Grace

As a boy I attended the First United Methodist Church in Little Rock. Of course no church in the United States is old by European standards, and FUMC isn't even very old by American standards, but it was one of Little Rock's earliest churches and it represented, at least aspirationally, a kind of upper class gentility that I haven't found at any other church. (The closest, in my experience, was an Anglican church in Washington, D.C.)

It's hard to overstate how refined and proper it felt. I remember in Sunday school a visiting speaker once made a joke about how a typical church member might wear a black suit every Sunday. A lawyer in the class gestured to the gray suit he was wearing and said, "Well, it's summertime, I figured I could go casual."

It came as a shock one day when a middle-aged man, toward the end of services, stood up and announced that he was visiting from Texas and was X number of days sober. He didn't interrupt a prayer or anything, but this kind of announcement from the congregation simply wasn't done. If you had something to communicate to the church, you would quietly tell the preacher and he or she would make an appropriate announcement.

The man was missing several teeth and his hair was thin and long, though carefully combed. He gave the appearance of someone who had cleaned up specifically for church, but who on an ordinary day would look unkempt.

Anyway once he had said his piece, the congregation burst into a loud, sustained round of applause, a sound that probably hadn't been heard in that building for years. I think this is an illuminating example of grace.