Counting Pebbles

In my classroom, I used to have five glass bowls — one for each group I taught. When the students obeyed the rules, I added a pebble to the bowl for their class. When they disobeyed the rules, I took a pebble out of the bowl. After a while, I would count the pebbles in each bowl, and the class with the most pebbles won a pizza party.

Many people think this is what it’s like to be a Christian: God gives us a bunch of rules to follow and adds pebbles to our glass bowl when we obey and takes them out when we disobey and then counts our pebbles to see if we’ve earned the reward of heaven. But this is not what Christianity is.

Christianity is not about obeying rules to score enough points to win admission into heaven or to get on God’s good side. Being a Christian is about living in relationship with God. That’s why the apostle Paul calls the gospel the “message of reconciliation” in today’s reading from Second Corinthians. It’s the good news of how we are reconciled to God through Jesus. And this is God’s gift given freely to us and not something we earn.