Preventing Grace
It occurred to me yesterday, as I was driving around trying to do some various odd errands while also concentrating on breathing in and out past this wretched cold, that the idea of corporate guilt is a clever ruse. I'm probably going to offend a bunch of people here, but I'll just try to sketch it out anyway and see where it takes me.
In seminary the liturgy, if that's really what it could properly be called, that we had to test out, shifted the confession from an individual confession and repentence to a coporate one. So instead of saying sorry to Jesus for the things I did wrong and thought wrong and neglected to do, I would say sorry for “the evil done on my behalf”. The idea, of course, is that systems can become corrupt and evil and in some way, we are all complicit, though not really, because I haven't had to really say sorry for anything other than my vague feeling that things are Really Bad.
There is a poison thread which comes with this sorrow for “evil done on my behalf” and that is guilt that cannot be atoned for. This manifests itself for me in a burden of dissatisfaction. I drive around in my comfortable car aquiring unto myself food and other whatnots and intsead of feeling happy and grateful I feel bad and wicked because I'm not being shot at by ISIS. Of course, I deserve to be shot at by ISIS but the fact is that I'm not being right now and a proper response for that great mercy is gratitude, not guilt. God has blessed me over abundantly. I need to constantly be saying thank you, not being angry because I'm so privileged.
The poison thread unfurls because the more guilty I feel about stuff not in my actual control, the less guilty I feel about my actual sins. I am living a privileged and comfortable life, but it's a life in which I genuinely and truly sin all the time. For example (hey, it's the internet, I might as well say more than I should) I'm not a very affectionate mother. Sometimes my kids have to beg me to hug them, and then it's awkward and I have to make a joke while I'm doing it because I just want to die of embarrassment. This, I know, is bad, and it comes from me not feeling loved by God and unable to bear my soul to the one who made me. So I get in a cycle of keeping everyone at arms length. God has, every now and then, to wack me into reality to get me to see and confess my sins of distrust which lead me to keep my children at a distance. Thing is, when I shuffle around feeling really guilty about not being shot at by ISIS, I've created a nice little barrier around me through which no arrows of conviction and repentence might prevail. False guilt protects me from true guilt and the ultimate result of that is brokenness for me, for my children and probably for the systems in which I participate. Not the evil done on my behalf but the evil I am actually doing in actual systems.
When Paul talks about being thankful in eveything, I think he is illuminating a way out of this evil. It used to be that wealth and privilege and safety and enough food, but also salvation and the love of Jesus, were good things that the human person was to be thankful for, not guilty about. The saved person used to say thank you to Jesus for saving her, and in gratitude went out into the world to tell others, but somehow along the way, saved people left gratitude behind and took up guilt at having heard when others hadn't. Once safe in the arms of Jesus, they felt terrible about it which didn't lead to going out and telling more people, but rather sitting about and complaining about how others haven't heard. I'm not talking about anyone in particular, other than myself, and just about every Christian community I've ever been a part of.
If the Christian person constantly pauses to say Thank You to God for Everything, a wide door opens for that person to see, suddenly and devestatingly, how he or she personally has fallen short, has sinned against God and neighbor. And once having seen, she, or he, can feel sorry and then can genuinely repent and turn around and be changed, and then, as a consequence of that, the systems also.
Sure, I feel really bad about the evil done on my behalf, but I can't do anything about it. Which is why it's to tempting to sit there. And then evil wins. Not love, not charity, not more money, not more people finding out about Jesus, not more clean water, just lots of us sitting around feeling bad with no way out.
And on that note, I'm going to go down and try to interact with my children, even in the morning, because I'm grateful to have them.
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