2024-10-16 A Meditation on Sin in the Wild

“14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. 15 Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.” (2 Chron 7:14-15 ESV)

“11 “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”” (Matt 3:11-12 ESV)

The realm of do-overs comes with it a terrain of wild and even at times offensive statements of fact, statements of life-as-it-is, statements that shock or offend a more bland audience. Who would have thought: man’s mindset sees itself as the horizon all too often; man and woman’s outlook, when hungry or tired, puts itself oddly first. Not so oddly, in fact, but rather neither purely logical or rational: some doctrines teach that sin is always cold hard evolutionary reality, but the fact of the matter is, sin is self-destructive at times, is self-mocking at times, is a wild hay ride of an affliction at times. It isn’t simply calculation and coldness.

The gift, then, of a priestly Presence, is an occurrence of interruption, perhaps, or our own cultivated, trained willingness finally to put all our holy thoughts aside and just to Listen: such a one as this may have been sent, for all I know, to deliver a Reminder: life is sin and mess, until we allow ourselves to live existentially in the moment. To be willing to listen, to a litany of apologies, to a Basis for relationship so utterly unthreatening, unimposing, as to Saint and make holy our interlocutor.

Such is the affliction of Goodness of the one raised in a certain heavenly embrace, and also such is their anxiety, their neurosis, and the pathological hard times simply of treating one another justly and fairly. Sinners each of us, yet we actually Believe there is a measuring line and gauge that makes some out to be more holy, naturally kinder, naturally self-effacing, naturally first to apologize. With this gauge comes a rather unwelcome interruption to our own thoughts: am I a good person?

Whatever our final judgment, the best present-day advice is to lean in on Christ’s promises, He whose life plan, daily prayer, was unto a strange and horrific Ending. It would not have pleased magistrate or official, neither pleased plebeian or beggar, neither earned the vote or the commissioning. Except that a furtive Hidden spirit called Holy, called Dove, did descend on Him and bless this unusual Life Mission. To die on a Cross. To Teach out of a basket of life experience that simply loved on others. We simply love on each other, in hindsight. To be loved is to have all Guilt and Stereotype and Faultline erased: you, my friend, are Holy, Good, and True. Believe! That today there is a Listener and an attainment you need Now, not in tandem with your day’s hard work, but Alone and All-Encompassing Now, already to rescue you from the hero complex, already to bring grin and pleasantries to that face called Greeting. Greeting one another, Greeting the ones Changed and New. Greeting because no one’s calculations or evolutionary efficiencies are quite all-knowing as we imagine: we have strange limiting points and goals, ambitions illogical and ultimately perhaps sacrificial or strangely unrewarding. Or we are those cold souls who most need a Pauline type of Conversion, a Christ-like vote of Holy confidence, a Petrine experience of denial.

What we fight for, this no one can assess, none can quantify: our “wealth” is couched in an eternal liminal zone; we are strangely raised up and tutored in so much communal Knowledge such that our accent betrays us, as those products of a time and a place, and we safeguard a Baptismal succession of experiences that follow. Follow our submersion in those holy waters. We fight in order to have a constant Holy Spirit—of fire—establish Need for Action, for Offensive: that is, the opposite of simply subdued and apologetic spirit within: we need to fight back, and to do that in a way strangely paramount to life: both socially acceptable and divinely proactive, so that we offend none except the strange spirit of the Sinner. We have this confidence because the best amongst us are real spirits and saints, who need to step up and need to adjudicate in all love and in all compassion.