A minister I once knew well told me a story of her oral exams prior to graduating from Wesley Seminary. During the course of the exam, Prof. Roy Morrison, a wonderful, curmudgeonly old Unitarian Universalist skeptic on all matters theological (he taught philosophy of religion) asked her, after she mentioned grace, "So, is grace like electricity?" Her response was beautiful, and while it probably didn't satisfy Roy all that much, it has captured my imagination ever since: "No, it's more like vulnerability." As a United Methodist, grace is a central tenet of our way of thinking about the relationship between God and humanity. For Wesley, grace was the central fact, and mystery, of the divine-human encounter.
As fact, it explains wonderful unmerited love of God that goes before us, runs with us, and prepares us for growth in love. As mystery, it serves as no explanation at all, because it begs all sorts of questions that, unless we rely upon all sorts of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, resist any explanation at all. This mystery - why would the God who created the Universe care all that much about us? Why would a God offended by the gulf that separates us from Divine Guidance and freedom grant us access to that love and freedom unmerited and unwarranted? To these questions all sorts of answers have been posed, but none of them satisfy, because they all end up begging questions that result in a spiral of reflection and contradiction. For some, that is enough to reject the entire scheme. For me, however, it just means that there are mysteries that are best left as mystery. No one can explain gravity, but we cannot deny its reality. In a theological sense, grace is like gravity. It is all pervasive, the source of our faith and the unexplainable mystery behind the impossibility that is the Christian faith. We grope in the dark, with only grace as our guide. It ignites not just our faith, but our hope and our love as well.
To describe grace as vulnerability captures one of the mysteries of grace that escape any explanation. It is the vulnerability of God that opens the Divine life to human sin, waywardness, finitude, and death. It is the vulnerability of human persons who open themselves to the promise of life, of hope, of love, and of freedom before God and other human beings to live and declare their allegiance to something wholly other. Mutual vulnerability is always dangerous; we place ourselves open to the Divine with the understanding that such not only brings hope and faith, but also danger and the threat of annihilation. We always live with these threats, of course. Living in the light and faith in grace only makes us aware of our contingency, our sinfulness, and death. Grace is the vulnerability of Jesus hanging on a cross and forgiving those who put him there. Grace is the refusal to surrender to all those forces that tell us we are wrong, nonsensical, irrational, illogical. Grace is the source of that human audacity that dares to speak of that for which words are always inadequate. Grace is the willingness to be open to a world and a life that desires to close its eyes to its radical dependence upon that which it cannot see, describe, or even make sense of.
Grace is like vulnerability. It is like daring to be led in the dark through horrible dangers that threaten life and sanity, trusting in this invisible yet very real presence to guide us home safely. I like that.
