Amazing grace on Main Street

I go, every week, to this place on Main Street. I call it church, but others say it’s a mental health drop-in center.

Every week I sit with my friends while they eat. Many of them pay for their food, but some cannot afford to, though the price is very low. They eat anyway, and pay later.

Recently one of them cooked pancakes for everyone. Which isn’t a big deal except he used to not do anything except drugs. So cooking for people is a big deal for him. He seemed ashamed of the pancakes. They were golden and round and we said we’d never seen more perfect crepes. He smiled.

Forgiven debts

After eating together, we sit by the windows for Bible Study. On this particular day we read from Luke 7 of the sinful woman. We talk about God forgiving our debts. Everyone here has experience with debt. Some of them still owe money for meals.

When I ask them how it would feel if someone paid their debts, they laugh. “That would be awesome!” they say.

Then we sing Amazing Grace. I play my guitar and my friend who’s in his seventies plays his harmonica. As we sing, I look over at one young girl and tears are streaming from her eyes. She weeps and claps and then asks me to play Oh Canada. So we sing that too.

Grace and sin

And it all makes me think how grace and sin are intertwined, like a pair of gnarled but lovely hands, and how we can’t have one without the other. How we can’t receive the one without giving up the other.

We can’t have grace without sin, nor sin without grace. “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” Paul says in Romans 5:20. They go hand in hand yet somehow, these days, we prefer just the one. We prefer grace.

But what is grace without sin?

And, one could argue, what is grace without a meal?

This word, grace, extends all the way back to Deuteronomy 8:10 in which Moses wrote, “And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God.” This word, “grace,” is associated with the Latin word, gratia, “giving thanks.” And what is food but a gift, so often prepared for us, given to us, through no effort of our own? And so we give thanks, or gratia, for food.

And we give thanks, not for sin itself, but for salvation from sin. For salvation is food for our souls. It is Jesus’ body, broken and become food for us, living bread, that we might eat and live forever.
After we sing and pray, my friend who cooked for everyone digs into his pockets and hands over his two vapes. His hands are gnarled and lovely. And they are open. Free to give, free to receive.

And grace becomes a feast at this unlikely church on Main Street.