Grace

Three years ago this week, the Body of Christ suffered the loss of Rachel Held Evans from among its members on this side of the resurrection. Today’s devotion is an extended quotation from her beautiful and brave 2015 memoir Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. May her good gifts of insight find and feed you today as you work beside and wrestle within and rest from the ongoing labors of grace in a world that loves the quick fix and the fancy wrapping.   

“But the modern-day church doesn’t like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife–style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. “The world is watching,” Christians like to say, “so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.” But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing.”

Rachel was graceful and beautiful.
-Genesis 29:17b