Sunday, March 29, 2015

The Gospel is not sin management

Christianity isn't about sin management.  Christianity isn't primarily concerned (not even when the religion takes place as Christian Community) with the corporate managment of sin.  The goal of meeting together and of being together is not so that we can all (and each of us individually) learn to progressively sin less.  We shouldn't imagine that the reason Christ came was to put us in a corporate setting in which we could all examine our individual and corporate sin with the intended goal of leaving that sin behind and therefore becoming holier.  We shouldn't imagine that to love someone as Christ loved them primarily focused around helping them get over their sin.  We shouldn't imagine that the thing that makes Christian love different from un-Christian love is this particular focus on becoming pure from sin.

 

Let me clarify: Christianity is only concerned with sin in a secondary way.  If and when that secondary way comes into play, it only does so after the needs of the human being about whom and by whom the sin is in question are met.  Christianity is concerned about love before holiness, about compassion before purity, and about bearing other's burdens before moral perfection.  To say otherwise is to pretend that man was made for the sabbath.

 

The above point is crucial and must be said over and over again.  I fear that we Christians have wronged our world, our children, and our selves by getting the order here mixed up.  I fear that we have given ourselves a reputation for being more concerned with identifying sin and becoming free from that identified sin than we are with the people we think are being freed.  In other words, we have placed a great deal of our emotional currency on freedom from what we say sin is.  So much so, that we are in grave danger of not knowing the people in our community groups and our social circles and our parishes -- all we know is the sin we hope that they are being freed from.  When we actually meet someone who identifies with something we call sin in such a way that they can't leave it (just as they can't leave their foot or their hand behind!) we are left in a paradox.  We settle to love them as we would love anyone else who persists in sin.  But this is not love.

 

Love is blind.  Love asks not, love knows not, all love desires is the object of one's love.  Love is uncritical.  Love knows not the language we wrap around categories.  Love is expansive and resplendent with life.  Love will not be satisfied with settling for the tired definitions of sin that we give it.  Love cannot insist on maintaining intact the identity markers with which we view our world.  

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