Disingenuous Church?

I once read a story about a businessman who, down on his luck decided to do something pro-active to save his business. He was in particular danger of losing his business, then his home, and very probably his wife and family if all went as he had foreseen. He owned a company that supplied car tyres.

His solution was, during the night, to slash the tyres of some cars in his neighbourhood. The car owners would make a claim with their insurers and  the man's tyre-replacing business would become the nominated repairer. In short, he enhanced the need for his services. In the end, he got greedy, got caught and got himself slung in Stir for seven hundred million years, lost his business, his home, his wife and kids, his freedom and his dignity. It is naughty, so the Judge proclaimed, to create a need that only you can meet. 

That is an extreme example of something that troubles me in my Christian life. I read something during the week that triggered this in my mind:

It's the power of the love of Jesus Christ, the love that conquers sin and wipes out shame ... [Hybels, 2002]

Bill Hybels is right, of course. But then I think of the Church and how we are in terms of the lives of those around us. We scamper about 'saving' people, after having judged them ourselves as 'unsaved'. We forgive the sins of people whom we judge to be sinful. The "shame" that we are called to wipe away is the "shame" that we identify - and there are times when the Church can appear like the scrawny little kid who sneers from behind the school-bully. 

The church is, in many ways, a very judgmental organisation (with never fully sits right with God is Love Plc). I remember, in my undergraduate days, being told by some Smiler in the Christian Union that sex before marriage was a sin and that I (and the assembled throng) should feel jolly wretched if we had submitted to that urge. Maybe we had and maybe we hadn't, but I think all of us felt lower than a snake's belly. Do this, you are bad. Do that, you are wrong. Do the other and you are wretched. Do something else and you will, my dear friend, burn for an eternity with the fiery Imps of Hades. Why, cos we say so (or at least that is what we interpret the Bible as saying). But don't worry, meagre sinful worm - we can wipe your shame away; you know, the shame we just gave you. 

If only those who are without sin cast the first stone (those are Jesus' words), then why are we a church so hell-bent on labelling the world as sinful and providing the nominated cure? Are not sinful ourselves? If we are not careful, a pragmatic world will cotton on to the fact that if they bypass faith altogether, the measure of their sinfulness vanishes and they will never need darken our doorsteps again. I seem to remember Jesus distancing himself from the judgmental attitudes of his Disciples. 

Maybe we should stop saving a world that God saved already - and worry about how we might be worthy of that life-changing Grace. Charity, after all, begins at home. 

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.

Worthily Lamenting Our Sins

I hadn't intended to work my way through the Collect for Lent in this blog, but it seems that I am - so carry on I shall. 

I was trying to explain to two Year 4 classes why Christians 'do' Lent. I told them about reflecting on the events that follow on from Lent, that by giving things up we give ourselves space to think about God. I said that some Christians like to take on new things like helping other people, doing some good deeds maybe. They coped with all that very well.

Then I said that Lent was a good time for us to think how we have sinned and how we might like to change and be a little better. A lad asked if it was my job to tell people that they have been naughty. I said no. He asked if someone else told Christians that they had been naughty. I said no, no really. He then asked why Christians thought they had been naughty when no-one had told them. I said that because we know we are not perfect that we kinda just know. He then asked if that is why Christians are always sad-looking. Game set and match the lad. I was lost for a quick-fix answer!

The thing about being a Christian is that we are in constant danger of getting the focus wrong. Many of us seem driven to place our sins in the middle of the canvass that is our lives rather than the goodness and love of God. I think that that is because we can more easily believe that we're 'but worms', rather than believe that God loves us. One is innate, the other acquired. I don't believe that we worthily lament our sins. I think that we tend towards obsessively grieving them. 

So what is worthy lamentation, Mr Curate? - I hear you yell with one voice.

Worthy - useful, of value, virtuous

Lament - to express grief, mourn, to regret

In short, we are called to attend to our sinfulness and our sins with valuable regret, with virtuous mourning - not obsessively. In other words, we take note, we regret, we mourn and we learn; we learn, we express sorrow, we seek forgiveness and we move on. This takes inestimable courage. Most of us are given two arms, two hands and one heart. As I say to my kids, there is only so much I can do at once, and so it is for us. If we are laden with our obsessive griefs, we will never have the capacity to embrace the love and hope that underpins any and all forgiveness. 

I think there is merit in assessing the value of self-reproach that never wains. Many (if not all) of us have those things in our hearts that we labour with after years and years. Such energy and dedication is required to carry such a load when in the end we are called, as Jesus followers, to lay them at the foot of the Cross and accept the gift that was once hanging upon it. I might even go so far as to say that endlessly burdening ourselves with our past sins, especially after receiving absolution, is a sin itself - a sin of ingratitude and wasted time and energy. At worst, it may even err towards a sin of vanity.