Pastor's Letter

Dear Friends in Christ,

One of Isak Dinesen's most famous stories (thanks largely to a movie made from it) is called "Babette's Feast." As we move through Advent toward Christmas, pondering what these holy days mean for us, I would like you to consider Dinesen's words about the nature of God's grace.

"We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe.

But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine

grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble.... We tremble before

making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in

fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes

are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my

friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with

confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes

no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us

all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty."

Dinesen thinks of grace as the hospitality of God. It is God's love declaring a "general amnesty" for a sad and broken human race. This, my friends, is what the shepherds found in the manger on Christmas night. Shepherds were notoriously slack Jews, almost outcast, probably unclean--and they are the first to welcome (to be welcomed by) this babe. Some faithful Christians resent the "C & E" Christians who only put in an appearance at Midnight Mass or on Easter Sunday, but Dinesen's God doesn't mind. He opens his arms to all. Just as we at CTS will try this Christmas to be God's wide open arms for all comers.

Dinesen says that God's grace "demands nothing from us," but this does not mean that it hopes nothing for us. Jesus had a strange idea that grace, that love, could change people, even redeem them. Not "redeem" them in the minimalist Anselmian version, as if God were collecting sinners at a Green Stamp Redemption Center, but save our souls in terms of salvaging our lives. Christ came to give us a new identity based on the love ethic, which itself is based on Jesus' assertion that God is love. God does not love us, God is the love by which we love one another. Babette's feast is cooked by Babette, but it is God's grace on all those plates, it is a new lease on life. I have been given God's grace so that I can be God's grace in the world. If you understand these things, it will deepen substantially your celebration of a momentous explosion of the hospitality of God within human history: "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be TO ALL PEOPLE. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a saviour, which is Christ the Lord."

Yours in Christ,

--Pastor Bastien