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.  

An Imagined Ecclesiology

Ecclesiology is, as many of my dear readers are aware, at the center of Christian theology.  How one views the nature and role of what it means for the church to be the church determines how one views the Christic events, the make-up of the trinity, and the role of our other theological categories: like justification, sanctification, sin, forgiveness, creation, and re-creation.  Ecclesiology is the lived outworking of St. John's mandate to, "love your neighbor whom you can see" before we "love God whom we cannot see."

Since we can see the church (we can bodily go there on Sundays) and since we can see how the church engages the world, it becomes the locus of our faith.  It is in church that our doxology (worship) guides our belief about God (the pronouncement of our theology) and turns into action in the world.  When we imagine our ecclesiology, we engage in a conversation about how the church should be verses how it is.  This internal act of self critical assessment is crucial to our very participation in the church becuase it engages us in church.  (and yes, I did just use the word church almost as a verb, but that isn't a bad thing.  If church is, as we have said, the location where our coporate worship becomes spoken belief about God and then lived action in the world, then the word most certainly also has verbal qualities).

In order for the church to be faithful to her scriptural witness, her lectional guidelines, and her sacramental core, she must continually bear the needs of the world to the God she worships.  For worship is song.  And the song comes out of the void - Rilke is correct - it is out of the void of the death of Orpheus' brother that the song which "enraptures and comforts and helps us" is born.  What I'm trying to say is this; our human ability to really and finally approach each other is born from the pain of shared loss.  Our ability to approach God (together with all our experience) also springs from the void of death.  Like Orpheus, Christ descent into Hell resulted in life granted anew.  Unlike Orpheus, all of hell joins in the song of new life eternally.  

From the stand point of those who self describe as being outside of the church, how do we bear their needs to God?  I imagine those needs being born through a lived theology of the descent into hell.  In other words, I only get what Christ does for me, when I see Christ in my hell.  It is all very nice that he was born, that he ministered, and that he died and rose again.  But I need to know that the isolation I live with everyday is not also a prison.  I need to know that the way the bars to my prison of isolation are busted is by Christ living with me in my cell.  

And there is the rub, isn't it?  Very often the isolation that people feel (especially in the LGBTQA+ communities and others) has been created by our own culture wars.  The church we inherited sought a war on culture in order to win people for Christ, but ended up burning the hearts and memories of those they sought to 'save'.  Instead of Christ, (whether Christ born or died, or resurrected) they implanted justifiable rage. 

Yet it isn't this simple either - for the isolatin is also social.  We have been ok with a prosperity gospel, a capitalist system, and equating patriotism with service to God.  By ignoring the needs of many who are no longer met by a minimum wage at 8 dollars, by allowing wage theft and corporate greed to drain the social safety net, and by turning our eyes instead of our cheek in the face of torture committed by our government, we effectively tell the 'least of these' to better their own lives on their own.  No wonder they feel isolated.

I imagine a church that is strong because she stands up for the weak.  I imagine a church which adopts the social realities of the least of these as their own personal concern.  I imagine a church which preaches that Christ descended into hell.  I imagine a church that preaches the descent of our Lord by simultaniously living in the hell we have complicitly created, while always already advocating for justice, mercy, and peace.