Yesterday morning I was given the great gift of being invited to speak to a budding church plant called The City Well in Durham, NC.   We met at Duke Park for some food and fellowship and then gathered in a circle where I shared some of my story.  My good friend, Cleve May, is the  pastor of this church intent on unchurching the churched while churching the unchurched.

Cleve had asked me to talk about grace.  He made this request immediately following my tearful recounting of how my sexual addiction had cost me everything – my wife, my home, my job –  landing me here, in Durham, seeking some sanctuary among friends.

I’d like you to come Sunday and talk to our gathering about grace,

said Cleve.   An odd request given what I just told him, but that’s the point.

Faith is odd.  And demanding.

That gathering was intimate and diverse.  A testament to the sort of vision and prayer giving flight to this unchurch church.  I felt at home.  And this is what I said, or hope I said,  when it came time for me to say…anything.

Most times when I am asked to speak to a group it has to do with grace.   But it is grace of a particular sort.  Karl Barth once quipped,

Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace may prove to be all too free…that hell, rather than being populated with so many people, may in the end prove to be empty.

What Barth is going after there is what caused one particular church to go after me in March of this year, deciding that a pastor who believes against hell, which is a posture I believe every Christian should maintain, wasn’t fit for their service.    But whether hell exists or not after I die isn’t the sort of grace I feel like talking about this morning with you all.

That sort of grace is amazing, and it’s worth losing a job and much more over.  A few days after I lost my job as pastor and the news began to spread a pastor, Carlton Pearson, called to encourage me and walk with me as he had gone a similar journey before.   He asked me a question that haunted me because I knew the answer all too well but was too ashamed to speak of.   He asked,

Chad, of all the people God could have selected to place on a platform like this to talk about God’s universal grace, why you?  Why a rural Methodist student-pastor not yet out of seminary?

Before he finished asking I knew the answer.   It hit me like a hammer to a nail:

Because I’m a sex addict.

I didn’t have the courage to tell him that on the phone.  But I knew.

Grace.  When Cleve first asked me to speak about grace to you all a number of images came to mind.  One was the Prodigal Son story.  I have Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son as my screen saver.  It’s a beautiful portrait capturing the loving, tender embrace of our Father  enfolding the broken, hurting, weary body of his son.  Of you and I.

But the following words from Paul were the most captivating for me the last few days:

Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. ⁸ Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12)

Boast in my weaknesses.   What an amazing thing.  It would make for a great tag-line at any church, wouldn’t it?   First UMC (Boasting in our Weakness) or The City Well (Boasting in our Weakness).  I was raised in a church culture, perhaps you can relate, where nobody boasted in weakness.  In fact, if it wasn’t overtly taught it was certainly implied that weakness has no place in here.   You may have had a fight with your spouse on the way to church, relapsed on Saturday night, doubted God’s existence on Thursday, but when you got out of the car in your Sunday’s best it was all smiles and “God is good!”    We don’t want to share our weaknesses, especially in church where we are told that if we are Christians, we should be perfect.

I suck at being perfect.

Two months ago my wife asked me to leave.   What began as an addiction to pornography had manifested itself over time to something much larger, to the point where I had broken every vow I held dear.

I sit before you today a broken man.   While I believe in the power of God to reconcile all things, I have no idea how my particular story might reconcile itself.   I have no idea what tomorrow holds.  I can only look at things today and name them for what they are.   Pretty bad.

I have a blog called Dancing on Saturday. The name carries two important images for me.  The first is “dancing” which harkens back to a theological term the early thinkers gave to our Triune God.  This God lives and breaths and moves in community – a perfect harmony of peoples – beautifully choreographed in such a way that creation is an obvious byproduct.   Because our Creator dances, so can we.

The second is not so pretty.   Saturday is that day between the cross of Friday and the resurrection of Sunday.   Saturday is a place of fear and trembling.  Oddly, it’s in that “fear and trembling” we are called to work out our salvation (Phil. 2:12).   Saturday is where many of us live much of our lives.  We find it difficult to believe.  We look at dreams shattered and vows broken and wonder if God is even aware that we exist, much less madly in love with us.

Saturday is where we the Church are called to sit and speak.  We point with crooked fingers and lives toward an empty tomb even as we stutter over the words of our creeds.  Saturday is where we are called to dance.   And we all need dance partners.   Church is a good place to find a bride to dance.  In church when I am too weary or jaded to sing I know someone will stand and sing for me.  Perhaps next week I can sing for them.

One place I have found great dance happening has been in 12 Step meetings.  Surrounded by fellow addicts who listen to the brokenness of others, share their own hope and experience and strength and offer nothing more nor less than a hug and solidarity in the midst of a storm is grace personified.  I have seen more grace in a circle of addicts than in a host of churches.

This saddens me because I love the church.  But I am hopeful seeing a gathering like this today.   That you are all giving me space to share this today speaks volumes of the sort of place this already is.   Grace.

Grace is a phone call from a friend at a moment of crisis.  Grace is sitting among a group of addicts bearing one another’s burdens.  Grace is homemade biscuits at Duke Park on a Sunday morning with new and old friends.   Grace is being asked by your pastor to come speak about grace in the midst of brokenness.

Grace is boasting in our weaknesses so that the power of both the suffering and risen Christ may rest upon us.

I want to close with another passage of Scripture that I hope you’ll chew on the rest of your day or life.  It comes from no stranger to brokenness, the prophet Hosea:

Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.

Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth (6:2)

He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.

Grace.