the Pitt 34: the Elasticity of Grace

Strange, the elasticity of grace...I find it this morning in a short respite, a quiet place.  I need it because I'm a bit crispy at the edges because I've been over-doing it a little lately, especially just before, during and after the Vineyard National Conference in Phoenix.  Such a great time, but it was also such a busy time for me, and I need a little grace to just...be.  The same kind of grace that is a primary element of the ancient faith of the Hebrews who were chosen and elected through grace by God to be a light to the nations.

Which reminds me: as I have been exploring my take on some "debatable issues" with the neo-Reformed crowd, a few friends have asked me to "get specific" with something in this little side road I'm taking us down, so: Election.  For myself, I like what my Australian acquaintance Scott Aitken said about salvation and grace and Election (after reading a book about it - Scott is a voracious reader!): "The idea of election should be seen as a unique vocation of revealing God, rather than what is often understood as special redemptive privilege."  This my friends, is an illuminating insight for me.  For the neo-Reformed that is probably an extremely debatable issue (or perhaps seen as a non-debatable issue, which is a debatable issue in itself, right?).

 But the elasticity of grace has just been on my mind lately.  Of course, Jesus talks about elasticity too, when Jesus talks of wineskins, but we debate this issue: what in the world are the wineskins an image for? what do they represent? what - for His name's sake - did He mean?

Now it seems to me there are a plethora of interpretations concerning this,  but the question remains: what is he alluding to?

• wineskins as an image of covenants?
• are we the wineskins?
• the practice of sabbath?
• the oral traditions built up around torah?
• law versus grace?

I do like what my friend David Hayward had to say about this in his review of the book Pagan Christianity (which personally I did not particularly care for) :

"Viola and Barna suggest that Jesus came as a "Revolutionary, tearing apart the old wineskin with a view to bringing in the new" (p. 246). My take on that parable is that when the new enters the old, the old simply cannot hold it. It will fall apart. And I think this is exactly what Jesus does: he simply enters our world, like a computer virus, and our systems, traditions, beliefs, theologies, practices, religion, spirituality. everything!...slowly, or rapidly, begin to unravel. They cannot hold him. He came as a free man within the system, but not part of it. He was an observant Jew and Rabbi...except when he wasn't. And he wasn't precisely when our liberation was at stake. And this, it seems to me, is the best way to be...personally and corporately."

Whatever it is about wineskins, David gets to the heart of it: the focus in the metaphor is on newness and elasticity, isn't it? Oh the dilemma: how to live a life abandoned in a Saviour whose grace has eternal elasticity?

Yet now that I think of it, we constantly must seek this sort of elasticity - being re-newed and stretched - for us to truly follow Him into the most dangerous and difficult way of living.  The kind of living that may get you accused of being a traitor to dogma and doctrine and may get you executed by the "powers that be."

So...are we really willing to live the kind of life Jesus lead?  The kind that could get us killed as a traitor? That's the kind of radical love that some people play with but most will not follow-through when push-comes-to-shove and the details and pressure of life in this age are brought to bear...(just as Chesterton says: 'Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.')  My friend Dave Schmelzer up in Boston turned me on to one of the best speeches of all time that explores the depths of this while addressing a thoroughly buoyant and secular audience: the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon College.  He talks bravely and honestly about how easy it is to get lost in the abstract ideas that mesmerize us so much so that we miss what's happening right in front of us.  I think David Foster Wallace - in this speech - pushes people with the elasticity of grace in such a profound way, because if we really trust that Jesus' message that the Reign of God has arrived in Him, it may be lurking in the crevices of our ordinary lives and experiences, those situations that are "...not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."  For those who are audio-inclined, you can hear the speech here: Part 1 and Part 2.  For those more oriented to reading it, check it out here.

And if as David Foster Wallace suggests, "The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death,"
then perhaps all of this speaks to the amazing thing about the elasticity of grace: it stretches as far as we stretch in following after Christ.

[to be continued...]