This is my burrito, broken for you

I just read a thought provoking post about grace and gifts on my friend Jason Coker’s blog. As such, I wanted to share it with you all. 🙂

“One of the things I love about forming new relationships is recognizing that moment when I’ve entered into the cycle of gifts with someone, because that is when grace begins to grow. This happened for me recently at work with the ladies at the front desk.

I’ll explain in a minute, but first, a quick word about grace and gifts.

Grace, you see, isn’t an abstraction. Rather, it’s born by the corpus of a gift. This, in my opinion, is a critical point to understand, because like most things theological, we have a tendency to abstract grace into oblivion.

Pastors of a certain persuasion tend to describe grace as the ultimate Get Out of Jail Hell Free Card; so cosmically magnanimous that the impulse to sin withers. In a word, for them, grace is freedom.  I think there’s truth to this, but it’s mostly overstated and largely unhelpful on a practical level. Worse, this freedom is often made into a badge that, ironically, excludes and vilifies others.

Pastors of another persuasion often describe grace as a divine ability, given for the transformation of self and others. In a word, grace is power. While I think there’s truth to this as well, it’s often given to a level of theatrical absurdity (“these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”) I just can’t stomach anymore and prone to a level of abuse that none should tolerate.

I’ve come to the conclusion that grace is far more ordinary. I think grace is a gift. I know, I know… everybody thinks that. Unfortunately, we’ve even made that concept abstract to the point of  obliteration (If you think grace being a gift simply means it’s free then you don’t understand how gifts worked in archaic societies – or modern societies for that matter). So perhaps it would be more helpful to say that gifts are grace. I mean that quite literally: every gift is grace.

Like my breakfast burrito.”

To finish reading this interesting discussion, please go to Jason’s blog, Pastoralia.org – it is well worth it.