Cheap Grace

 




While I am immersed in the idea of strange couplets, I cannot forget one of the most dissonant and important of all: cheap grace!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the phrase and explains it in all its complexity but here is a summary: Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

The irony of grace is that it is free gift AND costs our lives! We humans do not determine grace and must prepare ourselves for its reception. Sometimes, most often, grace comes or is realized because of or in the midst of struggle. It is that shiny pearl of great price. 

Advent calls us to these divine paradoxes and when we indeed process these ideas, these strange and unexpected phrase fellows, the dissonance creates the cracks where the light, insight, gets in. We are considering and pondering these apparent inconsistencies in order to begin to fathom the mystery of the ultimate unexpected: a babe lying in a manger who would save the world. That is amazing grace!

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