“19 On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 20 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” 22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”” (John 20:19-23 ESV)

People say it isn’t quite true, that in the forgiveness game all have a stake, and all have a hope and a future. First, the baser sins: we forget these at our peril, though it be a distant hypothetical the man or woman thus falling. But all life is interpreted through the lens of seeing someone else who has failed the moral upstanding code, and realizing in the ebb and flow of things, in the strange lugubrious rubbing against one another and clamoring for the top spot (or for the oxygen as we lay drowning), we all of us are compromised.

Next, the Gospel promises forgiveness. This isn’t a lobster pot, gotcha, caught ya, but rather we build on Christ’s gift of His blood to make all things new. We step forth, higher up and more made over precisely because of having compromised and fallen away. We intake the Blood of Christ as a momentary (if we took a moment to reflect) Reminder that God is for us, that the church is stronger for the sake of the ones it dismisses as Sinful, that the sinful one, in turn, is stronger because of having little to lose: we learn to live solely in the light of Christ, this being our reward, this our paycheck, this our unbored calm.

For, hear told, it is a boring kind of Faith, a less attractive kind of Faith, needful for those long in the fold to branch out a bit rebellious (or at least creative), and those outside to have a sincere desire to belong. Each loses because each has little respect for the alternative: we deuce ourselves by dismissing personages as ridiculous or unworthy of our respect.

The Gospel is not so sexy as we might hope, until it becomes our momentum and our All-In mentality. It takes broken people, and makes them whole again. The pastor believes this, except the climate is on such a high state of alert that no one comes forward for the altar call, it can seem. Your faith, it must be a personal thing, not a corporate one, it is said.

Back to the strange truth claim of our belief: today, we cash in on the Real Gospel, something spoken of in familiar or overwrought terms, but landing a home run in the heart of the penitent. That Tomorrow’s journey made in light of Today’s repentance, will be greater for the trials. It will find us at home base because our home base is our compromised, broken, mentality. Here—and this is radical, hushed tones, talk—we are made One in the name of our broken nature, our unfavored thoughts, our time finally taken to Meditate on the illustriously-portrayed sinful ones, and realize in our own frames, our own grandstanding or ambition, our own mess and hem and haw of life, we have become ourselves Compromised. That is, we delight in Christ’s Body broken for us, because Breakage has become the name of the game. That we are broken, that we are Ready to step up to the plate shriven and unpretentious: we have learnt a thing or two about human nature, and our Gospel—publicly preached but privately evaded—always benefits from the lifeblood of its saints. Always benefits from their aloft soaring response to the beggarly and needy time of confession.