LIsten to the unabridged audio here: Grace, Drunk Straight
This week in Beyond Sunday School we dove into the first two chapters of Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel: chapter one, “Something Is Radically Wrong,” and chapter two, “The Magnificent Monotony.” I have to say, I deeply appreciate a preacher who can nail the alliteration. Magnificent monotony. That’s good work.
I opened the session with a question, and I’ll ask it of you too: When you hear the word grace, what do you know is true — and what is still hard to trust?
The room answered fast. It’s free. You don’t have to do anything to gain it. And that, frankly, is the part that’s hardest to accept. Someone else added: grace is for everybody. Which drew an honest nod, because if we’re telling the truth, most of us would prefer it weren’t.
Before we get to Manning, we need Ephesians 2 fresh in our minds. Our state before God was not that we were underperformers. Not that we were struggling and trying our best. We were dead. Spiritually dead. And the hinge of the whole passage — the hinge of the whole Christian life, really — is those two words: but God.
Grace is received through faith. It is not earned, not chased down, not won. A few weeks ago I used the image of drowning: if someone pulls you out of the water, even if you wanted to stay under, your body is going to force you to breathe. That’s what receiving grace looks like. You can say “I don’t want grace” all you want, but when grace is given to you, you’re going to receive it, because that’s what you were made for.
And good works? They matter. Ephesians 2:10 says God prepared work beforehand for us to do. But works are not the price of admission. They are the fruit of grace, the response to having received it.
Which brings us to chapter one, and Manning’s diagnosis of the American church: “The Christian community resembles a Wall Street exchange of works, wherein the elite are honored and the ordinary ignored. Love is stifled, freedom shackled, self-righteousness fastened. The institutional church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded.” Too many Christians, he writes, are living in the house of fear and not in the house of love.
The house of fear. That phrase landed in our room like a dropped hymnal.
Our culture has made grace impossible to understand, Manning says. We resonate with slogans like “there’s no free lunch” and “you get what you deserve.” It shapes us more than we admit. Think about the last time you drove past someone asking for money. What was your first thought? Mine, if I’m honest, runs straight to: I don’t know if they’ll spend it on the right things. And if we struggle that much to extend grace, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine the God of the universe extending grace to us. We’ve taken the slogans into ourselves.
And the church, someone in the room said quietly, has to answer for a lot of that. She’s right. Lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, Manning writes, while “many Christians live as if it is only personal discipline and self-denial that will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than what God is doing.” The fear of God got put into us when we were kids, and grace became something we talked about while living some other way entirely.
I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my ministry someone has told me I need to preach more on the Ten Commandments. We get all the Jesus stuff, they say — we really need the accountability. But the whole point of Jesus coming was to free us from the fear of the commandments, because when we actually read them, we fall short on all of them. Probably before I finish breakfast I break most of them.
Isn’t it fascinating that Christians want the Ten Commandments hung in classrooms, but no Christians are clamoring for the Beatitudes to be hung in classrooms? Nobody’s lobbying to post Ephesians 2:8–9 on the wall. The commandments are Scripture, and they’re important. But the beauty of Christ’s coming is the coming of grace — a radical reorientation in which we finally know we can’t live up to the commandments, so grace frees us up to love. As John says, perfect love drives out fear. When we insist on the tablets instead of the sermon, what we’re communicating is that we’re afraid — afraid that those people, whoever “those people” are for us, might get the idea that grace is for them too.
Which raises the question one of our folks asked out loud: why are we so stingy with grace? What are we afraid of?
Jesus already answered us with two parables. In one, the workers hired at the last hour get the same wage as the ones who labored all day, and everybody who worked the whole day is furious. In the other, a man who owes the king more than he could ever repay begs for mercy and gets his whole slate wiped clean — then goes out and throws a fellow servant in jail over the equivalent of a day’s pay. That’s how too many of us handle grace. We get millions forgiven and go beat up people who owe us pennies.
Someone asked the honest follow-up: but what if you commit the same sin over and over? Does that mean you’re taking advantage of grace? No. It means you’re in process. The debtor who keeps sinning isn’t gaming the system. He’s a glorious mess being loved.
Manning reminds us the book was originally published in 1990 — keep that in mind when he writes that the word grace has become “trite and debased through misuse and overuse.” Ecclesiastical officials are still called “your grace.” Sportswriters praised Michael Jordan’s easy grace. A perfume is named Grace. A bad report card is a disgrace. We’ve lost our sense of awe. (Someone in the room added that we’ve done the same thing to “awesome.” It used to describe the beauty of God; now my pizza is awesome. We’ve even got a song about it.)
Then Manning quotes Robert Farrar Capon, and it’s worth reading slowly: “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered in the dusty basement of late medievalism a whole cellar full of 1500-year-old, 200-proof grace — of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly… The word of the gospel, after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps, suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started. Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale.”
No water, no ice, no ginger ale. I think we’re living in a time very much like the one Capon describes. Church after church teaches that we need to add something. In the early 2000s we got books like The Purpose Driven Life and the whole radical-Christianity wave, and the message underneath was: you can’t just be an ordinary Christian. You have to be a Christian with purpose, a Christian who’s radical, a Christian who does X, Y, and Z. No. We get to just be ordinary Christians who have received a radical grace, a radical mercy. And we’re saved for exactly one reason: because God loves us and gave us grace we don’t deserve — by definition.
Instead, too many sermons sound like a to-do list: we need you at this ministry opportunity, we need you on this mission trip, we need X percent of your dollars, and actually we need more of your dollars, and we need you at the Bible study and the small group and the soup kitchen. I once sat in a leadership meeting at a large church where I asked, “How would you define a successful member?” The answers: attends worship every week, in a small group, attends midweek classes, goes to Sunday school, pays their tithes. All of it was external activity. All of it was measurable works. There was nothing about growing in love, joy, peace, patience — nothing that looks like the fruit of the Spirit.
Chapter two opens with creation’s awe — Manning writes that “creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God’s power. We stutter and stammer about God’s holiness. We tremble before God’s majesty. And yet we grow squeamish and skittish before God’s love.” I am flabbergasted, he says, “by the widespread refusal across this land to think big about a loving God.”
Whenever I write about the love of God, I get emails and messages that start with “yeah, but…” My granddad would have said, “Yeah, but doesn’t live here.” We love the God who speaks creation into existence. We love the God so holy you take your sandals off near a bush he’s burning without burning up. But the God who is supremely loving? We immediately start making a list in our minds of all the people that love can’t possibly apply to.
We don’t want to share him. And as someone in the room said, the deeper truth is we don’t want to love them either. We need the whole picture of God — love without justice is just sentimentality — but it’s remarkable how easily we set aside the love. Folks a little to the right tend to distrust the love of God and cling to his justice; folks a little to the left tend to distrust his justice and cling to his love. Both get a little goofy. All of us need to re-embrace the bigness of his love.
We really do like having enemies. During the protests of 2018 and 2019, a lot of signs read “Love Trumps Hate,” and sociologists noted the slogan cuts two ways: love overcomes hate — or we just rally around hating somebody new. There’s a fallen instinct in us to need a bad guy, someone we can point to and say, “Well, at least I’m not like them.” Grace refuses to play that game.
Near the end of the chapter Manning draws the contrast between two gods. The God of the gospel of grace “out of love for us sent the only son he ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumble and fall, cried for his milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit… fixed on a cross and died whispering forgiveness on us.” The God of the legalistic Christian, on the other hand, “is often unpredictable, erratic, incapable of all manner of prejudices… Sunday worship becomes a superstitious insurance policy against his whims.”
That’s the difference between running from punishment and running into relationship. Are you following Jesus because you’re afraid of hell, or because you’re safe? Believing out of fear isn’t sin — you’re just missing out on what’s actually on offer. It’s like the difference between two kinds of kids. Some tell their parents the truth because they don’t want to get in trouble for lying — and the minute they realize their parents won’t find out, they keep them in the dark. Others tell their parents everything because they know they’re loved no matter what. I knew with my mom I could tell her anything. She might look at me with white-hot rage that said “I don’t like you right now,” but I never doubted she loved me. I never had to hide.
A friend in the room who does counseling put a name to it: unconditional positive regard — dealing honestly with a person’s behavior while holding their worth as a human being. That’s how God looks at us. And Manning insists this doesn’t lead to spiritual laziness. “Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure.” I know I want to be a better person for Amy, not to earn her love — I can’t earn it, she gives it freely — but as a response to it. That’s exactly how it works with God. Chasing a fear-based God is exhausting. You wear yourself out, and eventually you walk away — from a God who doesn’t actually exist. That capricious, erratic God is an idol, one we’ve mostly made in our own image.
The room got honest about where that fear comes from. One of our folks was raised Catholic and laughed through Manning’s confession stories because they were hers: counting mortal sins and venial sins all day, every day. When her grandmother died, her mother told her and her sister to pray Grammy out of purgatory, and she thought: how do we know she’s there? How do I know when she gets out? How does she get out? She left church countless Sundays thinking, “I am never going to be good enough. No matter what I do, no matter what I say.”
Manning’s line for her — for all of us — is this: “Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are.” God’s going to love you whether you’re sinning right now or not. There’s a myth that once you accept Christ you’ll be sinless from then on. No. It’s okay. He loves you no matter what.
Manning knows, because he lived it. He writes about becoming an alcoholic after his conversion: “It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure and took my eyes off Jesus… because justification by grace through faith means I have been set in relationship with God and not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table.” I love this man. We are a glorious mess. He calls himself a saint with a high capacity for beer; we’re Presbyterians, so I’ll say I’m a saint with a high capacity for scotch. And Manning is honest enough to admit that before grace got hold of him, he preached some of the very same stuff he’s now dismantling.
So what does God actually ask of us? Manning says there’s only one thing: “that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything, and for whom God is enough.” That’s the root of peace. The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners — for the weak who know they don’t have it all together and aren’t too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.
I’ll close the way Manning closes, with a little story: a sinner was forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. “They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.” And God said, “What are you complaining about? They won’t let me in either.”
When we chase legalism and set aside grace, we’re not letting God in either.