The ace: There is no way to God
Perhaps you’ve seen this diagram in an evangelism tract left on your porch. There is a picture of a huge chasm (caused by sin) between God and humanity. Jesus’ cross is portrayed as spanning the gap. Make the right decision (accept Christ) and you go to heaven. Fail and a terrible destruction is your fate. It’s all up to you. Now contrast this with the Lutheran understanding of the gospel, which is clear that there is simply no way to God, period. Our choices and efforts contribute nothing in that department, no matter how hard we try. This is actu- ally freeing. Knowing this allows us to stop trying and to simply receive God’s arrival as a gift. In Christ, God has come to us. Scripture reminds us how God comes to us as an undeserved gift with the “Immanuel” of Isaiah, the “Word made flesh” of John and the “I am with you always …” of Matthew.
The king: Jesus reveals that God is love The fact that God comes to us may or may not sound like good news in itself. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line “I’ll be back” from The Terminator was an ominous promise. But in encountering Jesus we discover that God is love.
God’s love is revealed to be costly. For the sake of this love, Jesus is willing to suffer and die on the cross. God’s love is revealed to be persistent, as seen in Jesus’ resurrec- tion greeting: “Peace be with you” (Luke 24:36). The costly and persistent nature of Christ is the content of grace. In spite of what we may do, God always comes back again, and again, and loves us upon arrival. Believ- ing this doesn’t make God love you. Believing this helps you trust that God already does love you (no footnotes and no exceptions).
The queen: Trusting God’s grace allows us to hope for grace for others Even today not all Christians and not all Protestants agree with the above statement. This was a fundamen- tal issue among early Protestants. Some Christians believed that since God knows everything, God knew even before you were born if you were going to heaven or hell. They believed that neither we nor God could do anything about it. This belief, called double predestina- tion, assumes hell is well-populated and accepts this as simply how it is.
Lutherans, on the other hand, took a single predestina- tion approach. If you trust in what God has done in Christ, God has always wanted you to do so. Your faith is no accident. But if you don’t trust, Lutherans were unwilling to write it off as destiny. As a matter of discipleship we are committed to hoping that hell, should it exist, is empty and
not full. This is not confidence in humanity. It is a commit- ment to the grace of God being bigger than we can define. In other words, we are confident about what we know concerning people who trust what God has done in Jesus. But we don’t feel nearly as clear (or as pessimistic) talk- ing about everybody else. That is God’s turf, not ours. We hope and pray for the best for all people. We share our story and hope (some would say expect) to be surprised by a God of amazing grace.
The jack:All of the baptized have a vocation Theologian George Forell’s Faith Active in Love (Ameri- can Press, 1954) may have the best title of any book about Lutheranism ever. Indeed this is the calling of the faith- ful: Trusting that we are loved in Christ, we are called to respond to that love by loving our neighbor in turn—in all that we do and wherever we may be.
As Lutherans, we understand that discipleship doesn’t demand withdrawal from the world. On the contrary, a life of faith fully engages all of life. Living a life of faith helps provide us with meaning and purpose.
The vocation of all Christians is ultimately the same: love our neighbors and tell how the God we meet in Christ allows us to do so. Lutherans believe God uses a wide variety of people and their work to make the world function. But those of us among the baptized are “put on notice”: Your life matters and the work you do is valued by God.
Showing our hand
What if all of us as Lutheran Christians could internalize and share our best things—the face cards in our Lutheran deck? What if all of our congregations focused energy around these things, helping people to live them out effectively in daily life? We can begin showing our hand with something as simple as a short statement that can be shared in only 30 seconds. For example: “We believe that as hard as we try, God is too awesome for us to get to. And that’s good news, because we can stop trying. We simply receive love as a gift—the costly love of Christ who will go to the cross and the persistent love of Christ who comes to us again and again with a greeting of peace. Freed by this love, we discover that our whole lives matter. We find meaning and purpose by sharing this love in our homes, our work and the world around us. Because God has been gracious with us, we refuse to write anyone off. We hope and pray God will be gracious with everyone else too.” That’s our hand when we hold some of our best cards. After almost 500 years, we Lutherans still have a message the world needs to see and hear.
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