2022-12-04 A Meditation on the Full Medicine
“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,” (1 Co 15:3 ESV)
Coherent in the telling, the soul longs to reconcile what lies in the past with what place one is in now. Too sinful. Too broken. A side of myself that I blush over. How can I today be self-confident and conversational, when in times past I’ve been… “that”?
The inner rebel in varying degrees hates much of Christian experience, that is, much of what passes for Christian experience. Humility before the assembly. Genuine apologies made. Uptight walks of “purity” or “passionlessness”. So we come to resent the free airs of the unbeliever. We start to doubt that a message of forgiveness is salutary. We forget to live near an existential cliff: one false step, and we are in self-loathing, panic, simple fear, embarrassment, all we held dear, our best conceits of ourselves, worn threadbare.
The Christian gospel is facing every effort under the sun to be made into a partial doctrine: Sunday mornings and posh presence in the pew, combined with hatred for one’s neighbor. Prayers outspoken and sage words that sound like belief, coupled with trauma on the family front. Things we think we are the only one who has ever struggled with; things we think “should” be part of our faith, our own private world: doesn’t everyone “get” that faith comes with a bit of irony? Come, now, let us put on a Sunday morning show, with a bit of a wink-wink, right?
No, not true! We are in ambulance mode. We are in “keep the doubter alive, at least” mode! Alive from doubts. Alive from self-denying thoughts. Alive from a pendulum swing between gospel effluescence and cool self-punishment. That cool needs Jesus, and stat! That warmth needs pinions, stable support, grounding, secure bolts, all-life-through applicability. It comes simply with one other soul who does love us, and that soul being Jesus’s. We can begin to reckon with the attention-grabbing, self-congratulatory, presumptuous bent we were on. We can rightly ask, if I was such-and-so capable then, what’s to keep me today from falling off the cart?
What keeps us today is, surprisingly, not a willpower to walk the straight and narrow, but rather it is that experience of being forgiven past that speaks a promissory word to the present and future: I somehow, when I know God is embracing me regardless of future mistakes made, I somehow cease to sin. I cease to need to test that principle. I cease to fight my lawsuit with the Spirit: God, how could you DO this to me?