My brother-in-law wanted to open a restaurant called Just Desserts, whose motto would have been We Serve You Right. There is a certain appeal in that. It's appealing most of all, of course, because it concerns food, a topic Lutherans are especially interested in.

It is appealing on more serious grounds, though, too. The sentiment of the restaurant's name and motto seems sensible to us. People ought to get what they deserve. On the face of it, that seems just. What kind of world would it be if people got off scot-free?

Every day we are confronted by acts which require, we think, some action to compensate for the harm done. Trent Lott is a racist. We don't easily accept his apology, and in consequence he loses his job. Cardinal Law lets philandering priests go from one parish to another. In consequence, he loses his job, too. And the priests themselves? The jury, literally, is out. We don't tolerate such things graciously.

A theologian once wrote that the Bible has a single plot: God creates the world. The world gets lost. God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which God created it. The means by which God restores the world, revealed in both the Old Testament and the New, is grace. Grace upon grace, John tells us in today's Gospel reading. Meaning both lots and lots of grace. And also meaning the grace of Christ on top of the grace of the Torah and of God's fidelity in the face of Israel's unfaithfulness.

The word grace means gift or favor. The gift that God gives the world is that we do not get what we deserve. God works by nature in a way which we, by nature, do not. Our preference is to reciprocate; to repay harm with harm. God's way is to not reciprocate. To repay harm with healing.

When we Christians say that we are justified by grace, we mean that, thank God, we are not going to get what we deserve. That all the bad things that we do, all those things that sit heavy on our consciences, are as nothing to God. Or rather, that though they might bring sorrow or even anger to God, they do not bring God's vengeance. If we believe that we are in the end, or in the day, forgiven by God, we must admit by our own example and experience and faith that God does not wish to punish the guilty. We are all sinners, as Luther and others have said, yet we all go free by God's desire.

God is essentially, fundamentally, and characteristically gracious. Essentially: the essence of the God of the Bible is grace. More than the other traits we attribute to God, more than powerful, or wrathful, or even creative, God is grace-full. Gracious. Fundamentally: the foundation of God, if we can speak of such a thing, is grace. The grace of God stretches over the whole of what we know of the life of God, from the ark to the cross to our lives. And characteristically: a characteristic of God is grace. Grace is an identifier of God for us. Grace is a way for us to know that it is God acting, and not, as some might say, the Evil One.

Grace and forgiveness are so intimately related that they are like two views of the same scene. To say our sins are forgiven by grace is to say that our sins are forgiven. Or to say that we have been graced. If there is grace, there is by necessity forgiveness. If there is forgiveness, it is by grace. Without forgiveness, there is no grace.

Grace is a whole and unconditional gift. Grace is 100%. If we are forgiven for almost--but not quite--everything, if we are forgiven for all things except for just a couple of little things, there is no grace. Grace falls apart. We cannot trust in it. We cannot have faith in it. Luther saw this. Once we are the responsible agents of God's forgiveness, we are trapped in the impossible. Once it is up to us--and by "it," I mean anything--to merit God's favor, we are in the soup.

Given grace, we are called to give in return. Forgive us our sins and we forgive those who sin against us, we pray. We claim to be built in the image of God, who is gracious. We claim as our example, teacher, and leader Jesus Christ, who is gracious. The message is clear: grace is the restorative elixir that brings the world to health.

But how far should we go? It is hard enough to forgive ourselves. Is there a boundary between those we forgive--those to whom we offer that gift--and those we do not? In widening circles of humanity, we get increasingly uncomfortable and stingy with our grace. Shall we forgive those we love? Probably. How about those we merely know? Friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Perhaps. But as a friend of mine once said, in any given gathering 90% of the people are jerks. How about those people? How about people whom we do not know, but know of? Public figures. People whose sins are visible when their similarity to us is not.

How about people who hate us? How about our enemies who attack us, or who swear publicly that we are evil and that they will bury us. Can we forgive them?

Hardest of all, what about those whom we hate? Can we forgive those who disgust us, or anger us, or who have harmed us or those we love? Just because God can do it, can we? Is it possible?

Christ calls us to turn the other cheek, to submit to insults and lawsuits and to respond to pleas for all sorts of assistance without question. Is that reasonable? And if we think it not reasonable, then what are we to make of Jesus, who asks us to do these things? What are we as Christians if we think that this man whom we follow as our rescuer is naïve and impractical?

Is it possible to forgive the worst? Not without God, it's not. It is the realization of God's presence in our lives that makes us gracious. Without God's grace there is no hope of unconditional giving on our part, no strength and focus that we require, no truth. Without God's grace ours seems not only puny, but idiotic.

The opening chapter of the Gospel of John is the testimony concerning God with us. The word was made flesh and lived among us--dwelt among us. It is the word that the prophets used when God promised to live among God's people, and as a person. It is the word for the place in which human Moses met God.

For John, Christ reveals God. What we see in Jesus we know to be in God. No one has ever seen God, John writes; it is the son who makes God known.

What we see in Jesus are daring feats of love that can even, as in Jesus' case, lead to death. We see radical generosity. We see unaccountable big-heartedness. We see forgiveness. We see God's grace in the person of this man and also God's grace working in this man.

As Christians, we make Christ known. What we do as Christians tells the world more than our words what Christ was and is. We are students of Jesus. We claim Jesus. If people see us, how can they not imagine that our actions are somehow revealing of the nature of Christ?

Our hope is that Just Desserts remains in the realm of fat, sugar, and chocolate. Our hope is that the world will never get what it deserves. That instead it will be restored, transformed into something that reflects God more brightly, that conforms more to the hope God had in its creation.

Such hope in us leans on trust in God's grace to work for us and through us. One event at a time, one interaction at a time, one decision at a time--person to person, day by day.