“My
little children,” writes John, “I am writing these things to you so that you
may not sin.”
My honest first thought reading that
verse? “Good luck with that, John!” The one constant in the universe is sin. That
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be better; we really should—and do. I just
spent a week with a bunch of high-schoolers and, let me tell you, we do our
darndest to provide the boundaries they need to not do anything particularly
stupid while we are in charge of them. We do this because we care for them,
because we believe that on their own they will sometimes make poor choices,
and, also, because we like not being sued. But, at the end of the day, all we
are really doing is forcing them within boundaries to keep them safe. They aren’t
choosing of their own free will not to sin; we just try to keep it from them.
Given true freedom we know what they might do, and we also know that they will
eventually spread their wings and, like Icarus, they may very well crash and
burn. I think that’s called college.
On the 3rd night of the
Gathering we heard from Pr. Will Starkweather, who talked about his experience
with cutting himself, starting in high school. This was one of many speakers who spoke on difficult,
challenging subjects that directly impact the lives of our young people. Will
talked about the first time he was honest with a spiritual leader about his
problems, and the pastor told him four words: “You are going to hell.”
That is the law, friends. That is
where that first verse in 1 John 2 seems to be leading us. Don’t sin. Or
else. I’ve heard this kind of self-righteous blathering from pastors
before. I’ve heard pastors who get up at funerals and talk about how the person
who died might have been saved if only he had done X, Y, or Z—if only he had
been a better person, if only she had been a better follower of Jesus; if only
they would have chosen to follow. I’ve heard this stuff before.
Miraculously, Will came back to the
church—a different church, obviously, because if you go to a pastor with a
spiritual problem and he tells you you’re going to hell, then you find a new
pastor—and Will eventually confided in a second pastor. You can imagine the
anxiety this would induce in a person who was already suffering for something whose
root cause ran parallel to anxiety. He went to his pastor, shared his story,
and she responded with four different words, “There’s grace for that.” Four
words that changed everything.
This became a kind of loving retort
for many people in our group for the rest of the week. Whenever anything would
happen, whenever anybody would mess something up, somebody from our group would
inevitably smirk and sometimes whisper, sometimes shout out: “There’s grace for
that!”
Spill mustard on your shirt? There’s grace for that! Drop your
laptop? There’s grace for that! Call
somebody by the wrong name? There’s grace
for that! And we’re just talking about five minutes of Pr. Frank’s life on
the bus.
There’s grace for all that, because
we have a God in Jesus Christ who does not ask how heavy your sin is before taking
it upon himself on the cross. These chapters from 1 John have to be read in the
context not only of the grace of God that covers all sin but also with 1 John 4
in mind, our reading next week, which proclaims that God is known fully and
exclusively in love. There’s grace for everything we carry, because God is love,
and love is not conditioned on how awesome you are, how holy you are, or how full
and unbroken you pretend to be. God’s love has no conditions whatsoever.
Some of you may have heard about
other speakers at the Gathering this year. You might even have friends who were
critical, or you yourself may be critical of people who spoke or things that
were said. Whether it was the pastor who sometimes swears, the person who
promoted an idea with which you disagree, the other pastor who sometimes
swears, or the former bishop who hit buzzword bingo in about five minutes of
talking, whatever your personal feelings or opinions about who they are or what
was said, the Gathering began with grace, so that we can move toward hope where
there was once despair. In this way, Gathering speakers touched on a ton of
difficult subjects—eating disorders, cutting, depression, rape, gender identity
and sexuality, racism and sexism, and more; all of it beginning with grace and
moving toward hope.
We could talk about nothing; we
could have spent days talking theoretical theology, never touching on subjects
that our young people actually deal with in their lives. We could have “stayed
out of politics,” but that fails to acknowledge that everything about loving
our neighbors is political. Not partisan, per se, but absolutely political. The
ELCA is no perfect church. I can tell you this because we are the ELCA—you and me—and we are not perfect people (and I can
tell you that because I follow some of you on Twitter). However, I believe in a
God who shows us the way toward love is, as 1 John says, to “walk as he
walked;” not because that saves us, but since God has saved us first, we are
freed to love.
Still, there’s all this business
about sin in 1 John; it is about sin in the most personal of ways. It is, as we
so often say in the church, contextual. The question is not: What is God
telling you to tell your neighbor that s/he is doing wrong? But instead: How is
God calling you to walk? This was not
written for someone else; it was written for you. God is far less interested in you telling other person how sinful
they are than God is with reminding you that you are a sinner. Come out of the
darkness; walk in the light. This is about you;
not about the person you feel compelled to change.
This is terrible news for control
freaks, because the love of God is not a thing that you get to portion out for
those around you. Rather, God’s love is a “well-spring of living water,” as the
Gospel of John says in chapter 4, verse 14. So many times, Christians have denied
grace as a kind of weapon; often, in the name of truth. People need to walk in
the truth first, we claim. They need to see the error in their ways.
However, by seeking to deny them
grace we are not protecting truth; instead, we twist what is true for our
advantage. The church should always be a living sacrifice, giving away its need
for control for the sake of pointing to the one who is in control. Whenever
anybody comes to Jesus trying to play the high-and-mighty card Jesus turns it
around on them, whether it’s the log in their eye or telling them to give it
all away, nobody comes away from meeting Jesus justified on their own accord.
Jesus is truth. It’s all coming to light in him; everything we assume we do
well and others do poorly, all of it. This is not a free pass to do whatever we
please, but rather a promise that God will meet us in the morning with a new
word of forgiveness that is deeply personal to our experience and not dependent
on the words of a pastor, or a teacher, or a well-meaning friend—all of whom
are sinners.
The church has thousands of years of
history, stretching back to Jesus and even before, where we have retained power
and neglected those who desperately need a word of grace, even after Jesus gave
us this amazing promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God, as
it says in Romans 8. Not hardship, not persecution, not famine (that’s right,
not the things outside of our control), but also not even death, or life; not
those over us, not even ourselves; nothing can separate us from God’s
love. So if anybody tells you different, they are the one failing to walk in
the light. That person is the one who needs to step out of the darkness.
That’s the feeling I came away with
in Houston. We had 31,000 people willingly take a step into the light, and we
had a church that was willing to meet them by giving voice to many who have never had a voice before—not as perfect people. Nadia Bolz-Weber was pretty clear that
every one of us will fail to reach the idealized version of ourselves—Nadia Bolz-Weber,
who ironically takes more flack than about any other Lutheran preacher even
though she consistently preaches a more Lutheran message than the rest of us, reminded
us that every one of us will be a blessedly imperfect creature for the entire
length of our lives, but there’s grace for that! Come into the light, because
there’s grace for that and so there’s nothing to fear.
This is basically what the church
has always sought to do. Each Sunday we gather to take a step into the light,
not knowing where it will take us next, because there’s grace we have nothing
to fear. We come for a bit of good news in a world that sells despair. We come
because the love of God compels us to take a step forward in faith; to love one
another as God loves us; to take the grace we have been given and put it to
work for the sake of everybody else who needs to hear: “There’s grace for
that!”
Because, miraculously, there is.
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