For Sinners Only (continued)

Part 69, "The Story We Find Ourselves In"

With regard to sinners, Jesus’ policy was association rather than separation.  But then what do we make of a passage like 2 Corinthians 6:14ff., “What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?  Come out from them, and be separate”? Take a stab at it!  As always, it comes down to historical context, to what the circumstances are that drew forth this text.  In this case, it comes down to a small and spiritually fragile community of faith in the notoriously decadent city of Corinth, where  prevalent religious practice included having sex with any of the hundreds of sacred prostitutes that serviced the cult of Aphrodite.  This city was so bad that its name had become a byword for depravity; to “corinthianize” was to engage in shameless immorality, and all in the name of religion.  So Paul is saying that it might not be wise to take as your closest business partners or your most intimate friends, the ones whom you most trust and confide in, those who think and act this way, and surely Paul is right.

But the truth is Jesus came for whom?  He came for hated tax collectors, for officers in the army of occupation, for women with bad reputations in town, for one caught in the act of adultery, for the thief hanging beside him on the cross, even for those who were crucifying him.  His church has only—in the rarest of moments and places—been for sinners, been places where sinners can come and be fully welcomed, where they can come and open up and tell their stories safely, their desperate struggles, their out-of-control hungers and longings, their sin and scandal and shame, and not be looked down on and scorned by the righteous.  Less than  300 years after Jesus, the church that bore his name was demanding that confessed sinners undergo public exposure and humiliation by making them prostrate themselves with loud groans and lamentations outside the church doors, or making them stand in mourning during services just inside the vestibule, for—get this—ten, fifteen or sometimes twenty-five years!  And then came the Crusades, and the Inquisitions and the murderous religious wars.  And of course the story in which we could actually find ourselves was lost, and one day we find ourselves with our towers falling down around us which is almost to be expected after nearly 2000 years of misdirection.

Now, a church open to sinners will of course be a messy church, but the God who reveals himself in Jesus, I believe, wants us to be a church with a whole lot more problems, with even greater diversity, with a lot more viewpoints, even scandal as life’s real problems resurface in the light of grace, as they come out of hiding into the light.  God wants us to be a church filled with people who have space in their lives and in their minds and in their hearts for those who are not “like us,” for the disreputable and marginal, sometimes for the deeply disturbed.  God wants us to be a church accused, accused of eating and drinking with sinners.  That’s what Jesus’s encounter with the Pharisees that day at Matthew’s house tell us (Matthew 9:9-13).  And when we are such a church, we will be on course to the story we find ourselves in.

Of course to do this, we will have to repent ourselves, that is, we will have to change some of the ways we think.  We will learn what Jesus taught about not judging (Matthew 7:1).  We will not give in to our knee-jerk impulses to put a value on every thought or action or person.  I’m told that when we meet a person for the first time, we decide in a matter of seconds whether we like them or not, whether we judge them to be good or bad.  We’ll stop that.  We’ll seek really to understand them.  We’ll know that whether God can forgive us has a whole lot to do with whether we forgive those who sin against us (Matthew 6:14-15).  We’ll learn what Jesus meant when he told us to “Stop judging by mere appearances, and make right judgments” (John 7:24). 

In short, we’ll learn to see our thoughts as just thoughts.  We’ll learn that every category we put a person in distorts reality, that every label we apply to a person keeps us from seeing that person as he or she really is,  whether that label is sinner, or liberal, or gay or straight, or Christian or Muslim. And if we learn these things , we will be close to the story we—and finally others—can find themselves in, and we will find that the tax collectors and sinners, and the women caught in adultery, and the social outcasts may—in the ways that matter most—be closer to God than those who are more “respectable.”  In fact, when we learn to see things as they actually are, we will notice that churchgoers have pretty much the same problems, make the same mistakes, and face the same family crises at pretty much the same rates as non-churchgoers.  And we’ll begin to know then what Jesus meant when he said that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of the chief priests and elders (Matthew 21:31).  

It would probably be good to just admit that Christians have done a lot of bad things, sometimes because we didn’t know better and sometimes because we betrayed our own ideals, but that we’d like to do better, and the story isn’t anywhere near over yet.  And it might be really good if people could come into churches and see us as we really are—confused, frustrated, often frightened, guilty, often unable to communicate even with those we are closest to, inwardly crying out for someone to love us.

Maybe, in your life right now, you’re feeling left out, looked down on, scorned by those who are more “righteous,” maybe even shamed, embarassed, your reputation in tatters, judged and abandoned.  Luke adds two words to Matthew’s account; in Luke 5:32 Jesus says, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” [then he adds] “to repentance.”  Jesus calls you to repentance, to fundamentally change your heart and mind, but—catch this—he does not require repentance of you before he will come and eat with you.  Repentance is not as churches often imply step #1.  It’s the goal toward which we all grow.  Don’t miss this!  The Pharisees had no problem with Jesus calling sinners to repentance.  Had he called all the tax collectors to repentance, the Pharisees would have made him a national hero.  The offense was, and still is, that Jesus did not require repentance before he would fellowship with sinners.  Jesus calls you to repentance, but his willingness to come home with you, and associate with you, and party and eat with you, does not depend on your repentance.  He comes to you willing to stand by your side because he loves you, and he calls you to repentance for the same reason: because he loves you. 

Meanwhile, he’s calling the “righteous” to repent as well, to fundamentally change their hearts and minds, to repent of the ways they have felt about you and the ways they have made you feel about yourself.  Jesus offers you, whether you are righteous or sinner, freely and in love, a chance to start over, to be reborn.  Imagine the feeling in your soul, the feeling of release, the heavy weight of judgment gone from both those who judge and those who are judged.  Imagine the peace in your heart, innocence again, trust again.  You can be forgiven, and you can discover within yourself and others the Spirit of God.