The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

by Brennan Manning

a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded.

the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice.

At heart we are practicing Pelagians.

Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency.

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown: “Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?

while business mogul Donald Trump has been described as “lacking in grace.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky caught the shock and scandal of the gospel of grace when he wrote: At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, “Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!” And he will say to us: “Vile beings, you who are in the image of the beast and bear his mark, but come all the same, you as well.” And the wise and prudent will say, “Lord, why do you welcome them?” And he will say: “If I welcome them, you wise men, if I welcome them, you prudent men, it is because not one of them has ever been judged worthy.” And he will stretch out his arms, and we will fall at his feet, and we will cry out sobbing, and then we will understand all, we will understand the Gospel of grace! Lord, your Kingdom come!

But as Jaroslav Pelikan notes: Luther suddenly broke through to the insight that the “righteousness of God” that Paul spoke of in this passage was not the righteousness by which God was righteous in himself (that would be passive righteousness) but the righteousness by which, for the sake of Jesus Christ, God made sinners righteous (that is, active righteousness) through the forgiveness of sins in justification. When he discovered that, Luther said it was as though the very gates of Paradise had been opened to him.

He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us.

False gods—the gods of human manufacturing—despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do.

the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of His be...

As C. S. Lewis says in The Four Loves, “Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our need, a joy in total dependence. The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh need they have

produced.”

I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.

Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.”

All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God.

Even our fidelity is a gift. “If we but turn to God,” said St. Augustine, “that itself is a gift of God.” My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

We are all, equally, privileged but unentitled beggars at the door of God’s mercy!

Cajun infants.

?

If a random sampling of one thousand American Christians were taken today, the majority would define faith as belief in the existence of God. In earlier times it did not take faith to believe that God existed—almost everybody took that for granted. Rather, faith had to do with one’s relationship to God—whether one trusted in God. The difference between faith as “belief in something that may or may not exist” and faith as “trusting in God” is enormous.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.” If that happens to us, we experience grace.

Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.

Something is radically wrong when the local church rejects a person accepted by Jesus

And though it is true that the church must always dissociate itself from sin, it can never have any excuse for keeping any sinners at a distance.

There is a myth flourishing in the church today that has caused incalculable harm: once converted, fully converted. In other words, once I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, an irreversible, sinless future beckons. Discipleship will be an untarnished success story; life will be an unbroken upward spiral toward holiness.

Because the Christ-encounter did not transfigure me into an angel.

He didn’t want God to forgive Nineveh; he wanted judgment. His narrow nationalism made it impossible for him to grasp the all-embracing love of God.

God was his God, the God of the Hebrews, imprisoned in one country, one temple, one ark of the covenant.

We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly.

In terms of spiritual growth the faith-conviction that God accepts me as I am is a tremendous help to become

better.

it extends to all who rely entirely upon the mercy of God and accept the gospel of grace—the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3).

Jesus abolished any distinction between the elite and the ordinary in the Christian community.

Once and for all, Jesus deals the death blow to any distinction between the elite and the ordinary in the Christian community.

If Jesus appeared at your dining room table tonight with knowledge of everything you are and are not, total comprehension of your life story and every skeleton hidden in your closet; if He laid out the real state of your present discipleship with the hidden agenda, the mixed motives, and the dark desires buried in your psyche, you would feel His acceptance and forgiveness.

When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments, and the surprises of the Spirit. Evangelical faith is bartered for cozy, comfortable piety. A failure of nerve and an unwillingness to risk distorts God into a Bookkeeper, and the gospel of grace is swapped for the security of religious bondage.

repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace.

REPENTANCE

The Father is not justice and the Son love. The Father is justice and love; the Son is love and justice.

Jesus brings good news about the Father, not bad news.

Trust says, in effect, “Abba, just on the basis of what You have shown me in Your Son, Jesus, I believe You love me. You have forgiven me. You will hold me and never let me go. Therefore, I trust You with my life.”

“Most of the time, my prayer consists in experiencing the absence of God in the hope of communion.”

Yet the experience of absence does not mean the absence of experience. For example, the soldier in combat who, during a lull in the battle, steals a glance at his wife’s picture tucked in his helmet, is more present to her at that moment in her absence than he is to the rifle that is present in his hands. Likewise, the poor in spirit perceive that religious experience and mystical “highs” are not the goal of authentic prayer; rather, the goal is communion with God.

No antecedent beauty enamors me in His eyes. I am lovable only because He loves me.

We cannot use failure as an excuse to quit trying.

Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God. It does not distance us from God, but draws us to Him—as nothing else can—and opens us anew to the flow of grace.

is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence.

Troubadours have always been more important and influential than theologians and bishops.

Erma Bombeck to write a column entitled “If I Had My Life to Live Over Again”? In it, she wrote: I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded. I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains. I would never have bought anything just because it was practical, wouldn’t show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime. When my child kissed me impetuously, I would never have said, “Later. Now get washed up for dinner.” There would have been more I love yous, more I’m sorrys, but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute, look at it and really see it, live it, and never give it back.

Amazement and rapture should be our reaction to the God revealed as Love.