Flannery O’Connor said, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” True enough. Having been raised in the South and after spending most of my adult years there, I can attest to O’Connor’s judgment on this note.

      Invariably in the South, when the subject of theology is raised, someone offers up the need everyone has to “accept” Jesus as their personal lord and savior. Often someone will also throw in faith and/or goodness as the sine qua non for admittance to heaven. That Southern Evangelicals believe this doesn’t surprise me. What stuns me though is the number of Lutherans I’ve encountered over the years who use the same language of accepting Jesus as “personal lord” and/or “living right and being good” as being the guarantor to enter heaven.

      You do not have to be good., wrote the poet Mary Oliver.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. The Episcopal priest and author, Fr. Robert Capon wrote, In Jesus’ death and resurrection, the whole test-passing, brownie-point-earning rigamarole of the human race has been cancelled for lack of interest on God’s part.

     The scripture that found me and remained with me throughout my formation at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary backs up this claim. From the letter to the Ephesians:

^2:4 But God, rich in mercy and loving us so much, ⁵ brought us to life in Christ, even when we were dead in our sins…. ⁸ …it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith—and even that is not of yourselves, but the gift of God. ⁹ Nor is it a reward for anything that you have done, so nobody can claim the credit. ¹⁰ We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to do the good things God created us to do from the beginning.

     Notice the flow. God is the primary actor in all of this. We are simply recipients of God’s action.

     Here’s Fr. Robert Capon again:

God's love and forgiveness are intimately and immediately present in full force to everyone in the world, virtuous or wicked, Christian or not…Nobody has to clean up [their] act in order to be forgiven or loved; all anybody [can] do is [open to] and…trust, have faith that [they’re] home free already, and then enjoy the forgiveness [they’ve] had all along by passing it on to everybody [they] run into…Everything else has been taken care of.

      God is not in the sin accounting business. Neither you nor I have a ledger with our sins inked in red. Nor is there a ledger listing our good works, replete with gold stars. God’s grace and love are not earned by living right or otherwise. God’s grace and love are gifts. There is no quid pro quo, no transaction involved. God loves us with an everlasting love that depends not on us, but on the fact that God chooses us and chooses to love us. And that…is…grace,…Christ-centered…grace.

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Flannery O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.” Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works. Comp. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: The Library of America, 1988. 853-864. Print.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Boston : Atlantic Monthly Press

Robert Capon, The Mystery of Christ... and Why We Don't Get It, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1993.

Priests for Equality. The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation (p. 756). Kindle Edition.

Photo: The chancel at Christ Chapel, The Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, SC.