You,
“All
in.”
The whole thing turns when
we start to look at the inclusiveness of grace against the exclusivity of most
of the groups life on earth is arranged in. There is the veneer of
inclusiveness but it really means the right to stand with a particular way of
thinking or idea about life. It is frequently about the one issue that
particular group has found as pivotal to life and every disagreement with that puts
you in enemy territory. This is true of the political right and left, social
issues or economic theory and even down to religious differences. Sometimes these
disagreements lead to unkindness and other times they can breed violence and
death. We have never learnt to disagree without hate or anger or self-righteousness.
We are never able to quite sit down and listen to end of the other sentence
before we reply with the narrow understanding of our stump speech of rigid
positions and no love. We miss it when we think this is what God wants.
For sure there are many
examples to draw from in the Holy Book to make the point that God is black and
white and friendship with Him is enmity with the world. Yet the context of that
last phrase is not about people but about systems, ideas, the ruler of this
present world and all his evil. It does not mean we should hate anyone. This is
important in a virulent world increasingly represented as a drawn line between
groups that cannot meet and cannot share a conversation. We must have the mind
of Christ who came and sat with people we would call sinners today, and only
that, and spoke with such kindness and affection that it shook the very
foundations of the religious order of the day. His venom was for those same
religious leaders who were always “putting weights on others they will not
carry themselves”. We have to have the mind of Christ to understand that love
is the golden rule not political correctness or political incorrectness, not
exclusive clubs or reclusive aloofness from the problems of most of the world.
The grace of God is big
enough to accept the burden of the whole world. It is not, as we might think or
even hope, the way we may lord it over those who do not get it and put dear value
on our petty ‘sacrifices’ (the famous “if I was not a Christian, what I would
have enjoyed…” argument) while we look with scorn at the latecomers to the life
of grace. Our whole faith begins with the supreme sacrifice by God himself, in
flesh and as father. To our squabbles over who is included and excluded from a
party He has tagged “all in”, His reply must surely go something like:
-who you be?
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