Sin, grace and language continued..

On a stunning spring day in the Berkshires, before entering the assorted chores of our household, let me return to my reflection on sin, grace, redemption and a language that works for 21st Western people.  I am grateful that some of you have shared with me your thoughts, questions, concerns and insights over the past few days.  As I often tell folk in our faith community, even blogging depends on being connected to the whole "body of Christ" where I can discover my blind spots and mature through correction and challenge.  So it is in this light that I hope to continue with today's reflection.

First, if it hasn't become clear by now, let me confess that I have been shaped by the wisdom and writing of Reinhold Niebuhr when it comes to sin and grace.  Many in the West have called him the 20th century's theologian of sin, but I would want to add "and grace, too." Because while Niebuhr wrote more about sin than any other theme, he did so in a diagnostic way that was always grounded in grace. He was clear that after our culture embraced a romantici way of comprehending modern life - the dual notion that human beings could fix whatever was broken and that progress both within and among us involved a linear journey - the result was a case of social and personal anxiety writ large.  In a word, we felt like we should be able to do "better" in fixing all things even when our experience rarely supported such thinking.  Three points are essential here:

+  Niebuhr explained human nature as the union of three truths: a) we are creatures - finite beings - b) we are created in the image of God - beings filled with freedom - and c) we are sinners - beings susceptible to temptation. In a vastly simplified way, sin is the result of our choosing to abandon our role and place in God's creation.  It is living without balance between our nature and our spirit. 

+ When we freely choose to abandon our intimate relationship with God, the fundamental result is anxiety because we no longer know where we fit in the world.  Once we reject our dependence upon God - our finite nature as God's creatures - and live only within the realm of freedom, we become "even more conscious of (our)insecurity; as a result (our) anxiety reaches unbounded proportions."  Sin, therefore, has to do with fighting and denying our place within God's creation - and denying the anxiety that grows from our free choice.

Howard Patton in his exploration of Niebuhr's theology puts it like this:

Niebuhr saw the self participating in the double environment of nature and spirit with its correlatives of greatness and weakness. In this situation the whole self exhibits capacities for both good and evil. The contradictory character of human existence is not evil in itself. Man’s essence resides in his freedom. Sin is not possible without freedom, but it does not necessarily follow from it. The issue in Niebuhr’s doctrine of sin is not man’s finiteness in nature, but his abortive attempts to escape that finiteness.  "Sin in history is not finiteness and particularity," he said. Man’s situation of finiteness and freedom is actually a good thing, ordained by God. The situation becomes the locus of sin only when it is falsely interpreted.

If man conscientiously took into account his full involvement in both nature and spirit, he would not be deluded into unwarranted megalomanias. An ultimate mystery surrounds the way in which the human situation becomes a sinful situation. This mystery does not easily fit a scheme of rational intelligibility. The two forms of the mystery are man’s responsible freedom, despite the determining factors of creaturely finiteness, "and the greater mystery of the corruption of that freedom and resulting sin and guilt." Man becomes confused and falls into sin when he rejects this state of finiteness and freedom and tries to realize himself without divine authority to define his limits.

The alternatives of right and wrong are not inherent in man’s situation of finiteness and freedom. Niebuhr used the symbol of the devil to explain the false interpretation by which man is tempted. This biblical symbol indicates that sin did not originate out of man’s own nature. Niebuhr said to "believe that there is a devil is to believe that there is a principle or force of evil antecedent to any evil human action."The devil is a symbol that sin is a mysterious offer, a tempting alternative to God’s established order.  (For an excellent and clear summary of Niebuhr's "doctrine of sin and grace" check out: http://www.religion-online.org/show chapter.asp?title= 3279&C =2737)

For me, this is language that makes sense and works beyond the confines of both modernism and post-modern thought, yes? Here Niebuhr cuts us free from both Augustine and Anselm without denying the reality of sin (or the insights and limiations of these time-tested theologians.)  Yes, he uses psychological language, but only to explain the origin and consequences of sin in our personal and social experience.  He also explores what sin looks like in our contemporary realm:  self-love - that is pride in all of its obvious and inverted forms - and sensuality - using things to either deaden or deny our anxiety. 

What's more, Niebuhr continued to maintain the paradoxical - and truly mysterious - belief that human sin is original (going to our origins.) Patton puts it well: Anxiety presupposes a choice between good and evil. Human experience, however, indicates that man invariably chooses evil. The inevitability of man’s choice of evil and his responsibility for having done so, logically irreconcilable facts of experience, formed for Niebuhr the problem of original sin. He said: Here is the absurdity in a nutshell. Original sin, which is by definition an inherited corruption, or at least an inevitable one, is nevertheless not to be regarded as belonging to his essential nature and therefore is not outside the realm of his responsibility. Sin is natural for man in the sense that it is universal but not in the sense that it is necessary. Niebuhr believed that both contentions must be maintained, even if they are an offense to rationalists and moralists.

Second, our response to sin is either confession and repentance or denial.  And here is where the element of time factors in - at least in my experience as well as my take on the wisdom of scripture.  Confession can happen in a variety of ways:  in 12 step meetings - where there is the immediate nature of owning our brokenness as well as the long term commitment to periodic moral inventories - in Sunday worship, in therapy and in prayer.  Each and all of these forums involve getting honest with ourselves and reclaiming something of our place within God's created order.  And for some of us, this can take years.

So one challenge to experiencing grace in the midst of our sin is cultivating a healthy and humble sense of time.  Think of the various ways this truth is given to us in the Scriptures - a few of my favorites include:

+ To everything there is a season...

+ God's ways are not your ways...

+ Do not fret, but wait upon the Lord...

+ In the still small voice...

+ Taste and see...

+ Come unto me... and I will give you rest...

Forgiveness and grace come only with time.  To be sure, I have experienced a total encounter of renewal and liberation after confession, but it took years of regret, shame and anxiety to get me to the place where I was able to "let go" and trust the Lord. That's why I have come to see even the gift of grace as connected to a different relationship to time:  those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.  Craig Barnes speaks to this when he writes:

After spending so many hours during the previous week in front of a television (or a computer screen), a secular form of Sabbath rest, those in (our) pews are accustomed to being sold a message in thirty seconds. Then another thirty-second pitch races onto the screen. And another. So even though the body is stretched out on the sofa during all of this, the mind of the viewer is actually moving pretty fast. It's not working hard, but it is moving quickly to the next thing... same thing happened earlier in the day with they raced through (all) their appointments - they moved quickly without (necessarily) working hard. As a minor poet, the preacher has to invite the congregation to move slower mentally while working harder, the exact opposite of the expertise of the people. Poets are among the last people in society who do not confuse buyness with hard work, and who move slowly to devote themselves to the extraordinary hard work of paying attention to life. (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 135)

This is where I have experienced personally and professionally the greatest challenge to becoming open to God's grace:  we want it like fast food - when we're ready - and when we demand it.  Sometimes it takes years of trusting, waiting, watching and listening for the presence of new life to be born within us. That's what Advent is for, by the way, practicing letting the Spirit simmer and percolate until God's time is ripe. We equate waiting with wasting time - not being productive - never being satisfied. But the wise Gertrud Mueller-Nelson remind us in her reflection on Advent that while waiting is unpractical time, it is necessary for becoming:

As in a pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, not a loving relationship, not a reconciliation, a new understanding, a work of art, never a transformation.  Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is not whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value... (To Dance with God, p. 62)

Same truth holds for acts of repentance, the other essential response to sin and grace: it is rare that we can repent quickly or conveniently.  This time table is not under our control no matter how painful the waiting feels to us.  I know that I have had to wait for years before the hurt I caused another could be named and forgiven.  That type of waiting is like penance, yes?  We must feel the magnitude of our sin.  Other times forgiveness is just impossible for whatever reason and we have to learn to live with that wound.  With God all things are possible, to be sure, but not so with those of us who have been humbled by sin and our finite reality:  we must learn to wait.

This is where Niebuhr's so-called Serenity Prayer comes into play for me.  Part one is very familiar through AA and other 12 step groups, but part two is equally important:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

 

All of this, of course, is a meditation on trusting God rather than ourselves - in all things - something I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to embrace. I don't believe we can confess and own our sin honestly and profoundly without trusting that God's grace is real and greater than even our sin.  In this, the holy embraces the human, heaven and earth kiss and rejoice in the goodness of God.

credits:
1) Mako Fujimura, Tree of Grace, @ http://www.makotofujimura. com/ images/sized/mako _images/Tree_GraceM48x60_1997ineral_pigmentsGold_on_Kumohada_private_collection-802x630.jpg
2) Mako, Grace Foretold @ http://www.makotofujimura.com/ images/sized/mako_ images/Grace_Foretold_102x80M-490x630.jpg
3) Mako @ http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_113054_758051_makoto-fujimura.jpg
4) Mako, Kairos @ http://thejesusquestion.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/charis-kairos_fujimura.jpg
5) Mako, Broken Splendor @ https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYJkmaD1hdxFcWpQTe8mTDzU0FvRd61bTitdG6gfmQJMYwdgDeCKS6m1DQcbshHe9bbhyIyRfQmcTTi4UvHfitxjOz7P88ntYP_saDnXVa74UU9yP7fUsSdcfQmOvTXJyoFOQtnTjc7Zuv/s400/ broken+splendor.jpg