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Grace, It Comes with the Table

For regular readers, you were probably expecting a blog about Open Minds this week following the last couple of weeks on the UMC Slogan: Open Hearts, Open Doors, Open Minds…well that is not what is being served up, because something else arrived at the table first:

Free chips and salsa as soon as you sit down at a restaurant is one of the many reasons why Texas is an awesome place to call home. And now thanks to soccer, folks from all over the world are discovering the joys of our culinary adventures. For me, the best part of the US hosting the World Cup is the international tourists’ reactions to experiencing our country’s food. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching Brits at Buc-ee’s, Scots out partying in Boston, a small town in Tennessee adopting the Algerian team, several sensational reactions to Texas BBQ, Freddy from Germany reviews, and many more.  However, my favorite is the expertly written social media post on something we all take for granted; free chips and salsa.

“Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. ‘We have not earned these.’ ‘They just come with the table, man.’…In my land hospitality is a debt…Here the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner…” X @japan_nobunaga.

What a perfect analogy for what we United Methodists call previenent grace. Previenent grace is what we call the grace that comes before we ‘earn’ anything, before we sin, before we potentially can start to try to think about God, before we are even born. We believe previenent grace is a free unmerited gift that simply comes with being born in the image of God. Like chips and salsa comes as you are seated at the table at a Tex-Mex eatery, previenent grace comes with the entry into God’s world. God loves us from the start; we do not need to do or believe anything to be loved by God. Furthermore, just like a bottomless bowl of chips, previenent grace never runs empty. Previenent grace is always there for us, even when we run away in the opposite direction as fast as we can. Even when I think that God cannot possibly love me after what I just did, here comes the waiter with another bowl of chips. Not to say that our actions do not have real world consequences, they do, and not to say that when we chose to sin we do not affect our relationship with God, we do, and also God is always willing to forgive genuine repentance.

From Japan to Jasper Texas, despite the free chips, we all live in a transactional society.  Goods are exchanged for services, contracts are agreed to with conditional terms, quick pro-quos are exchanged, interest rates are negotiated on loans, and there is no free lunch. So a free appetizer is not just unexpected, it is a total paradigm shift. Unlike the diet coke I always order to go with the salty chips, I do not have to work for the chips or even prove I can pay for them. The chips come in the form of grace, and outside the conditions of a contract, they don’t appear on the bill. Free chips and salsa arriving before I have ordered anything off the paid menu come as part of a covenantal trust. A trust that me as a poor college student would promise not to sit down at a table of a Tex Mex place, open up a textbook study for hours and not order anything, just eat the free chips and salsa.  I never did that, that is what those bottomless cups of coffee at diners are for.

We all owe World Cup fans a substantial debt for reminding us how grateful we should be, not only for chips and salsa, Buc-ees, and BBQ; also for grace in all its myriad of forms.