LIsten to the unabridged audio here: Tilted Halos
What happens when we stop keeping our halos on too tight
Beyond Sunday School — The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 3 and 4
I still crack up at where Brennan Manning says the phrase “ragamuffin gospel” came from.
He overheard some valley girls talking, and one of them said something like, “Like, Jesus is totally intense — dying for ragamuffins and all.”
I can hear it in my head. Maybe I have watched Legally Blonde too many times, but I can hear it.
And yet, for all the comedy in that, Manning is getting at something deadly serious. We are rooted — absolutely rooted — in the necessity of grace.
Jesus hung out with rabble
Manning opens chapter 3, “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” with a list that ought to stop us in our tracks:
Jesus spent a disproportionate amount of time with people described in the Gospels as the poor, the blind, the lame, the lepers, the hungry, sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, those possessed by unclean spirits, all who labor and are heavy burdened, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last, the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
In short, Jesus hung out with rabble.
With ragamuffins.
Someone in our room heard that list and said what I think most of us were thinking: sounds like all of us.
That is exactly right. He hung out with all of us.
But then Manning writes the sentence I very often skip over, and I think it might be the most important sentence in the chapter:
Obviously, his love for failures and nobodies was not an exclusive love.
That would merely substitute one class prejudice for another.
Here is what can happen when we get enraptured by this vision of the ragamuffin gospel: we can become Pharisees about being ragamuffins. We can look at the poor, the blind, the lame, the sinners, the lost — see ourselves in them, which is good — and then turn around and despise everybody outside that group.
Yes, Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes. He also ate, again and again, with Pharisees. He was at their tables constantly.
The love Manning is describing is not a love that lets us create a brand-new category — Jesus loves us ragamuffins, and by definition he despises those other people who are not ragamuffins.
That is not the deal.
This is an inclusive love. And that is beyond important.
Poor in spirit can have a pretty good life
Part of what Manning is trying to get us to see is that you can be poor in spirit even if you grew up with every privilege you could possibly have.
The one who is poor in spirit is the one who recognizes that everything she has, everything he has, comes from the hand of God.
I think about my kids. They grew up — and yes, I am tooting my own horn a little bit here — with a mom and dad who loved them well, who tried to demonstrate the love of God, who leaned into grace and mercy. There would be a danger for them not to be poor in spirit.
But I think they are. I think they know that all of that love was by grace. They did not deserve it. They were, by God’s sovereign goodness, just born into our family. And so they carry this great sense of gratitude with them.
That, to me, is poor in spirit. Not a performance of brokenness. A recognition: all I have comes from the hand of God.
Only now
Then Manning gives us what I think is the key line of the chapter.
He is talking about little children — and about little John Dyer, the boy who showed up at Brennan and Roslyn’s house with one thing on his mind: Where are the cookies? No past. No résumé. Just present-tense need and present-tense trust.
Manning writes:
When Jesus tells us to become like little children, he is inviting us to forget what lies behind. … Whatever we have done in the past, be it good or evil, great or small, is irrelevant to our stance before God today. It is only now that we are in the presence of God.
How does that strike you?
In our room, somebody named both sides of it honestly. First: relief. He’s not going to hold me accountable for the things I did that I wish I hadn’t done. And then, right behind it: But I did a lot of things right. I hope he recognizes that.
That is us, isn’t it?
We want grace for our failures. We want credit for our successes.
And so the conversation went where it always goes — to works. To the scorecard. Are we going to be judged by what we have done?
I have trouble with the scorecard version of God. I think most of us do.
Yes, James says, “I’ll show you my faith by my works, for faith without works is dead.” Yes, Paul says God has prepared good works beforehand for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). Works are real. They are the signs of life. If you walk by a plant in your garden and it never blooms, never greens, stays gray and dry season after season, you are probably going to conclude it is dead. It might be out of season for a while. But if it never blooms?
Our lives — how we live, not just what we say — show whether something is alive in us.
And yes, Paul says some will be saved “as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15). That sounds ominous, and it should. Corinth was a mess — I called it NashVegas in our sermon series, Nashville and Las Vegas mashed together — and their lives were not reflecting the grace they had received.
But here is the tension we have to hold: God’s grace is so overwhelming, so beyond our comprehension, that we will never wrap our minds around it. And because it is that amazing, we respond by doing good. The doing is the response. It is never the payment.
The thief got there on somebody else’s word
Think about the thief on the cross. He had no time. No church attendance. No Bible study. No prayer life to speak of. No fruit of evangelism.
Scottish preacher Alistair Begg tells it like this: imagine that man standing at the pearly gates, and St. Peter starts asking questions.
Tell me about your theology. How often did you go to church? What about your Bible study? Your prayer life?
To every question, the man has the same answer: I didn’t. I never.
Finally Peter says, “Well then, sir, why do you think you should come into paradise?”
And the man says, “The man on the cross in the middle told me I could.”
Well, why didn’t you say that from the beginning? That’s all that matters.
He demonstrated his faith in that moment — he turned to Jesus — and yet it was purely, scandalously by grace.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8–9)
That is grace. That is the grace.
So what do we do with people who say they believe in Jesus but whose lives don’t seem to show it? Or people who claim faith and live beautifully? Jesus told a parable about wheat and weeds growing together, and the punch line is not flattering to our instincts: it is not up to us to sort them out. Drive past a wheat field and you cannot tell wheat from weeds until harvest. It is not our job to determine who is being honest and who is false. That is between them and God — and somehow we know God is perfectly just, perfectly loving, and gracious beyond our math.
That is the hard part. And it is also the freeing part.
What “works” actually looks like
Someone in the room asked whether we put too much focus on our definition of works — as if works mostly means physically doing things. Helping somebody dig up their yard. Mowing a lawn.
Isn’t it also how we live our lives in relationship to other people? Do I show you the same grace God shows me? Do I show you kindness, respect, courtesy, decency?
Yes. It is both.
We talked about a man one of us grew up knowing — ran a booming party store, later became president of the town’s only bank. Quietly, he was the person families in trouble could go to. As a banker, he helped people get into homes who had no other way to afford them. In retirement, he was the guy out visiting people with cancer, people who were dying in their homes. If you were making a list of acts, you could not think of anyone who had done more.
And we talked about a woman we knew in a nursing home who had no knees, who went from bed to wheelchair and back again. She could not get out and do much of anything. But whenever we visited her, she blessed us. She prayed. That was her work, and it was not small.
Works is not a category of religious busyness. Works is a life lived out of grace, in whatever body, in whatever season, you have been given.
The issue is trust
Here is where Manning is so helpful. When we talk about grace versus works, we almost always think of doing as the problem, as if grace and doing are opposites.
That way of thinking has been colored for most of us by the Protestant Reformation — faith versus works, grace versus works — and it is not wrong, exactly. But it can mislead us if we stop there.
Because the real issue underneath the debate is not doing. It is trust.
What am I trusting in to be forgiven? What am I trusting in to be brought into the presence of God? My good deeds? Or Christ’s righteousness?
If we trust ourselves, we are in trouble. We will never do enough. It is not a moral scale where we just need one more good deed to tip the balance against the bad. The problem is that one bad — one falling short against an infinite and eternal God — is a hole we, as finite and mortal creatures, can never dig ourselves out of.
And that is exactly where grace becomes even more radical. Even more scandalous. Even more beyond what we can imagine.
Manning puts it this way: there could be no bargaining with God in some petty poker-table atmosphere. Our puny works do not entitle us to barter with God. Everything depends on his good pleasure.
I love that. No poker table. No chips. No, Well, God, I did this, so you owe me that.
Grace comes. Then the doing comes — led, as best I can tell, by the Holy Spirit, who leads us into all truth — as a response.
The scandal of the table
If chapter 3 is about who the gospel is for, the table is where you see it.
Manning writes that nowhere in the New Testament is the privileged position of nobodies and marginal people disclosed more dramatically than in Jesus’ ministry of meal sharing. In our time, it is scarcely possible to appreciate the scandal Jesus caused by his table fellowship with sinners.
He paints it with a picture from 1925: if a wealthy plantation owner in Atlanta had invited four Black cotton pickers to his mansion for Sunday dinner — cocktails beforehand, brandy and conversation afterward — the Georgia aristocracy would have been outraged, Alabama infuriated, and the Ku Klux Klan apoplectic. Sixty or seventy years ago in the Deep South, the caste system was inviolable. To break it was to lose your reputation.
In first-century Palestinian Judaism, the class system was enforced just as rigorously. It was forbidden to mingle with sinners outside the law. Table fellowship with beggars, with tax collectors — traitors collecting taxes for Rome from their own people and taking a kickback — and with prostitutes was a religious, social, and cultural taboo.
And Jesus did it. On purpose. Repeatedly.
Grace frees us to go be present with the people on the fringe.
You have to wonder what we would do if Jesus showed up today. If the Christ came now, arrived on the scene as an adult ready to teach, and started having dinner with women who have had abortions and were proud of it. With prostitutes — still looked down on today. Maybe with LGBTQ folks. Maybe with Democrats. Maybe with Republicans. Maybe — and this would be a stretch — even with a Buckeye fan.
How would good, solid Christians respond?
We would lose our minds. We would be apoplectic.
There is no way that could be the Christ, because he would never share a table with — fill in the blank.
And yet he did.
I get asked sometimes whether the Bible says we should not hang out with certain people. It does not. What is common is Christian authors telling us to be careful who we hang out with, because who you hang out with is who you become.
Maybe. But Jesus hung out with sinners, and how did that turn out for him? He got crucified.
Maybe some of those writers just want to keep us from being crucified.
God created no junk. That was something one of us said in the room, and it has stayed with me.
Manning ends the chapter by saying the beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus — the essential tenderness of his heart, his way of looking at the world, his mode of relating to you and me.
“If you really want to understand a man, don’t just listen to what he says, but watch what he does.”
Watch Jesus at the table. That tells you the man.
Your halo is on too tight
Chapter 4, “Tilted Halos,” opens with a joke that is so perfect I wish I had written it.
A man walks into a doctor’s office. “Doctor, I have this awful headache that never leaves me. Could you give me something for it?”
“I will,” says the doctor, “but let me check a few things first. Do you drink a lot of liquor?”
“No, don’t touch the stuff.”
“How about smoking?”
“Disgusting. Never in my life.”
The doctor is a bit embarrassed to ask the next one. “You know the way some men are… any running around at night?”
“Of course not. Who do you take me for? I’m in bed by ten o’clock at the latest.”
“Tell me,” says the doctor, “this pain in your head — is it a sharp, shooting kind of pain?”
“Yes! That’s it. A sharp, shooting pain.”
“Simple, my dear fellow. Your trouble is you have your halo on too tight. All we need to do is loosen it a bit.”
The trouble with our ideals, Manning says, is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.
The tilted halo is what grace does to a person. It loosens the thing.
Manning gives us three marks of the disciple who lives by grace rather than law:
- A decisive conversion from mistrust to trust.
- Genuine gratitude.
- Absolute, rigorous honesty.
That is the whole chapter, and, if I am honest, most of the Christian life.
Because when we look at the places where the fences and walls get built — where the message is mostly you can’t be with those people — what do we so often see? Mistrust. The opposite of gratitude, which might be privilege or disdain or thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. And, if we are telling the truth, a fair amount of dishonesty.
One of my favorite jokes: if you ever go fishing with a Baptist, make sure there are two of them. Otherwise the one will drink all your beer.
It is funny because it is honest about dishonesty. In the holier-than-thou crowd, there is an abject dishonesty — as though they are perfect.
They are not. None of us are.
Once you grasp the necessity and centrality of grace, you can be honest. You can admit that you break just about every commandment before your first cup of coffee. You do not have to hold on to pretenses anymore.
There is great freedom in honesty.
Afraid of being found out
When we are not living in grace — when we are living by the law, trying to put on some sort of fake holiness — we go through life deathly afraid someone will find us out.
That we don’t really have it all together. That we aren’t all that holy. That we aren’t all that righteous. (Come to game night at my house sometime. You will see all the unrighteousness you need.)
I did not go to a seminary where people lived on campus, but one of my mentors did, and he said on Sunday mornings in married housing — early spring and early fall, windows open — you could hear all the fights. And then you would see those same people at church, because everybody pretty much went to the same church, and they were the perfect couple.
Some people say the most unholy hour of the week is the hour before church, getting there — yelling at the kids, yelling at each other — and then we show up and everyone is a happy, smiling family.
We all giggle uncomfortably because we all know it is true.
None of us want to get found out.
Grace is the end of that fear. Not because we become impressive, but because we no longer have to pretend.
And that honesty runs deeper than confession. It is about telling the truth when life is terrible.
Doug, in our room, talked about getting his heart diagnosis and wanting to be an example — upbeat, positive, a good witness. And then he would get to church on a Sunday when he was not feeling well, and Janet would come up and ask, “How you doing?” and it was so hard not to be truthful. It is really hard to say “I’m doing great” when somebody who cares about you actually wants to know.
Here is the beautiful thing about grace: you don’t have to lie.
My friend John — one-legged John, the best — never lied about his cancer. If he was having a terrible day, he would say it. “This is terrible. I’ve got phantom pain. I hurt. I’m on this chemo, it’s making me puke and poop at the same time, my hair’s falling out, I look like Uncle Fester.”
And then he would always say, “And yet… I have one more day. One more day to be with Kristen. One more day to demonstrate God’s love to people. And because I’m laid out in this bed and I cannot do anything — I’m just a smeared piece of nothing — I’ve laid here with my index cards and I’ve prayed. I prayed for all of them. I prayed for you.”
My first conversation with him after they took his leg, he was about as low as I ever remember him being. He said, “Yeah, this is the worst. But on the upside, they didn’t take the wrong leg.”
That was all he had in that moment. And it was enough.
You never have to be untruthful. You get to say, “This is terrible, and yet…” And the and yet is where you begin to see grace, even in the darkest moments, because John held on to his joy with a dogged determination to keep looking for grace there.
Gratitude is the only possible response
The second mark — gratitude — grows right out of that.
One of us said she has been thankful to God lately just for letting her get old. For looking back over a life, thanking him for letting her live long enough to realize some things, to see what she did back then and what he has allowed her to learn, and to become a different person.
Someone else put it simply: if you don’t have gratitude, you just take it for granted. You don’t appreciate God. You start to think all of this is your due.
Put a sign over the kitchen sink that says Thank you, as one family in our room has, and you start to see it.
When we really come to grips with the fact that we cannot earn it — that God has to, by his grace, give us this forgiveness — gratitude becomes the only possible response.
We talked last week about the forgiven debtor who went straight out and throttled the man who owed him a little. He had no gratitude, because somehow he believed he deserved the forgiveness he’d been given. So he turned right back to judgmentalism. That is what a graceless heart does.
And gratitude is hard. Someone said it plainly: it is hard to show gratitude and be gracious when you’re having a tough day. It is. It’s a test. That’s where it gets brutal.
One person in our room, on a tough day, goes outside, looks up at the sky, and thanks God for the sky that day. Blue sky. Clouds. Trees. Squirrels. Something, anything, to be thankful for.
Our week-one practice fits here: sit in silence for five minutes. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t confess anything. Just sit and feel his presence. That was hard for more than one of us, because we immediately want to start thanking him for this and this and this, and then we start asking for things. It is hard simply to be quiet and let his Spirit be present.
But gratitude is not a mood we wait for. It is a way of seeing. Even in the depths of despair — a terrible cold, a death, a diagnosis — the question becomes: Can I see Jesus when I’m in that?
If I can, everything changes.
From mistrust to trust
Which brings us back to the first mark, because mistrust is where legalism starts.
Under a legalistic picture of God, there is a level you have to reach — do this, and this, and this — and if you don’t, you fall short. We learn to expect shortfall from ourselves, and then we expect it from other people too. We don’t know what God is going to do. We don’t know what his judgment will be. Just because I think I’ve met the standard doesn’t mean he believes I have.
Someone remembered a Christian teacher in a Flint high school who threw open the door of the smoke-filled teachers’ lounge and announced, “You’re all going to hell.”
Well. That wasn’t good.
Kind of like when we do it on Facebook. Super, super helpful.
That is mistrust doing evangelism.
Trust is different. Trust says God is in power, God is good, and I do not have to manage outcomes I was never given to manage. Trust turns a person outward — to the table, to the fringe, to the neighbor — instead of turning us inward to protect an image.
Nothing can separate you
Manning closes the chapter with words I want to sit with for a while:
To be alive is to be broken. To be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ.
The saved sinner with the tilted halo has been converted from mistrust to trust, has arrived at an inner poverty of spirit, and lives as best he or she can in rigorous honesty with self, others, and God.
And then he asks the question the gospel of grace puts to every one of us: Who shall separate you from the love of Christ? What are you afraid of?
Are you afraid your weakness could separate you from the love of Christ? It can’t.
Your inadequacies? They can’t.
Your inner poverty? It can’t.
A difficult marriage, loneliness, anxiety over your children’s future? They can’t.
Negative self-image? It can’t.
Economic hardship, racial hatred, street crime? They can’t.
Rejection by loved ones, or the suffering of loved ones? They can’t.
Persecution by authorities, going to jail? They can’t.
Nuclear war? It can’t.
Mistakes, fears, uncertainties? They can’t.
And someone in our room, bless him, added one more to the list: being a Detroit Lions fan.
It can’t.
The gospel of grace calls out: Nothing can ever separate you from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So loosen the halo a bit.
Live tilted — trusting instead of mistrusting, grateful instead of grasping, honest instead of hiding — and go sit at whatever table Jesus is sitting at.
You will fit right in. It’s full of ragamuffins.