By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Scot McKnight in his book Embracing Grace, says that, “The gospel is the work of God to restore humans to union with God and communion with others,” and McKnight identifies western individualism as the biggest hurdle we face in embracing this gracious gospel. Here in America, he says, we are steeped in a philosophy of individualism: we think in terms of individual rights and we see the needs of individuals as being in competition with the needs of the group. We celebrate the mythos of the “self-made man” (woman), as if there is something less worthy about a person who is overly dependent on others for their self-identity. Even the word “community” has a different connotation in western thinking than it does in eastern thinking. I teach a course occasionally at Alfred University called “Spirituality and the Environment” and when I get to Buddhism, my students often have difficulty understanding Buddhist teaching about unity because for Americans, a community is simply an aggregate of individuals who share something in common while in Eastern thought a community is expressed as “many in body, one in mind”. This thinking baffles students as they try to get their heads around how we can be one in mind while still remaining distinct entities. And even if they can finally understand the concept, many reject it because they are suspicious of a philosophy that elevates community over the individual.

And so, while Jesus – an eastern thinker – preached a gospel of grace in which God works to restore us to both union with God and communion with others, we who live in a western culture celebrating individualism, have trouble finding the balance that is required by Christ’s message. We often emphasis one half of that equation to the neglect of the other.

Now most of us would assume that our culture of individualism would lead us to emphasize the first half of that gospel of grace – union with God – to the neglect of our communion with others, and in fact that is often what we see in American Christianity. Americans spend extraordinary amounts of time and money trying to get right with God: we buy self-help books on prayer, purchase devotional guides, and practice meditation or yoga. We can find salvation all alone in front of the TV set where whole cable channels are devoted to saving souls in the privacy of people’s living rooms. And when we talk about grace, we often describe it as a restoration of the relationship between God and the individual: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” Just look at the new praise songs filling our worship: most are thinly veiled love songs sung between God and the individual believer, sometimes in such intimate terms that if God were really in the room, we’d be embarrassed to have other people overhearing the conversation. One popular song croons, “Nobody fills my heart like Jesus! Nobody thrills me like You do!” I mean, get a room.

Of course, many of you might respond, “Hey, I never have liked those praise songs, and I am a firm believer in helping my neighbor. In fact, I’ve always thought Paul got a little over-zealous when he denounced salvation by works because I think we could use a little more sweat and elbow grease in our faith.” Yes, there are Christians among us today (many even in this church) who reject the self-satisfaction of individual salvation and embrace whole-heartedly the commands of Jesus to love our neighbor. Like a placard at a convention, we wave Matthew 25 in the faces of others saying, “Feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, free the prisoner, for when you do it to the least of these, you do it to Christ.” Yet even here, like an insidious infection, American individuality contaminates our best intentions. We become Lone Rangers out to save the world by the sheer effort of our individual hands. We put our noses to the grindstone believing that Jesus has called me to solve poverty, combat hunger, and bring world peace in my lifetime because after all, we live in America, the land of opportunity where any person can grow up to be President – or even the Messiah!

We must remember, however, that Jesus wasn’t an American and offered a grace that restores us to communion with God and with one another, and he didn’t see that equation as an either-or proposition or even as a two-step process in which we must do one before we can do the other. He saw communion with God and communion with each other as two faces of the same thing. To put it bluntly, my relationship to God cannot be restored if my relationship to you....or you.... or you is still messed up. And conversely, my relationship to you... and you... and you cannot be repaired if I neglect my relationship to God. The two happen simultaneously; my love of God and my love of neighbor are intertwined and inseparable, the two faces of grace.

In John 7, we are given a beautiful image that shows these two faces. Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” We receive grace and we give grace. The love of God that streams into our broken hearts is a river moving through us and on to the broken hearts of others. To borrow an image from eastern thinking, love of God and love of neighbor are the yin and yang of salvation. Most of you have seen that yin and yang symbol – the circle in which one half is black and the other white to depict two halves of a whole. If you look closely at the symbol you will see that the black and white halves don’t divide in a straight line down the middle but each flows over into the other half in a recognition that these two halves are not in opposition to one another but are in harmony with each other. And look even more carefully at that symbol and you will see a tiny circle of white embedded in the black half and a tiny circle of black embedded in the white half reminding us that neither half can be complete without the other at its center.

The yin yang symbol may be Buddhist but its eastern origins bring it closer to the heart of Jesus’s gospel than our much later western gospel of individualism, and much of our struggle in the American church could be healed by embracing the balance of yin yang, the two faces of grace, or to use John’s language, the balance of drinking from the living water even as it flows also from our hearts to quench the thirst of others.

Today it seems, most American Christians are either squatted down by the riverside guzzling the living water concerned only about their own thirst or they are so busy being the Gunga Dins of faith, trekking water buckets to the rest of the world, that they never have time to take a drink for themselves.

The danger for Christians who emphasize only the first half of the gospel of grace – who obsess about individual salvation to the exclusion of other’s needs – is that they risk becoming pious, arrogant, self-satisfied, and ineffective in healing society. The danger for Christians who emphasize only restoring communion with others to the neglect of their own relationship to God is that they risk becoming burned out, cynical, joyless, and spiritually empty. But the gospel of grace is not a choice between your spiritual health and the health of those around you; the gospel of grace is a gospel that restores you both to union with God and to union with others, and when we understand that and embrace it, we will not only drink of the living waters but we will become rivers of living water to others.

Coretta Scott King once talked about that balance between receiving the power of grace for oneself and giving grace to others. She wrote, “For my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. prayer was a daily source of courage and strength that gave him the ability to carry on in even the darkest hours of our struggle. I remember one very difficult day when he came home bone-weary from the stress that came with his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the middle of that night, he was awakened by a threatening and abusive phone call, one of many we received throughout the movement. On this particular occasion, however, Martin had had enough. After the call, he got up from bed and made himself some coffee. He began to worry about his family, and all of the burdens that came with our movement weighed heavily on his soul. With his head in his hands, Martin bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud to God: ‘Lord, I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can't face it alone.’

“Later he told me, ‘At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear a voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at our side forever.’ When Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a new sense of confidence, and he was ready to face anything.”

The gospel of grace is a gospel of living water that has the power to restore your soul. The gospel of grace is a gospel for others that has the power to restore the community for which all of us hunger. The two are inseparable sides of one another – God and other, “me and Thee and together we,” the two inseparable faces of grace And so Jesus asks us, “Are you hunkered down at the side of the river quenching only my own thirst? Get up and begin carrying that water to others – repairing strained relationships, practicing forgiveness, caring for those in need. Or, are you so busy trekking buckets to others that you have forgotten to take a drink to yourself, maybe even forgotten where the river is. Put down the bucket, get down on your knees, and take a good long drink.”

For Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink .... and out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”