Faith Matters | Whatever happened to grace and mercy? The answer should make us uncomfortable
“What was the biggest challenge to your faith in this last year?” I asked the high school students sitting across from me on Sunday.
To a person they each said, “People stopped being kind, stopped loving one another, stopped caring.” They went on to talk about how divided their worlds are and how they feel like they are living in a time when no one is interested in seeing any point of view that they personally disagree with. They shared how social media and cancel culture is part of their daily living and how one single social media post can completely destroy real-life relationships that took years to cultivate.
It would have been easy to default to the ages-old quips about them being salt and light, about how they are called to something better. I believe they are, but I also believe that they need more than that. It takes my 17 year-old daughter all of 5.5 seconds to type into a search engine whatever information she needs to begin refuting everything that I have to say — about anything. Of course, not everything you find on the internet is true or helpful or life-giving. Yet, after 2,000+ years, it remains that everything you find in Scripture is true and helpful and life-giving. But I can’t just beat my daughter, or any teenager, or anyone over the head with a Bible.
Faith isn’t something you can check off on your to-do list. That’s why it wouldn’t have been helpful for me to just tell the students that they are salt and light and simply walk out of the room. Faith requires relationship – first with God and then with fellow believers. And right now, fostering relationship — sticking with people when you disagree, when it’s hard, when you have to put someone else first — is just about as counter-cultural as you can get.
Jesus disagreed with people, but he didn’t walk away from them. In fact, he walked towards them. He listened to them. He heard the biography behind the belief. So many times Jesus inconvenienced himself, went out of his way, to meet people in their messiness.
What I loved about meeting with these high school students was that they weren’t really looking for easy answers. Their whole lives have been filled with easy answers. (Thanks, Google.) They wanted to struggle, to sit with the discomfort, to feel like their opinion mattered because they’ve been told so many times that it does not.
And finally it dawned on me, the students sitting across from me actually disagree about almost every political hot button issue of the day, but they were 100% unified in their feelings about the destruction of friendships and the divisions these issues have created. That gives me hope. It means that there is still a spark in them that recognizes the image of God, even in the people that we disagree with. And they find themselves mourning the loss of that image in broken relationships that fractured over this particularly hostile and divisive season. It means that there’s still a part of them that desperately hungers for relationship over having to be right on every issue, every time. They want to know what happened to grace and mercy.
And they are not alone. Isn’t it amazing how in a day and age where we can find so little to agree upon, almost all of us, sitting on our heaps of broken relationships, are looking around and asking ourselves what happened to grace and mercy? Seems like a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Perhaps we need to sit with that discomfort for a while until it becomes so uncomfortable that we’re willing to do something about it.
Only then can we really talk about being salt and light.
Faith Matters is written by members of the clerical community in the Bradenton area. Rev. Hope Italiano Lee is the lead pastor at Kirkwood Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, www.bigreenchurch.org.
This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 6:00 AM.