Preventing Grace
A little dusting of snow during the night has rendered a fresh clean view from my bedroom window. Much as I hate the snow, I don’t mind its first, fresh fallen moments, at least from the inside. It is a picture of hope, sort of. It looks pretty. You can’t see all the black underneath for a bit, until it melts away and you are left facing the underlying reality.
It is within human nature to hope, even when there is no reasonable evidence to carry on doing so. Every person, in some quiet, often un-self-acknowledged way, hopes for stuff in the face of it not really being there. I have one child in particular whose view of reality is so shaped by hope that in many cases he cannot see what is directly in front of him. In many ways this is nice because it shields him from the cold light of truth. When he hasn’t done a neat job of writing a paragraph, he just can’t see it. But, of course, to me it is a great frustration because hope without reality will land him, down the line, in a heap of disappointment and trouble.
A person who is, in general, optimistic about life, will always be irritated by me, who expects to be disappointed. I don’t want to know what might happen. I want to face what is happening. If you don’t face what is happening, you can’t fix it, or repent of it, or in anyway understand where you are. Disappointment isn’t fun, but if you are unwilling to see the tragedy right in front of you, you will always be falling back into the same trouble over and over.
In speaking thus, of course I have my eye on the meeting continuing on in Canterbury, with Anglican heterodox and orthodox bishops meeting to try to avert the imminent crisis of a world wide split. It was reported yesterday that Canterbury tried to employ the Delphi Technique, that clever business of getting everyone divided up into small groups and not letting them talk altogether. Each small group is managed by a facilitator who reports up the line what the group has said. “Consensus” and “Agreement” are achieved through a carefully managed and crafted process and nothing frank or honest is ever reported to have been said. Also, they, the primates, had to all turn in their cell phones.
Being the pessimist I am, I muttered, “of course” when I read this. But, then, in the depths of my soul, I discovered a kernel of something I haven’t faced for a long time, grief.
Because, it turns out, though I hadn’t been willing to look at it, and I wouldn’t have been able to face it even if I could, I also had been harboring hope. Not a single person who walked away from the episcopal church, unlike Lot’s wife, did so without much agony and looking back. It’s not that we were unsure, or confused, it’s that we were sorrowful, grieved. Because the episcopal church had been a place of nourishment and beauty. It is a church full of lovely things to look at, beautiful music, and interesting people who are, as I like to say, God Curious.
But, well, the leaders of that church, Michael Curry more brilliantly than anyone, have mixed just enough truth with just enough error to wreck everything. If you really want to know God on his own terms, not shaped and molded by the dubious sensibilities of the age, you won’t be able to stay there. You have to get into a church space where the Word of God is unfolded completely, even the parts that seem, to our ears, offensive.
But lots of Anglicans like me have wished and hoped that the Episcopal Church would be called to repent, yea, by even the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Even when no one admits it, everyone wishes for it all the time. And that hope, that great wish, has kept us going to meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting.
The world looks at the call to repentance as mean and unkind. To repent you have to admit that you have done the wrong thing, gone the wrong way, believed something untrue, acted in a way that violates God’s perfect law. Repentance is looking at yourself and admitting that you, not God, were wrong. This offer isn’t made very many places any more. You’re supposed to accept who you are and be happy about it. All your choices are good and right, unless they’re not, but then, if you try hard, you can probably make the small corrections to your personality that are required. In the episcopal church, if you are in a relationship that violates God’s perfect law, you aren’t given the opportunity to repent, you are called to feel happy about yourself. If you believe something that contradicts scripture, you aren’t corrected, you are congratulated.
When a person isn’t given the opportunity to repent of sin, the church is essentially saying to that person, you must carry around the burdens you yourself have accumulated, forever. No one is here to take those wrong things away. No one is going to save you from yourself. You can never be forgiven. You can never let go of the things that are hurting you that you yourself have chosen to do. You can’t be rescued. God isn’t someone bigger than you, he is whoever you want him to be.
No amount of church unity is worth that lie. I don’t want to be locked in the prison of my own small mind, my own wretched sin. Jesus has redeemed me. He has bought me back. I want that gift to be there for everyone. What a small thing if I were to choose the comfort of my present circumstances, over going out with the offer of eternal mercy from a God who is big enough to pay it all.
We have misplaced our hope, we Anglicans. We have looked to the world instead of to Jesus. We haven’t trusted the strength of God’s mercy for the whole world. Our hope in Rowan Williams and now Justin Welby ought to have been spent on going out with the message of the gospel, a gospel that saves, a gospel which does not return empty.
I’m talking to myself, of course. But also to anyone else who might be watching Facebook and wishing for a good outcome. What is good? What would make us feel ok? It ought to be enough where we are now. We ought to be grateful for the riches of God’s provision. We ought to be desirous of going out with a message that is desperately needed in a world where hope is not something in the future, it is a shady, troubled acceptance of who you are now.
May the God of hope fill us with true belief, true repentance, that we might face the step that’s right in front of us.
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