The Arsenal of Grace

Another reading from Philip Yancey's book Grace Notes is the reading for today, titled The Arsenal of Grace. It's taken from his book, What's So Amazing About Grace, (135-136). Food for thought . . .

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"Like a gale of pure air driving out stagnant clouds of pollution, peaceful revolution spread across the globe. In 1989 alone ten nations comprising half a billion people experienced nonviolent revolutions. In many of these, the Christian minority played a crucial role. Stalin's mocking question, "How many divisions has the Pope?" got its answer.

"Then in 1994 came the most surprising revolution of all, surprising because nearly everyone expected bloodshed. South Africa, though, was also the mother lode of peaceful protest, for it was there that Mohandas Gandhi, studying Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount, developed his strategy of nonviolence (which Martin Luther King Jr. later adopted). With much opportunity to practice, South Africans had perfected the use of the weapons of grace. Walter Wink tells of a black woman who was walking on the street with her children when a white man spat in her face. She stopped, and said, "Thank you, and now for the children." Nonplussed, the man was unable to respond.

"In one squatter's village, black South African women suddenly found themselves surrounded by soldiers with bulldozers. The soldiers announced through a bullhorn that the women had two minutes to clear out before their village would be razed. The women had no weapons, and the men of the village were away at work. Knowing the puritanical tendencies of rural Dutch Reformed Afrikaners, the black women stood in front of the bulldozers and stripped off all their clothes. The police fled, and the village remains standing to this day.

"News reports barely mentioned the key role that Christian faith played in South Africa's peaceful revolution. After a mediation team led by Henry Kissinger had abandoned all hope of convincing the Inkatha Freedom Party to participate in elections, a Christian diplomat from Kenya met privately with all the principals, prayed with them, and helped change their minds. (A mysteriously malfunctioning compass on an airplane delayed one flight, making this crucial meeting possible.)
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Taken from Grace Notes by Philip Yancey. Reading for September 24, originally in Philip Yancey's book What's So Amazing About Grace?

Grace in Action

Again, from Philip Yancey . . . this post from his book Rumors of Another World (222-24), Zondervan 2003.

" . . . We live in a world that judges people by their behavior and requires criminals, debtors, and moral failures to live with their consequences. Even the church finds it difficult to forgive those who fall short."

"Grace is irrational, unfair, unjust, and only makes sense if I believe in another world governed by a merciful God . . . "Amazing Grace," a rare hymn that in recent times climbed the charts of popular music, . . . John Newton, a gruff and bawdy slave trader, "a wretch like me," wrote that hymn after being transformed by amazing grace."

"When the world sees grace in action, it falls silent. Nelson Mandela taught the world a lesson in grace when, after emerging from prison after twenty-seven years and being elected president of South Africa, he asked his jailer to join him on the inauguration platform. He then appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to head an official government panel with a daunting name, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC]. Mandela sought to defuse the natural pattern of revenge that he had seen in so many countries where one oppressed race or tribe took control from another.

"For the next two-and-a-half years South Africans listened to reports of atrocities coming out of the TRC hearings. The rules were simple: if a white policeman or army officer voluntarily faced his accusers, confessed his crime, and fully acknowledged his guilt, he could not be tried and punished for that crime. Hard-liners grumbled about the obvious injustice of letting criminals go free, but Mandela insisted that the country needed healing even more than it needed justice.

"At one TRC hearing, a policeman named van de Broek recounted an incident when he and other officers shot an eighteen-year-old boy and burned the body. Eight years later van de Broek returned to the same house and seized the boy's father. The wife was forced to watch as policemen bound her husband on a woodpile, poured gasoline over his body, and ignited it.

"The courtroom grew hushed as the elderly woman who had lost first her son and then her husband was given a chance to respond. "What do you want from Mr. van de Broek?" the judge asked. She said she wanted van de Broek to go to the place where they burned her husband's body and gather up the dust so she could give him a decent burial. His head down, the policeman nodded agreement.

"Then she added a further request, "Mr. van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot of love to give. Twice a month, I would like for him to come to the ghetto and spend a day with me so I can be a mother to him. And I would like Mr. van de Broek to know . . . that I forgive him . . . I would like to embrace him so he can know my forgiveness is real."

"Spontaneously, some in the courtroom began singing "Amazing Grace" as the elderly woman made her way to the witness stand, but van de Broek did not hear the hymn. He had fainted, overwhelmed.

"Justice was not done in South Africa that day, nor in the entire country during months of agonizing procedures by the TRC. Something beyond justice took place. "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," said Paul. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu understood that when evil is done, one response alone can overcome the evil. Revenge perpetuates the evil. Justice punishes it. Evil is overcome by good only if the injured party absorbs it, refusing to allow it to go any further. And that is the pattern of otherworldly grace that Jesus showed in his life and death."

(From Rumors of Another World by Philip Yancey, published in 2003 by Zondervan. From pages 222-24)

Grace in Action

Prevailing Grace

From a recent entry (July 22) in Philip Yancey's book, Grace Notes:

"Recent times have seen public dramas of forgiveness play out in nations formerly controlled by Communists.

In 1983, before the Iron Curtain lifted and during the period of martial law, Pope John II visited Poland, where he conducted a huge open-air mass. Throngs of people, organized in orderly groups by their parishes, marched over the Poniatowski Bridge and streamed toward the stadium. Just before the bridge, the route crossed directly in front of the Communist Party's Central Committee Building, and hour after hour the platoons of marchers chanted in unison, "We forgive you, we forgive you!" as they passed the building. Some said the slogan with heartfelt sincerity. Others shouted it almost with contempt, as if to say, "You're nothing--we don't even hate you."

A few years later Jerry Popieluszko, a thirty-five-year-old priest whose sermons had electrified Poland, was found floating in the Vistula River with his eyes gouged out and his fingernails torn off. Once again the Catholics took to the streets,s marching with banners that read "We forgive. We forgive." Popieluszko had preached the same message Sunday after Sunday to the multitude who filled the square in front of his church: "Defend the truth. Overcome evil with good." After his death they continued to obey him, and in the end it was exactly this spirit of prevailing grace that caused the regime to collapse.

All over Eastern Europe the struggle of forgiveness is still being waged. Should a pastor in Russia forgive the KGB officers who imprisoned him and razed his church? Should Romanians forgive the doctors and nurses who chained sick orphans to their beds? Should citizens of Eastern Germany forgive the stool pigeons--including seminary professors, pastors, and treacherous spouses--who spied on them? When human rights activist Vera Wollenberger learned that it was her husband who had betrayed her to the secret police, resulting in her arrest and exile, she ran to the bathroom and vomited.

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten--a principle that applies to nations as well as individuals. Though forgiveness is never easy, and may take generations, what else can break the chains that enslave people to their historical past?"

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[Taken from Philip Yancey's book What's So Amazing About Grace? pp. 125-26]

The Power of Grace

The reading in Philip Yancey's Grace Notes (Zondervan, 2009) for July 21 reads as follows:

"In 1990 the world watched a drama of forgiveness enacted on the stage of world politics. After East Germany chose a parliament in its first free elections, the representatives convened to take up the reins of government. The Communist bloc was changing daily, West Germany was proposing the radical step of reunification, and the new parliament had many weighty matters of state to consider. For their first official act, however, they decided to vote on this extraordinary statement, drafted in the language of theology, not politics:

"We, the first freely elected parliamentarians of the GDR . . . on behalf of the citizens of this land, admit responsibility for the humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish men, women and children. We feel sorrow and shame, and acknowledge this burden of German history. . . . Immeasurable suffering was inflicted on the peoples of the world during the era of national socialism. . . . We ask all the Jews of the world to forgive us. We ask the people of Israel to forgive us for the hypocrisy and hostility of official East German policies toward Israel and for the persecution and humiliation of Jewish citizens in our country after 1945 as well."

East Germany's parliament passed the statement unanimously. Members rose to their feet for a long ovation and then paused for a moment of silence in memory of the Jews who had died in the Holocaust.

What did such an act of parliament accomplish? Certainly it did not bring the murdered Jews back to life or undo the monstrous deeds of Nazism. No, but it helped loosen the stranglehold of guilt that had been choking East Germans for nearly half a century--five decades in which their government had steadfastly denied any need for forgiveness.

For its part, West Germany had already repented officially for the abominations. In addition, West Germany has paid out sixty billion dollars in reparations to Jews. The fact that a relationship exists at all between Germany and Israel is a stunning demonstration of transnational forgiveness. Grace has its own power, even in international politics."

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Perspective

Just back from an Annual Meeting at Grace Chapel Primitive Baptist Church in Memphis, TN. We weren't able to stay for the whole thing, and my recalcitrant sciatic nerve made me miss one morning's session, but I very much enjoyed the gatherings I was able to be part of. Elder Lasserre Bradley preached wonderful--very helpful and encouraging--messages. Adding to that were other ministers that brought us good, solid messages from God's Word.

While away from home, I continued my reading in Philip Yancey's book, Grace Notes, and yesterday's reading is one that is connected to my GRACE posts, so I'm including it below. Later, I hope to send to other posts taken from Yancey's writings. I labeled the one below "Perspective", because it sheds a lot of light on believers' relationships to each other in Christ. For all true believers, these thoughts are enlightening.
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"God miraculously provided food for the Israelites wandering through the Sinai Desert, and even made sure their shoes would not wear out. Jesus too fed hungry people and ministered directly to their needs. Many Christians who read those thrilling stories look back with a sense of nostalgia or even disappointment. "Why doesn't God act like that now?" they wonder. "Why doesn't God miraculously provide for my needs?"
"But the New Testament letters seem to show a different pattern at work. Locked in a cold dungeon, Paul turned to his longtime friend Timothy to meet his physical needs. "Bring my cloak and my scrolls," he wrote, "and also bring Mark, who has always been so helpful." In other straits, Paul received "God's comfort" in the form of a visit from Titus. And when a famine broke out in Jerusalem, Paul himself led a fund-raising effort among all the churches he had founded. God was meeting the needs of the young church as surely as he had met the needs of the Israelites, but indirectly, through fellow members of Christ's body. Paul made no such distinction as "the church did this, but God did that." Such a division would miss the point he had made so often. The church is Christ's body; therefore if the church did it, God did it.
Paul's insistence on this truth may trace back to his first, dramatic personal encounter with God. At the time, he was a fierce persecutor of Christians, a notorious bounty hunter. But on the road to Damascus he saw a light bright enough to blind him for three days, and heard a voice from heaven: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
Persecute you? Persecute who? I'm only after those heretics the Christians.
"Who are you, Lord?" asked Saul at last, knocked flat on the ground.
"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," came the reply.
That sentence summarizes as well as anything the change brought about by the Holy Spirit. Jesus had been executed months before. It was the Christians Saul was after, not Jesus. But Jesus, alive again, informed Saul that those people were in fact his own body. What hurt them, hurt him. It was a lesson the apostle Paul would never forget.

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Back Home Again!

In late May, we left home to 1) visit family in Mississippi 2) depart from Mississippi with our oldest granddaughter (who graduated high school recently) and her choice of friend (she chose her sister, our second oldest granddaughter) to take her on a promised trip as her graduation gift (we gave her the choice of any location in the U.S. -- she chose the Smokies) 3) for my husband to attend his 50th high school graduation reunion 4) to attend the Annual Meeting of our "Home Church" in Mississippi. The whole journey had us gone from home for almost three weeks. We enjoyed the trip very much . . . the time with our families, traveling with our granddaughters, renewing old friendships, and the wonderful sermon we heard. Even so, we were very glad to get back home!

I hope to post again soon, but didn't want the whole month of June to go by without a post. Our garden will continue to take some of our time (grew profusely while we were gone), but hopefully once we "recuperate" from being away from home, I'll start posting again -- until the next trip!