nature of God and then not practice it in how we lead.

Although I am by no means a Calvinist, I am alert to my own life and to the world around me. Thus, certain aspects of Calvinism’s TULIP doctrine¹ make a whole lot of sense to me (especially the Big T: total depravity). I recognize such depraved tendencies in myself and, to be fair and balanced, in others as well. Sin is everywhere and all the time. No part of me and no part of the world goes unaffected by it. As the Office of Morning Prayer in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer states: “There is no health in us.”²

Well, maybe there is some health. Maybe the prayer overstates the human condition a bit. There is “health” in me. My intentions are good at least 51 percent of the time. I am able to do good. I can be kind, compassionate, and just. But I know that even my best intentions can become an avenue for my sin. Echoing the Prayer of Manasseh, I must conclude: “I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned, and I know my wickedness only too well.”³ (And I know yours too, by the way!)

Still, I understand the biblical witness to be one of God’s irresistible grace, mostly. That does not mean we do not resist it. We do in countless ways, sin being what sin is, but God has the last word on humanity’s fate. God does not and will not leave us to our own devices. Grace intercedes in our path to personal and communal destruction and snatches us from the jaws of death. And this not only for the “sweet by and by.” There is plenty of living death right now all around us as the people of this world live gracelessly. Grace is for now, and not just when we move into the “larger life” with God. In other words, we live knowing how the drama of the human story ends: with the New Jerusalem of John’s Revelation coming to earth. And, as we say in the Lord’s Prayer, God’s kingdom will come one day to this earth “as it (already) is in heaven.” God’s grace in Jesus makes this possible. The human family, who has seemingly bought a one-way ticket to death and destruction, gets its destiny rerouted by God’s intervention on the Cross. Our human trajectory changes from death to life. This is God’s final word to humanity.

God’s grace, then, should not be seen as God meeting us anything less than all the way. It is not as if God reaches half of the way to us and then waits patiently for us to come to our senses and then we reach the other half of the way. Our good works, our insight, our cleverness, or even our faith do not make up the other half so we can meet God somewhere in the middle. God through Jesus steps into the cesspool of our lives and brings us out all the way. We do not help one bit.

A favorite icon of mine is one I believe is called the “Harrowing of Hell,” where Adam and Eve are emerging from prison-like square boxes (like a jack-in-the-box) as the chains fly off those boxes. They are reaching up with their arms from out of the boxes and God’s arms appear in the top half of the icon. In a cursory look at the icon, you might see that these two first humans are holding hands with God. But if you look closer, then you see that God is not giving them the “right hand of fellowship.” God has them both by the wrists and is literally yanking them out of their imprisonment in death. Neither Adam and Eve, nor we, meet God even part of the way. Martin Luther, it is said, once responded to a man who was bragging that he had accepted Jesus Christ as his “personal savior.” Luther asked him something like this: “If someone came up to you and dropped a bag full of gold coins in your lap, would you then go around bragging about how clever and faithful you were in accepting the gold coins? Of course, you would not.”

Grace and Human Choice

A few years ago as I was driving home one late Sunday evening, I saw a church sign that read: “Choosy Moms Choose Jesus.” It was dark and late and I was not sure what I had read, so I stopped my car, turned around, and went back to double-check. Yep. My hunch is that the person who came up with that message, however unaware, was using an old marketing strategy: be timely and draw on the comfortably familiar to promote your message. It was, after all, Mother’s Day and the message related emotionally to a successful ad campaign for a peanut butter brand a few years back. Those two ingredients made the message work. Except it’s horrible theology.

The idea that you or I or anybody else chooses Jesus is arrogant and gives us way more credit than we deserve. Such a claim presumes that a person has done her market research. She has tested all the other possible saviors or gods out there, weighed their strengths and weaknesses in providing the value she desired for her and her family, and then she chose Jesus, because, of course, she only wants the very best for herself and her family. Jesus then becomes the choice she makes to maximize her return as the choosy consumer of salvation that she is. Like I said, arrogance.

Jesus says in John 15:16 that we did not choose him, he chose us. It is egotistical for us to conclude anything else. As a disciple, I did none of the market research described above. I did not survey the salvation-market landscape and then conclude Jesus was the highest-value alternative among the choices. What actually occurred was quite different. Jesus worked his way past my pride, my self-centeredness, my presumption that I knew best about my life, and met me in the truthfulness of my pathetic, sinful weakness. His grace on the Cross gave me something I had no power to give myself, namely, forgiveness of my sins. I did not choose God’s forgiveness. God forgave me in spite of myself.

That church sign manifests a larger cultural distortion of the Christian faith that syncretizes Christianity with modern capitalist presumptions about human behavior. It reflects the commodification of Christianity as just another transactional choice we make. But I had no hand in the construction of the Great Narrative of Redemption. Through this narrative, God in Jesus has grasped my life and has compelled me into a drama I had no hand in creating. Any other claim is, as I have said, clearly arrogant. As Lesslie Newbigin has written:

My commitment to the truth of the gospel is a commitment of faith. If I am further pressed to justify this commitment (as I have often been), my only response has to be personal confession. The story is not my construction. In ways that I cannot fully understand but always through the witness of those who went before me in the company of those called to be witnesses, I have been laid hold of and charged with the responsibility of telling this story. I am only a witness, not the Judge who alone can give the final verdict. But as a witness I am under obligation—the obligation of a debtor to the grace of God in Jesus Christ—to give my witness.⁴

And yet we seem to return constantly to the theme of making the Great Narrative of Redemption to be about our efforts and our accomplishments. As Newbigin contends, we are merely “called to be witnesses” of the story.

Hedging the Great Narrative

A recent survey of Christians who claim they hold orthodox theological views⁵ reflects this commodification. The survey shows a wide divergence between their views and what the Church has traditionally proclaimed, particularly about God’s redemptive grace. Two-thirds of the survey participants responded (and remember, these are self-described orthodox Christians) that we are reconciled with God by our own initiative and then God responds to our initiative with grace. What they are claiming is this: we first seek God out through our own initiative (“Choosy Moms Choose Jesus”), and only then does God respond with mercy and forgiveness through grace. This is how, they say, grace becomes operative in our lives. From my many conversations with Christians across the liberal to conservative spectrum, two-thirds seems about right. It may be even a bit low.

To be fair, this argument has its own internal logic based on Enlightenment constructs of individualism, fairness, and reciprocity (the old quid pro quo, as it were), but it is not the gospel we have received. It nevertheless makes sense to us. It sounds like it should be the way God works, given the intellectual constructs of the Western world. It has a certain “truthiness” to it, as Stephen Colbert might say. Apparently, many of us are so steeped in the deep internal codes of personal responsibility and rugged individualism in Western culture that we like the idea of having a starring role to play in our own drama of redemption. Just one big problem: that has NEVER been the orthodox teaching of the Church.

That brings us to the fifth-century Englishman Pelagius. Yes, he was British, so those of us who are Anglicans must claim him as part of our spiritual family tree. He is like that crazy uncle we have whom no one in the family wants to acknowledge, but own him we must. Pelagius contended that humans first choose God by their own personal gumption. Our sin, original or otherwise, did not, according to Pelagius, impair our ability to choose wisely by choosing God. He thought we must choose to appropriate the benefits of God’s grace through the power of our own will. His position came to be known as Pelagianism. Two church councils, first in 418 ce at Carthage and then in Ephesus in 431 CE, rightly rejected Pelagianism. A century or so later, a spinoff of Pelagianism, known rather noncreatively as Semi-Pelagianism, became popular. It sought to affirm the orthodox teaching about humanity’s original sin while, at the same time, insisting that humans must take the initiative for God’s grace to be operative. In 529 CE, the Council of Orange said, “Nice try, Semi-Pelagianists,” and rejected their views.

As I listen to my fellow Christians, it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of us are either de facto Pelagianists at worst, or Semi-Pelagianists at best. God’s grace makes us uneasy. Grace does not feel right or fair. It is like we are getting something we do not deserve or did not have to work for at all, that we did not get the old-fashioned way by earning it. It is as if someone gave us something exceptionally amazing at Christmas, something it turns out that we really loved and needed, and it is not that we just forgot to get them anything in return, we actually chose not to get them anything at all. Christmas is the perfect season to illuminate the truth of God’s grace. At Christmas, God said, “Here is my baby boy. Do with him as you will.” And we did. Oh boy, did we! We laid the wood to him. Then God used our own sinful violence to redeem us.

Self-Justification: No Leg to Stand On

God’s grace, and God’s grace alone, justifies us before God. We do not even justify ourselves a little bit through own hard work and goodness. A semithorough reading of St. Paul’s epistles will result in only one conclusion: we are not capable of justifying ourselves because our sin is a too all-encompassing force over us. As the psalmist says: “Our sins are stronger than we are” (65:3). In fact, St. Paul spends the first four chapters of his Epistle to the Romans making one particular point: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). He could have saved himself the trouble of writing the first four chapters with just that one sentence.

So, St. Paul, in Romans and throughout his other epistles, urges us to throw up our hands in surrender; to admit that we are no match for sin, and to have faith in Jesus alone to justify us through his sacrifice on the Cross. The only way, St. Paul says, that we “obtained access to this grace” (Rom. 5:2) is through God’s justification of us, not through our self-justification. But do we not hear that? It has been, and continues to be, the bedrock teaching of the Church, but so many Christians apparently do not believe it. We spend our lives in an ongoing self-justification project. When we seek to justify ourselves, we trade in the saving gospel of Jesus for a version that says all we really need to do is be a good person. Although we might not admit, it our actions also say we should spend time looking down on others who we think are not as good as we are. We have bought into the idea that the Christian faith is about being good, and if we cannot be good, we can always find others who are not as good as we are. Like the Pharisee who looked down upon the tax collector in Luke 18:9–14 and said (I paraphrase here), “I may be a sinner occasionally. I make no claims to perfection, but look at that guy over there. What a scumbag! Now there’s a real sinner.” We build ourselves up by tearing others down. Such is the language of self-justification, and we are experts at it.

Our Cultural Formation in Self-Justification

Many of us grew up thinking that church was about being good. I know I did. The church I grew up in was a place for nice girls and boys who obeyed the rules and always had good manners. It was about having pure and clean thoughts, even as we fought off the ones that were not. It was wholesome and sanitary, full of good deeds that proved we were saved, where good boys and good girls drank their milk and cleaned their plates. In high school, the guys in my youth group said, “I won’t smoke, drink, or chew, or go with girls who do.” Of course, there was more to it than that. The church of my youth also told me that Jesus loved me and saved me. But the church, as I experienced it, said that what really mattered was that I was a good boy, that I behaved myself. Sin was talked about a lot, but only as a cudgel to scare us back into good behavior. I did not begin to understand what grace truly was until I was well into adulthood (and after graduating from seminary).

Growing up, I was all about being good and having a good testimony, but deep down inside, I knew that I was not good much of the time. It was a short step for me to conclude that Jesus loved me only when I was good. The catch was this: if I were just good enough, then Jesus would love me. The church’s message started out as the gracious word that Jesus loved me, but it wound up in a very different place. It became an ominous threat. Yes, Jesus loved me, but that love seemed to come with certain conditions in the fine print of the contract. Just how good did I have to be and how often? Fifty-one percent of the time? Seventy-five percent of the time? Ninety percent of the time? All the time? I never knew exactly where the goal line was. It kept moving.

If we look at recent studies, many young adults feel betrayed by the church because the church they hear does not sound much like the Jesus they hear in the gospel.⁶ What they hear is a church lecturing them about being good but what they see is a church that seems more concerned with obeying its rules and surviving as an institution. And the church bears most of the blame because we have not told folks the truth. We were wrong about who we were and what we were about. Christianity is not about being good; it is not about hanging up our clothes or having good manners; and, I discovered, Jesus does not care one bit whether I clean my plate.

Christianity is not about our being good. It is actually about our regular failure to be good. It is about the brokenness of human life. It is about our repeated inability to be the people God created us to be. It is about how everything about us—even our best intentions and motives—can become an avenue for self-justifying sin. Christianity is not about us being good. It is about God’s goodness. It is about what God has done on the Cross of Jesus Christ. In spite of our sin and failures, ...