The Marginal Note--July, 2026
Our Lane, God's Freedom.
From the Desk
A few weeks ago, someone left a note for us. She had been coming to the Ray of Light Food Pantry, the street and recovery ministry connected to Light of Christ Lutheran here in La Porte, TX.
“I was one of those that you served on Saturday. I started coming about four months ago and it truly has made a difference for me and for what I have to eat at home. Thank you so much and I really appreciate all that you do. May your days be filled with His grace.”
I have been thinking about that last line ever since.
Not because it was surprising—because it wasn’t. Grace showed up at a folding table on a Saturday morning, passed from hand to hand in canned goods, produce, and the dignity of being seen and served without interrogation. And the person who received it named it correctly. His grace. Not ours. Not Lutheran grace. Not the grace of people who have their theology sorted out. His.
Her use of the word “His” is what stopped me. She didn’t credit the volunteers, the church, or even the food. She saw through us to the source. For a moment, the folding table became a kind of altar. But that moment also brought a tension into focus—a tension I’ve felt every time I stand there. She received grace, and she knew it. But what if she doesn’t know the One who promised to be there? What is our responsibility at that intersection of faith and God’s seemingly untethered generosity?
That combination — confessional conviction on one side of the table, religious diversity on the other — is not a problem to be managed. It is, I would argue, exactly where the church is supposed to be.
But it does generate a real theological question, and I want to try to answer it honestly rather than with the kind of carefully managed non-answer that satisfies nobody.
The question is this: if we believe that Jesus is, as he says in John 14, the way, the truth, and the life — not a way among many — what do we do with the grace that seems to operate outside the borders we can see, map, or account for? What do we do with the pantry client who closes her note with a benediction that would not be out of place in any Lutheran liturgy, and who may or may not have ever set foot in a church?
Bound by Promise, Not by Cage
Here is what I do not do with it.
I do not say that it doesn’t matter what anyone believes, that all paths lead to the same place, that the differences between religious traditions are essentially decorative. That is not honest, and it quietly dismisses real distinctions that real people have staked their lives on. The devout Muslim and the committed Buddhist are not accidentally Christian. Their traditions make truth claims that are genuinely different from ours, and treating those differences as negligible is its own form of condescension — it absorbs other people’s faith into ours without their knowledge or consent and calls it tolerance.
I also do not say that only people with correct theology receive grace. That turns faith into one more performance, one more thing you have to get right before God will deal with you. That is not Lutheran theology. That is not any theology worth the name.
What I say instead requires a distinction that the reformers were careful about and that we have mostly forgotten how to make: the difference between what we are bound to and what God is free to do.
We are bound to what we have been given. The proclaimed Word. Baptism. The Supper. These are not channels God invented to make salvation harder to access. They are the places God has promised to show up — the specific, concrete, locatable commitments that mean we never have to wonder whether God might be present when the water is poured or the bread is broken or the Gospel is spoken into a specific human situation. The promise is ours to rely on. That is our lane, and we stay in it without apology.
But the promise is binding on us. It is not a cage around God.
Our lane is not a defensive position; it is a delivery route. It is the route of the Word and the Sacrament, the route where we are commissioned to go and make disciples. We are the delivery drivers, not the accounting department.
Luther knew this. The reformers insisted that God is not so bound to the signs and sacraments that he cannot work without them. How do we talk about a grace that might be operating without a known confession? There is a long tradition in Lutheran theology of speaking of a “hidden God”—a God whose ways are mysterious. But the reformers’ consistent counsel is to avoid speculating about that God. We are to look only to the “revealed God”—the one we see in Jesus. And when we look there, we don’t see a God who is looking for reasons to exclude. We see a God who has already run out the door to find the lost. The question of who God might be saving outside the church is a question about a God we haven’t met. The God we have met is too busy looking for the lost sheep to worry about locking the gate.
Stay with the revealed God. And the revealed God — the one whose face, Jesus says, you have seen when you have seen his — is not a God of restriction and fine print. It is a God who is, at this very moment, out looking for the lost sheep, the lost coin, the son who left and hasn’t come back yet.
There is no other God hiding behind the cross. What you see there is what there is.
The Agency of the Door
Which means that when Jesus says, in John 14, no one comes to the Father except through me, the alert reader will notice what he does not say. He does not say: and most of you won’t make it.
The preposition in the Greek is dia — through, by means of, by the agency of. This is not a statement about who is excluded. It is a statement about who is doing the bringing. Jesus is not the bouncer checking credentials at the door. He is the way, the open door. And he has said, explicitly, that he came so that people might have life — not a trickle, not a rationed portion, but abundance.
To say that Jesus is the only way is not to draw a small circle around the people who have used the right words and performed the right rituals. It is to identify the character of the God who is doing the reaching — everywhere, always, in ways we can see and in ways we cannot.
The grace that is fully and finally revealed in Jesus was always the grace this God was operating with. Before Bethlehem. Beyond the church’s borders. At folding tables on Saturday mornings in La Porte.
Leaving the Accounting to God
I will tell you plainly what I do not know. I do not know with certainty what God does with the person who never heard the Gospel and died seeking whatever light they had. The tradition I stand in does not require me to pronounce on that, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I know is what I have been given: Jesus Christ crucified and risen, the only Savior I have seen. I proclaim him without apology and without anxiety. The rest belongs to God.
What I know is this: the woman who left that note named something real. Grace had shown up at her table — His grace, she called it — and she recognized it for what it was. She may not know the tradition that sent those volunteers out on a Saturday morning. She may not know the theological convictions that make a Lutheran congregation believe that feeding people is not optional charity but something closer to sacrament.
But she knew grace when it arrived. That is not nothing. That may, in fact, be everything.
So we stay in our lane. Not out of fear, but out of fidelity. We show up at the folding table. We pass the bread. We open the Scriptures. We pour the water. We do this because we have been told to, and because we have been promised that He is there. We leave the rest—the accounting, the reckoning, the mysterious scope of His mercy—to the God who has been out looking for the lost long before we ever arrived to help. May your days be filled with His grace.
We’ll keep showing up to help with that.
From the Tradition
“We must keep in mind that the promise of God is certain and sure, and that the sacraments are signs of that promise. But God is not so bound to the signs that he cannot work without them.” — Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520)
The reformers were never confused about this. The means of grace are God’s commitment to us, not our contract with God. Luther insists that the sacraments are reliable because God has promised to be present in them — and resists the conclusion that God is therefore absent everywhere else.
The promise is the floor, not the ceiling. What we have been given is enough to stand on. It was never meant to be the limit of what God can do.
Questions to Sit With
Where have you encountered what you can only describe as grace — in a place, a person, or a moment with no obvious connection to church or Scripture? What did you do with that encounter?
The Ray of Light Food Pantry serves the La Porte community every Friday afternoon and Saturday morning through Light of Christ Lutheran Church.
The Marginal Note is written by Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz, ordained Lutheran pastor, intentional interim minister, and certified spiritual director based in La Porte, Texas.
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Learn more about Steve’s work at stevestutz.com
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