Week 26: Rethinking What Happened (4)
Last week, we said it is clear from the people Jesus associated with that lower case “s” sins were not deal-breakers. Also we said, for Paul, the grace of God was such a central them, it trumps any of our bad acts or thoughts. This would seem to indicate that God doesn’t think and act like you and I do.
And if God isn’t a version of humanity like you and me, maybe the way we’ve thought about sin, and God’s forgiveness of sin, can be reconsidered. On the other hand, if God is bound to human-being traits like you and I are; if God really is just an extension of thoughts about our favorite parent, grandpa, king, judge, or lover, then it would be completely appropriate to expect that he’d get fed up with our sin, and eventually the bad things we do would become deal-breakers. After all, that’s what people do. That’s how humans act and think. If our Story should start “in the beginning man created God; in his image created he him,” then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect such humanly-inspired terms for sin, lostness, salvation, and redemption.
However, we’ve seen in this project (section 3), that while seeing God as a projection of human-ness can be a helpful and often necessary part of the spiritual life, it is only a stopping place on the journey, not a final destination. Those who have gone before us, who have progressed deeply into spiritual maturity, all tell us that God cannot be seen only in terms of human-like traits. God cannot be reduced to fit into the human condition, to think with a human mind, or to act with a human will. God is beyond that; so far beyond that, our doctrines say, that God must be understood as “ineffable,” “incomprehensible,” or “un-understandable.” We shouldn’t even speak the word “God,” our Hebrew scriptures tell us. It makes our actions too familiar with a concept we are better served leaving in the realm of the unknown.
So, perhaps we should take another look at our scriptures about Love and Grace, and do so without trying not to fit them into a human-limited construct. Maybe the idea that God’s Love is limitless, changes the game, as does the limitlessness of God’s Grace. Maybe the complete otherness of God’s ways makes Divine Love and Divine Grace different than the way we human beings live.
Also, maybe the separation from God that sin produces, isn’t because God, like any self-respecting human being would do, has gotten so fed up with our long-term sinfulness, that he has imposed upon us separation from himself.
If God’s Love truly is unmerited, truly is unlimited, the game has changed. How can unmerited, unlimited Love be thwarted by sinfulness? How can it cause God to turn from us and reject us? Maybe, as Jesus’ life certainly demonstrated, the Divine can exist quite comfortably in proximity to human sinfulness. Maybe the Divine is not, as many were taught, so soiled by sin, so offended by sin, that God must respond by imposing the death penalty on us; separation from God.
Maybe the wages of sin isn’t death because God, unable to abide our sinfulness, sentences us to death. Instead, maybe the death-wages of sin is descriptive of what happens. Maybe it tells us what sin does to us, not what God does to us.
And if this is so, separation from God has a very different meaning. Yes, sin is what separates us from God. Yes, greed, and selfishness, and pride, and envy, and hatred do indeed separate us from the Divine Life. But not because God can’t abide our sinful state. No, they separate us from God because they are decidedly un-Divine. You can’t be greedy, and at the same time have the Divine heart of generosity. You can’t be prideful, and at the same time yield to Divine Truth and Divine Life. You can’t be hateful, and at the same time live in, and flow in God’s love.
So perhaps the death-wages of sin are not a death penalty imposed on us by God (who has had “just about enough of that, young lady!”). No, perhaps, it is a description of what the human condition does 
to us; separates us from God, separates us from love, joy, peace, patience, kindness… the Fruit of God’s Spirit, and separates us from Divine Union, the baptism of the Spirit, and immersion in Divine Life, Divine Love, and the Divine Nature.
If this is so, it radically alters what we think is happening when we say Jesus saves us from sin.
One of my favorite modern hymns has these lines in it; Till on that cross as Jesus died, The wrath of God was satisfied. As much as I love the hymn, and it’s clear articulation of the power of salvation and the victory of the life of God over sin and death, I rewrote those lines for our community to sing. I can no longer sing of Jesus’ death satisfying the wrath of God. I can no longer believe that God has so deeply rejected me for my sin that a chasm has been rent between us, a gulf that cannot be bridged without a death-sacrifice by Jesus. I can no longer believe that I have been so rejected by God for my sin that a Jesus-bridge must be built for me to return to God.
As will be clear later in this section, I do completely believe the words “Jesus died for my sin.” I’ve just come to believe that something else is going on when we say those words; something different from God’s wrath being satisfied.
I think this very common way of telling our Story sacrilegiously diminishes one of the fundamentals of our faith, one of the cornerstones of our our religion – the Love of God. This way of telling our Story sacrilegiously reduces the scope of Divine grace and goodness to being just a bit better than humans can muster.
When we do this, we ignore how Jesus talked about God in his stories. Recall the story of the day laborers. Some worked all day, some worked just an hour, but all received a just and generous payment. Recall the story of the prodigal. There was no death-payment required to come home. No, he was simply accepted by the father, embraced by the father, loved by the Father – always, completely, never wavering.
Again, we don’t teach our children that “God loves us.” That would imply that love is something God does. And if you do something, you can decide one day to not do it. No, instead, we teach our children the Bible verse that “God is love.” It is the very nature of God to be love. It is the very nature of God to be grace. It is the very nature of God to be patient, long-suffering, and merciful. God can no more be unloving, unmerciful than black can be white, or in can be out.
I believe we sacrilegiously trivialize the love of God when we elevate sin to a status strong enough that it can force God’s hand, compel God to reject, shun, abandon, or turn from us. And given that we’ll see before we finish this section, that there are several historically, orthodox Christian ways to talk about Jesus saving us that do not trivialize or reduce God’s nature of love, we would do well to rethink the way we have.
Jesus revelation of God was so thoroughly loving that what we do or do not do is no factor. Jesus taught that it is the nature of God to send rain to water the crops of the unjust, just as freely as it is sent to the just. The sun is given to warm and grow the food of the unjust, just as freely as it is given to the just.
With these words so central to our scriptures, then, why is earning God’s love and so heavily weighing our sinfulness and un-love-worthiness, so persistent, so deeply embedded in our Story?
I believe this reduction and dismissal of Divine Love in how we speak of sin and salvation is due to human pride. The ancients taught us that pride is at the root of all that separates us from God, at the root of all that is sin.
Note what I am not saying.
I’m not saying that pride is so odious to God that it renders you un-love-worthy to God. I am not saying that God rejects you for your pridefulness, that God cannot stand to be in the presence of your pride, or that God separates him or herself from you because of your pride is as filthy rags. No, I’m only saying I believe pride lies at the core of all that separates us from God.
You cannot be both proud, and awake to God.
Consider this. At some visceral level, we humans don’t like the idea that God gives the sun and rain to the unjust as freely as they are given to the just. We don’t like it because that allows some folks to be freeloaders, to get God’s good gifts without earning them. And where’s the fairness in that? (hopefully you can hear pride getting warmed up here.)
Consider that we don’t like a universe in which worthiness, desirability, and love-worthiness are just the nature of how things are. We don’t like that everybody has them. We prefer them to be earned by our efforts, we prefer to earn them by something we do to distinguish ourselves.
Many would rather be deemed love-worthy than to be loved. We want to be special, set apart, and recognized for our efforts. We want to be differentiated enough from others to merit God’s special attention. And this instinct is at the core of why we pollute the story of salvation with a picture of God rejecting at least some of us, God unable to abide the sinful parts of us.
Even though we use the words “the grace of God,” it is little more than lip service. The word “grace” occurs so often in scripture, we have to say it, but for us, we like a world in which we earn our own way. Consequently, we tell the story without serious consideration that Grace, Forgiveness, Mercy, and Love could simply be the nature of God, be the nature of the universe, be the nature of The Way Things Are.
Instead, we pollute our story with images of God holding love, grace, and forgiveness back, until a death-sacrifice is paid. Pride actually prefers telling the story in a way that sin earns the wrath of God, and gets us in a serious pickle, rejected by the God of the Universe. That way, when we figure out the religious formula for getting ourselves out of the pickle (pray the proper prayer, exhibit adequate repentance, accept the free gift, see the light, believe the doctrine, etc.), we feel we are somehow ahead of the poor saps who haven’t figured out the rules of the game yet. We get to be “us,” and they have to be “them.” Pride just loves that kind of stuff!
This prideful instinct creates a way of telling the story that is difficult to freely receive what “just is.” If love is free, mercy is free, grace is free, we feel that somehow diminishes us when we get it. If we didn’t earn something, we don’t like it. We actually prefer a world of scarcity, a world in which there isn’t enough Divine love to go around, a world in which we somehow came to discover the one and true way, and become the special ones able to access the little bit of love God has to offer. That makes us special. And prideful flesh likes to be special.
But again, the ancients taught us that pride is the root of all sin, the root of all that separates us from God.
Overcoming this fundamental human disposition is at the core of the Bible’s plot-line. Conquering this way of thinking and viewing our humanity has been the steady movement of God throughout history. This prideful way of thinking will separate us from God better than anything. It will separate us from God’s love by duping us into thinking that love is a finite resource, reserved only for those who jump through the right hoops. It will separate us from God by causing us to believe love and grace are only for the elect, the few, those with the acumen to see the truth and accept it.
As long as we keep following this kind of win/lose, earn/loss salvation script; as long as this is the door through which we enter the spiritual life, Christian spirituality will continue to be as unhealthy and sick as it is today. We will continue to appeal to low-level, base, self-interested parts of our humanity, and our morality will never rise to the transcendent, life-giving abundance Jesus told us was ours in God.
Pride and the story it concocts will keep us from tapping into the Divine Life inside us that just is; the Divine strength indwelling us that just is.
But the Christian Story was never intended to follow the basic win/lose plot-line of the rest of human history. Ours is good news. As such, it is a radical departure from the instincts that have driven the pitiful, win/lose narratives of human societies over the centuries.
But today, it’s our own religion that has fallen into a pitiful state.
And we got into the situation we’re in right now; we got into this anemic spirituality that makes us actually worse people than those in the society around us; we got in the position we’re in, because we allowed our concept of God’s Love and Grace to be diminished. We shoehorned our own Story into the win/lose, pride-based, scarcity story that drives the rest of societies. We just added some religious frosting on top.
Even the un-Christian world around us is wising up to the truths of Jesus faster than we are.
Unless we awaken to the grace that is always extended to us; unless we become aware of the generous love of God that just is, Christianity will never produce in us, the new mind, the new self, the new Life promised us by Jesus. Without our Story being founded on this central understanding of the way God is, we will just retread the same old tired scenario that seems to plague the human race throughout the centuries.
Our story is a radical departure. It is rooted in a God who simply is Love. It is rooted in a love-worthiness that simply is, grace that simply is. And that, I believe, must be at the foundation of our Story of sin and salvation.
When the implications of our tale of sin, salvation, and the redemption of God demands we have a God who turns from us, rejects us, and requires a sacrifice to be able to accept us, we absorb a set of instincts and assumptions that betray us, that make us so very unlike Jesus.
And as I keep promising; before we finish this section, I’ll give you a historically orthodox way out of those instincts and assumptions.