“For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting;

and his truth endureth to all generations”

(Psalm 100:5)

Do you remember any of those fairy stories you listened to in your childhood about someone who had been transformed into a beast and could regain his human shape only through somebody else’s love?

Certainly you recall the Grimm Brothers fairy tale about the frog prince. A wicked witch had turned a handsome young prince into a loathsome frog, and the spell could be broken and he returned to his human shape only by the love of a beautiful princess who would allow him to sit beside her and eat from her plate and sleep in her bed. And when this incredible love had at last been bestowed, the miracle of restoration to his lost human shape took place.

How fanciful is the fairy tale and yet how true to human experience! How many times has the bewitched spirit of some person under the evil spell of selfishness or greed or lust or violence or perverted emotions made that person act like a loathsome beast until at last a pure, sweet love, entirely unmerited, comes into that life and rescues it from beastliness. And behold! the lost human shape is restored in the image of the handsome prince or princess that had always remained imprisoned in the human heart.

This, of course, is what the Christian gospel is all about — transformation through love. Yes, the gospel tells the story of the Eternal God who is holy and righteous and just, without any moral imperfection, who nevertheless has moved beyond the limits and demands of meting out justice to mankind, and by his love has rescued loathsome, sinful, unworthy creatures from their beastliness, broken the spell of sin, and restored them to their lost human shape.

“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God…. All we like sheep have gone astray…. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Do you remember how Barbra Streisand used to sing, “He touched me. He touched me”? We have all listened to the television advertisement for the telephone company that says, “Reach out and touch someone.” Well, that is the essence of the gospel. That is the meaning of the Incarnation. The Eternal God in Christ became man for us and for our salvation. He reached out and touched us in healing, redeeming, transforming love, touched our loathsome­ness, the beastliness of sin, and lo! the lost image of God in our hearts burst back into reality.

An old man had been an indigent in and out of a charity hospital for years. He had received treatment from the generations of interns there who practiced on him and his infirmities. He had become an unlovely, wasted, almost inhuman shell of a man.

Finally the day came when one of those interns was established in his own practice, and the same old man who had frequented the charity hospital entered the young physician’s office and said, “I want you to be my doctor. I’ve come into an inheritance, and now I can pay, and I want you to be my doctor.”

“But why have you chosen me?” asked the young physician. “So many of us treated you. Why me?”

“Yes,” said the little man with the bent back, “all of you did and all of you were helpful and kind to me, but you were the only one who helped me with my coat.”

The warmth that included treating him as a person, that reached out a hand and touched him as another human being — this was help and healing for the whole man. This established the relationship of persons that could not be broken.

This is a poor illustration, but nevertheless a faltering reach in the direction of the eternal reality over which the gospel exults. God in Christ touched us; his love bestowed broke the evil spell of sin that had enslaved us in beastliness, restoring our lost humanity and lifting us into a relationship of persons with God.

When the Bible speaks of the goodness of God, it usually refers to one of two things: providence or grace.

Providence is the goodness of God to all the human family: God’s making the rain fall on the just and the unjust; his feeding the birds of the air; his clothing the lilies of the field; his ordering the natural world to bless all human life, whether people are conscious of God or not.

But grace is that goodness of God bestowed upon unworthy, sinful people that involves their consciousness of being made right with God, all the while knowing that they have not merited this goodness.

In Psalm 103, the Psalmist could see the goodness of God at work at many places in his life: providentially healing all his diseases, redeeming his life from destruction (snatching him from perils on land and sea), satisfying his mouth with good things (treasures of the earth in material prosperity, intellectual pursuits, and spiritual riches), so that his life was “renewed like the eagle’s.”

But see what the Psalmist puts at the summit of the mountain of God’s mercies: the forgiveness of his sins. He mentions that first: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction.” But he can’t leave it. Over and over again in his hymn of thanksgiving he comes back to it. The Lord “hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities…. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.” His soul is obsessed with the unbelievable goodness of God in forgiving his multitude of sins, and he comes back to it over and over. This forgiveness is the goodness of God that is all grace.

Dag Hammarskjold in his book Markings says of forgiveness: “Forgive­ness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean. The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive. In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us — we are forgiven. But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.”

Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians, “I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink…. But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness” (1 Corinthians 10:1-5).

What was the difference? Why were not all who were the recipients of the goodness of God both in providence and grace brought through to the Promised Land? Here is why: They differed in the use they made of the cloud and the sea and the meat and the drink. As Paul Scherer, the Lutheran pastor and scholar, pointed out in his book Event in Eternity, some of them acted as if they were singled out for the purpose of enjoying the luxury of the divine favor, while others understood that they were being equipped for taking part in the divine mission.

Suppose, Scherer asks, “the crew of a ship sent to carry provisions to a sick and starving community should on their voyage forget their purpose? Suppose they drank the wine and ate the bread themselves as if the whole cargo had been stored on board for their sole comfort and satisfaction?”

When John Denver was in Memphis for a concert, he said in an interview that his principal reason for coming was not to sing, but to stir up public support for a campaign against world hunger.

What is your role and mine now — yes, and what is the role of our nation — in this crucial time of the transition of whole nations from com­munism to democracy? In a time when people in underdeveloped nations are starving and overburdened with debt? At this point in our life’s voyage, what is our purpose? Are we feasting at the bounteous captain’s table on the Good Ship American Way of Life, gorging ourselves on our plentiful provisions, acting as if the whole adventure were designed as our personal pleasure cruise, while indeed and in truth God’s purpose in outfitting and provisioning and dispatching our ship is for bringing food — material and spiritual — to a starving world?

Pope John Paul II, when visiting a poverty-stricken slum in Rio de Janeiro, was so overcome by the human suffering he saw there he took off his heavy, golden fisherman’s ring, the symbol of his office as Christ’s regent on earth, and gave it to the parish priest to purchase relief for that wretched congregation. What an amazing sensitivity to the biblical understanding of the goodness of God in providence and grace.

On another trip Pope John Paul II visited Africa, and millions of people gathered to greet him everywhere he went. Christianity, you know, is growing now in Africa faster than anywhere else in the world. Time magazine, in its May 12, 1980, issue, says that in 1960 Africa was thirty percent Christian, while in 1980 the continent was nearly half Christian.

Why this growth in Africa, of all places, where white men’s govern­ments and business interests have exploited blacks for centuries? One would think that with the rejection of Western colonialism among the people of Africa during the last three decades would go also a rejection of Western religions. But such is not the case. Rather, Christianity has kept on growing steadily. Why? The reason, say the Africans themselves, is that the Christian missionaries when they came fed the starving, healed the sick, taught the young and the old to read and how to improve their farming. In short, they brought love, expressed in sharing the best blessings, both material and spiritual, that God had showered on them.

Every Sunday when we come to church for worship we bring our offerings. We stand and sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” and we pray a prayer dedicating our gifts and ourselves to the service of God’s will in the world. How many times do we ask ourselves in that moment of prayerful dedication: Why is God, from whom all blessings flow, pouring out such an abundance on me? What purpose does the great, good, loving Heavenly Father have in mind by this miracle of grace he has wrought in my life, healing all my diseases, redeeming my life from destruction, forgiving all my iniquities, filling my mouth with good things, and crowning my days with his loving kindness and tender mercies? Why?

Is God nudging me to contemplate some grateful expression for his amazing grace in my life? Is he hoping against hope that I will wake up from my silly, selfish daydreams and see what my life is really all about? That God has provisioned and dispatched me, not on a pleasure cruise to consume in self-indulgence all he has put aboard, but in his infinite mercy he has loaded me down with life-giving supplies to sustain the bodies and souls of others so I may embark on a rescue mission of divine origin and universal dimen­sions.