Thursday, April 12, 2012

ERNIE BEAL: Reciprocal Grace

Our Hebrew scriptures tell a fascinating story about a God who loves a people who fall into infidelity quickly and often.   The text tells also how the people's experiences with God end falling short, at least insofar as life working out as they would wish.   Jesus sums up this reciprocal disappointment in a fascinating way: with the admonition that the people should love God as God loves them.  One should appreciate the irony in this admonition--God loves the people though they have acted badly and the people must love with an equivalent sense of grace.   In other words, whether merited or not this loving relationship must exist with equal intensity--i.e. with an unlimited capacity for foregiving and forgetting the errrors, missteps, and misdeads now history.

Jesus offers also a special twist--an added admonition.  People must love their neighbors (everyone else) with an intensity equal to the way God loves them and they love God.   This special spin produces the Christian challenge:  getting over and getting past someone else's mistakes and bad behavior by maintaining a loving relationship with everyone in the present moment.   It takes great effort to set history aside, to hold that what someeone once did or who they once were maintains no place in our "this moment" relation.   Too many folk find it hard to get beyond events now past and sins once committed.   More often than not folks point fingers, remain hostile, alter behavior, and make harsh judgments about what someone once did.  Unconditional, in the present moment, love and grace are not within their grasp.

This problem is not restricted to folks outside the Christian tradition.  It affects many people who attend worship regularly and consider themselves "good Christians."  Of course, they rightfully know that God continues to love them in spite of this weakness.  Yet one wonders why applying that lesson eludes them.

As I work with faith-based service organizations I find this difficulty extends to the organizational level.  Agencies driven by a mission where they ask others to accept or disregard historic failings by the clientele served have difficulty "walking the talk" insofar as their own agency's practices are concerned.   That point smacked me across the nose recently while consulting with an agency committed to helping former criminal offenders find employment post-release. To my astonishment no one on the managerial team accepted the hypocrisy implicit in asking other companies to grant "grace" (ignore records) when they refused to do likewise with highly qualified candidates who sought agency employment.  

I think faith-based enterprises have a special obligation to lead the way by embodying grace in all that they do, including their human resource practice.  All of us, of course, ought to do better in this respect too.   That goodness God loves us even when we fail to do so.

Ernie Beal

http://erniebeal.brandyourself.com