What's Tony Thinking

Never Be Afraid to Remind People of the Obvious

Some years back I heard someone quote Samuel Johnson, a.k.a. “Dr. Johnson, Man of Letters,” the 18th century author as saying: “Never be afraid to remind people of the obvious; it is what they have most forgot.” It’s true. We tend to forget the obvious, the basics, the main thing. Why is that?

Recently I took a class on painting the sky. It’s the first painting class I’ve taken since COVID. The experience was an illustration of Dr. Johnson’s truth. I had gotten stale in my painting and needed to be reminded of some of the basics, of the obvious.

For example, mixing colors. There are so many dazzling colors available straight from tubes of paint that one is tempted to just go with what’s in the tube. The result, however, is a loss of subtlety and shade, not to mention that half the fun of painting is mixing colors, trying to find the right hue or shade by adding just a grain of this or a touch of that. To paint more or less straight out of the tube, with little mixing, is one of those short cuts that turns out not to be. Your colors end up too saturated. Besides, you can get most all the colors working from just the three primaries, red, blue and yellow.

To be reminded of the obvious, to spend some time and effort mixing colors, neutralizing or accenting, was a V-8 moment. Remember the V-8 ads where the guy smacks his own forehead and says, “I could have had a V-8!” At right, one from the class that reflects a little more subtlety, a winter sunset at Golden Gardens Park near us.

“Never be afraid to remind people of the obvious . . . ” is also useful advice for a preacher. When I started out as a minister/ preacher I thought that I had to have something new and unique to say each Sunday. Which is a killer of an expectation to put on yourself. Over the years, I concluded that I pretty much had one thing to say and mainly needed to find a fresh way to say it.

For me that one thing that we tend, oddly, to forget, even week by week, if not day by day (hour by hour!), is God’s grace. One way to describe grace is as “God’s one-way love.” That is, grace is not transactional, not a quid pro quo nor an “if/ then.” Another way to put it might be, “It’s not all about you, nor is it all up to you or on you.” “There is a power at work in the universe forever on the side of those brave enough to trust it,” wrote Montaigne. That power is grace.

Grace can be the hint of spring on a February day, or the taste of a ripe strawberry in June. Who earns or deserves these? It is the miracle of being loved and loving someone. It is a failure or mistake that is forgiven. Grace is a fresh start when you had about given up and thought there wouldn’t be any more ever because you were too old, too dumb, too sad or too stuck. Grace is being down as low as you have ever been, only to hear, “Do not be afraid, I am with you, I love you.”

This spring I’ll be speaking at the annual conference of Mockingbird Ministries in NYC. The title of my talk is, “Isn’t Christianity Really Just About Being Good?” I’m a little anxious about my talk, partly because I just get anxious about such things, but partly because this is a theologically sophisticated crowd. Moreover, Mockingbird is already all about grace. Which is to say they already know that Christianity isn’t just about being good. I worry that I’m carrying coal to Newcastle, as the expression goes.

But I take courage from Dr. Johnson’s line. “Never be afraid to remind people of the obvious, it is what they have most forgot.” Not only is that true of people generally, it’s true of me. It’s true of me when it comes to grace. I am always needing the reminder of the truth — and maybe more than the “truth,” the power — of God’s grace. For there is always more grace in God than there is sin in us. Grace is a power, a power that changes things.

But saying “it’s not all on you, not all on us,” while wonderfully true and absolutely necessary, is not the whole story. I rely on another truth, expressed in the aphorism, “Salvation is all about grace; ethics is all about gratitude.” If the first move (and the last) is God’s, we are also invited to respond to the grace, to answer the grace and love we have known in the way we live, a.k.a. “ethics.” That isn’t to say that grace must be earned after the fact, but that the experience of grace changes us. In fact, it’s the only thing that does.

In times of apprehension and anxiety (like now), we need a firm hold on a few core truths and to be reminded of them often. So mix your colors, trust God’s grace made visible in Jesus Christ is with you and for you, and that the final work of grace — to make us gracious — is underway in you even now, and will be brought to completion in the fullness of God’s time.

One more painting from the sky class. This one a summer sunset in the Wallowas, heading west on the road from Imnaha to Joseph, Oregon.