"I will," said the doctor, "but I want to check a few things out first. Tell me, do you drink a lot of liquor?"

"Liquor?" said the man indignantly. "I never touch the filthy stuff."

"How about smoking?"

"I think smoking is disgusting. I've never in my life touched tobacco."

"I'm a bit embarrassed to ask this," the doctor continued, "but - you know the way some men are - do you do any running around at night?"

"Of course not. What do you take me for? I'm in bed every night by ten o'clock at the latest.

"Tell me," said the doctor, "the pain in the head you speak of, is it a sharp, shooting kind of pain?"

"Yes," said the man. "That's it - a sharp, shooting kind of pain."

"Simple, my dear fellow! Your trouble is you have your halo on too tight. All we need to do is loosen it a bit." (Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, p.72-73)

Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy. I'm not a squeaky clean, halo-wearing, shiny, happy kind of Christian. I've been known to eat too much, drink too much, and spend too much money on silly things. Sometimes I goof off at work or engage in fostering petty jealousies and criticisms. I've been known to use the kind of language that my Dad uses when the lawnmower won't work. I've had more shallow relationships than I care to count, and I've betrayed the confidence of true friends for stupid reasons. Some members of my own family wish to put me on a pedestal that I neither want nor deserve just because the title "Reverend" can be placed in front of my name. But I can say with sure confidence that the very heart of the gospel was written for me, a sinner.

Where did we ever get such a crazy notion that if we tightened up our halos and worked really hard we could earn our way into God's graces? Where was it that we learned that spiritual perfection was God's desire for humankind? Some blame the religious shackles of the Catholic church, some blame the legalistic nature of the Pharisees before that, and some blame modern day fundamentalists. But even we of the Protestant ilk who were once so enamored with God's grace have cheapened the word. We've made it less than it is. We call things like "missing church" or having "Death by Chocolate" for dessert sins. The real "sins" in our life are still a matter left behind closed doors. We are reluctant to admit our defeat before one another, and we are petrified to admit our defeat before God. We are worried to death that even the little things that we do could disappoint God and bring us punishment swift and sure. It is enough to cause that splitting headache. The guilt and shame of our worst fears mound up quite quickly and we allow God to become the bookkeeper counting up points toward our salvation - no different from the religious sects we've chosen to criticize throughout our common Protestant history.

We need to go back to scripture and back to our historical roots to uncover the passion that can only be felt after knowing even in part a small measure of God's steadfast love toward humankind. Psalm 51 is a blatant account of a sinner who has nothing to hold back as he pleads to God for mercy. It is attributed to King David and prayed in the full knowledge that God knows exactly all the scathing things he had done to satisfy his lust for Bathsheba. The sinner recognizes his own transgressions, his own capacity for evil, and instead of playing the victim of bad parents or ignorant of what he was doing, he pleads with God, God alone to give him a clean heart, joy in salvation, and a willing spirit to venture differently into the future.

We're not accustomed to that kind of openness in our confession. Perhaps we cannot trust that God will forgive the things we've done. We've heaped too much guilt upon ourselves. We have bought into a God no more powerful and far less real than Santa Claus who treats the nice children to pleasant gifts and the naughty ones to lumps of coal. Our God quickly becomes who we imagine God to be. Sadly, we have expected our God to despise sinners, but it is only the false gods and spirits of our own making who hate sinners. (Manning, 22) The true God loves them, loves us really. "The Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do." (Manning, 22)

However, when we really dive into scripture as our reforming predecessors did in the 15th century, we will discover the same treasure that they did - that God is a God of Grace, a God of the Good News, the one true God who restores us to right relationship through forgiveness which comes through the life-affirming message of Jesus Christ. Robert Capon has described that awesome discovery this way, "The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two hundred proof grace - of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel - after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps - suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started...Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case."

When was the last time you heard God's grace explode so profoundly off a page of text or resonate so perfectly in one's song? Grace should be a message that infects us right down to our sinful toenails. We can never measure up to the perfection we think God expects of us. There's just no doing it. I know I'm going to mess up without even trying to. Too many pastors out there are afraid to go anywhere near this strange message of grace for the undeserving because they want too much to be liked and thought of as "good" by their congregations. I could talk until I'm blue in the face about all the virtues I think we should practice as Christians and all the vices I think we should avoid. But what's the point? We may agree or not agree, but the main message of scripture is that those lists are rendered irrelevant in the face of God's pure and steadfast love for humankind.

The Reformers' understanding of Scripture turned out to be quite peculiar. They determined, through all their rigorous study, that grace is enough. No matter how many "but what about this?" sentences we might want to add, they are of no consequence. God has proven, in the truth of scripture, and in the truth of the living Word - Jesus Christ, that there is not one sinful thing we can do to separate ourselves from God's love for us. And while we who today have inherited the benefits of liberal Protestantism may be able to imagine that kind of love for addicts and the forgotten ones in life, also remember that God even loves those of us crazy enough to fasten our halos on a bit too tight and wonder why we get headaches.

For today's message, I am indebted to Brennan Manning for the deep reflections on grace and being human that can be found in his little book The Ragamuffin Gospel. But his best line by far is when he says, "Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer." God indeed loves us as angels, welcomes us as children, and blesses us to be brothers and sisters of the one we call Christ. My friends, we choose to cope with our own limitations in many ways - my own preference being also to indulge in my own capacity for drinking beer, and eating good food, and trying to fall in love all over again with this gift we so take for granted called life. We can learn to trust that our own sinfulness and shortcomings will not nullify God's love for us. Once we discover the freedom given to us in this incredible gift, we too will be drunk like the Reformers on this amazing intoxicating grace. Amen.