Perfect Remission

My spontaneous gambol through the Collect for Lent has taken me to the following places:

You Hate Nothing That You Have Made

Create and Make in Us ...

Worthily Lamenting Our Sins

As ever, I commend the Collect for Lent as a wonderfully reflective tool because it attends to many aspects of our spiritual journey. You will also note that, at the time that I write this, I have the Collect in full to the right of this box [If you are reading this in the future, you can find the Collect here]. 

'Remission' is a word that Christians use often, and mostly without any thought. We pray for the 'remission of our sins', and rightly so - but do we really know we mean? For those of you about to bounce around in your swivelling computer-desk chairs yelling "yes, Farv, of course I do", then I congratulate you, for I thought I knew too, but didn't really in truth. 

Like I did in the last post, I pondered the meaning of that word 'remission'. Like so many things, it is bound up in context. For example, speak of 'remission' to a person winning a fight with cancer and we have a taste of the word at its most powerfully wonderful. 'Remission' can also refer to the making of a payment - and here we have a very clear indicator of the payment of the Cross. 'Remission' can also refer to surrender and for me, at least, directs my thoughts to the Garden of Gethsemane. Again, 'remission' tells us of being discharged from debt, and here we wander into the territory of redemption which owes its meaning to related ideas. 

So, we have a number of very broad labels to work with here. And there was us thinking we knew what 'remission' was when applied to our sins. We have cure, payment, discharge, abatement, surrender - such a loaded and potent word that easily falls from our tongues in prayer. What is also easy to miss is that we ask God to grant this to us - that it demands no action from us (though we are, of course, called to penitent earlier in the Collect). I wonder how many people, when labouring under the terrible shadow of a cancer, have prayed earnestly to be in a state of remission. Whilst I have only had the merest scare in that regard, even then I got a flavour of the depth and anguish in that cry. To be granted remission in that case is nothing less that been granted a new life in its entirety. So it is with our cry from remission of sin. It is no less a life or death pleading. 

As I searched the Interweb for a pretty picture for this post, I found the one that now adorns it. Its graphical representation has caused me almost to think more about the word 'remission' than the Collect did. 'Mission Remission' was a campaign to raise support for cancer sufferers in remission, but the way that the word is configured in the image has touch a little nerve in me.

'Remission', in all the definitions that I have seen and read talk about a one-direction process. Something was there and then it was either in retreat or it wasn't there at all. Re-mission says more to me than that. It talks about our duty, as Christians, not just to receive 'perfect remission', but to take that out to the world. Or another way, when we receive perfect remission from God, we receive a new opportunity to re-mission in the world in which we live. In the word, there is a mandate, an opportunity to engage with 'mitto' [Gk] - to be sent out. When we pray for 'perfect remission' of our sins, we pray to receive something. What is clear to me is the implicit call then to share that with the world that may not know about this perfect gift of grace.

Create and Make in Us ...

I have been enjoying the series 'Wonders of the Universe', presented by the annoyingly cool Brian Cox [once a rocker, now a professor - and he still looks like he is 20 years old]. I have no formal scientific education but I think that my pragmatic learning style allows me an instinctive grasp of physics and chemistry. In short, I understand intuitively that all life is founded on structures and processes, that effects have causes that are attributable to other events and that every thing has its order. This programme appeals to me at that level and while I take most of what Prof Cox says at face value, it sort of makes sense in a way I can't quite put my finger on. 

In the last episode that I watched, a factor of our existence that I have always sensed and accepted was explained - that nothing new exists under the Sun. I have no issue with the idea that as human beings we are are a sort of re-shuffle of elements, not new in any way - in the physical sense. The cells that make us up existed elsewhere before they were caused to be part of us. I find that rather interesting - that my nose may have been part of the right foot of a tyrannosaurus or a meteor hurtling through the abyss. As a Christian, I have absolutely no problem with this at all. 

Lest you have not noticed, for Christians it is Lent. The prayer that we (Church of England types) use, the Collect for Lent has already been a subject of discussion here - and today I attend to another bit. "Create and make in us new and contrite hearts". Well, I am only thinking about the first half of that, as the title of this post might suggest. Keep up!

Brian Cox explained the 'science creation'. He did so well and I believed every word. That the gold in my wedding ring was formed only in the heat of dying stars because the quarks that make up the atoms that make up the elements cannot cook at a cooler temperature - I am happy with that. Brian Cox will, I am sure, be relieved to know that. However, there was the inevitable gap. Where did the quarks, the atoms, the elements, the amino acids, the stars and the heavens - where did they come from. How did it all start. 

Quark - from Star Trek. Not Brian Cox.

I believe that God is the only Creator. It says so in my creeds - but this programme applied a logic and a science to that. The building blocks of life, these little bits that join up in temperatures that would singe your eyebrows - they had to be created. Logic demands it. Logic also demands that there had to be a reason why the Big Bang happened, the moment where life was born as we know it. Logic demands that if this were not the case, the whole of history and all of the natural order is nothing more than one huge fluke. I am not sure that even the most robust atheist scientist would hold to that theory. Our Scriptures have applied a poetic approach to all of this born in part of a profound lack of the science that we now know - but it works. The account of the Creation, the acknowledgment that every single fragment of every single quark was fashioned in the hands of God, and that life has simply been a re-ordering of them through time - it holds good. What science cannot offer (to my knowledge) is a non-God account of the breath of life that we all receive - how if this is a huge fluke, why I am me and you are you, both of us loved and known by God.