If I had one theme I could preach until the day I die it would be grace.

Grace sneaks its way into almost every sermon I've ever written, probably because the longer I live, the more I understand how desperately I need grace. I disappoint myself and others far too often to not believe in grace.

And yet, even after all these decades, I barely comprehend grace. Not to mention apply it in my daily life and relationships -- full of screwups and letdowns and stumbles.

The most honest truth is:

I don't fully believe in a God of grace.

I don't fully trust grace is enough for me.

For if I did, I wouldn't still feel as if I should add some of my own good, solid, moral effort to God's grace, just in case.

Admit it, you do, too. Don't you?

Which is why the somewhat scandalous priest and author, Robert Farrar Capon, wrote:

"However much we hate the law, we are more afraid of grace."

Roll that quote around in your head a few times.

We hate the law because we know we can't keep it.

We hate the law because it condemns us as law-breakers.

We hate the law because people use the law to bash other people over the head with it.

We hate the law because eventually it reveals our fatal flaw. We are, as St. Augustine said, in curvatus es --- curved in on ourselves. We just can't help it.

And even though we hate the law, we are even more afraid of grace.

Grace is slippery; out of our hands, out of our control.

Grace allows us to bring nothing to the table.

Except our curved-in selves -- banking everything on the belief that all the saving, all the forgiving, all the rescuing, all the loving is always and only up to God,

and not us.

And that ---

terrifies us the most.

That we bring nothing.

That all we can really do is kind of free fall into the shockingly radical, relentlessly hospitable, ever available, unfathomable grace of God in Christ.

That's it.

And yep, it is terrifying.

We must fall anyway.