Total Depravity

               You know, I’m not a 5-point Calvinist.  In fact, I’m not a Calvinist at all, but I am quickly coming to believe whole heartedly in the total depravity of humanity, mostly thanks to Facebook.  We are hopeless slaves to sin.  I’m sure someone recently posted a pithy little picture with a caption to that extent.  Just watching the speed with which people that I know to be good people, who honestly believe themselves to be trying to stand up for what they believe is right, degenerate into outright hatefulness and cruelty in public forums is enough to show me our desperate need for the grace and the cross of Christ. 

               Apart from Christ, it seems that the natural child of righteousness is animosity toward those who are less right.  Apart from Christ, it seems that being tolerant of others can lead directly to apathy regarding injustice and abuse.  Anytime we step outside the radical and glorious light of the Cross, even our best only makes everything worse.  The more we try, the more we fail.  The less we try, the more we wither.  And just to be clear, Christians are exactly no better than the rest of the world at putting into practice what Christ shows us and offers us.

               Obviously, disagreements, even passionate disagreement, is an unending condition of the human race, at least as long as we retain our powers of thought.  The problem is, we see those with whom we disagree as the enemy.  Oh, what’s that?  You don’t see anyone as your enemy?  Then why did you post that anonymous thing on facebook calling them all morons, bigots, or whatever the insult of the day is?  Maybe you don’t have facebook.  You’re not off the hook.  There are hundreds of ways, whether on the internet or in good old fashioned casual conversation, to speak cruelly of others, and we all do it sometimes.  Whether we even realize it or not, those we see as “wrong,” we treat as being evil, and if we really don’t think they’re evil, the shame on us is doubled, because then we are being rude for no reason at all.

               This is why we all need to crawl together back to the foot of the cross.  We need some sackcloth and ashes to show our repentance for the way we speak to and about one another.  We have to realize that the grace that will break us out of the cycle and stop the escalation before one more heart is broken doesn’t come from us.  Colossians chapter 1 makes this much clear:  We are God’s enemies, because of our total wrongness, until we are reconciled to Him through Christ, because of His total rightness.  This suggests three things to me:

1.      None of us is “right” enough to be accepted by God on our own, so maybe none of us is “right” enough to vilify someone else even if they are obviously wrong.

2.      The work of the cross is powerful enough to bridge the gap between our sinfulness and God’s holiness, so surely it is powerful enough that there may be reconciliation between us here on earth, all of whom are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

3.      Did you catch that, according to scripture, the work of reconciliation started with the One who is right?  The One and only in all of reality who had an unequivocal right to judge and reject, took it upon Himself to fix what was broken because of us.

Soooo….if you’re in any way serious about imitating Christ, and you see someone who is obviously wrong and sinning and lost, you don’t get to call them names.  You don’t get to control them.  You don’t even really get to stop them.  What you get to do is lay down your life for them, in any way you can.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever heal what is wrong with all of us except for the grace of God.   How will any of us ever know just how healed and reconciled and redeemed God would make us unless we extend that grace to each other, and do so publicly, as well as privately?  I’m really tired of trying to correct the world.  I’m really tired of working to make sure that right prevails, and the evil are shamed, boycotted, and legislated against. I just want to sit, slumped and head bowed, at the foot of the Cross and ask Jesus to move in our world in a way that I cannot. I don’t care what you say about me on your facebook page.  I’m getting out of the business of fixing other people, and instead I’m just going to try to extend some grace to the broken.  The rest is in His hands, which is exactly where it has been all along.

Chainbreaker

One quick note: I composed the following blog the Monday after Easter, I just procrastinated on getting it posted.  Sorry it's not as timely or relevant as it would have been, but hopefully it's still worth a read!

Yesterday morning, the youth at church planned and led an amazing Easter sunrise service, culminating in a parade around the sanctuary to Charlie Hall’s “Chainbreaker,” complete with paper chains.  That song never, never, fails to move me to tears, which also means it causes me to think deeply about its meaning.  “You are free/you are free/drop your chains sons and daughters/come and run in liberty.”  Freedom through Christ is a common enough theme throughout Christianity, one that always stirs emotions, but what does it mean?

I felt that freedom all the more profoundly yesterday because I was not experiencing a number of other emotions that I associate with freedom.  I was tired, stressed, and for a number of reasons, a little sad.  Our congregation has been through a lot this year, and there were people that I missed yesterday.  Freedom in Christ doesn’t seem to mean freedom from pain or heartbreak, doesn’t appear to mean safety from bad things happening, and clearly is not immunity from the ability or even entirely from the desire, to sin.

So what does freedom from the power of sin mean?  Yes, it obviously means that we can be forgiven our sins and thus freed from eternal damnation, but is that the limit of freedom?  What exactly are the chains that are broken?  There’s a very subtle cycle that sin moves us into, both our desire to commit sin and the pain we experience when others sin against us, or those we love.  In the face of great pain, or the strong desire to take actions that will cause others pain, two instincts take over: the instincts to distance and devalue.  We push others away, and we tell ourselves they don’t matter.  We lessen the depths of our relationships and the strength of our commitments, as well as draining away the passion from what we used to value, and it’s pretty obvious why we do it. We don’t want others to hurt us, and we don’t want to have to care if we hurt them. We don’t want to feel how far we fall short of our values and ideals, so we set the bar lower on purpose. 

Obviously, we all do this to some extent, and this is bad, but sometimes we don’t even see how little we are left with when we follow this path.  We make ourselves so small when we allow nothing in our lives that is big enough to threaten or challenge us.  We make ourselves so small, and that tiny, tiny piece of self that is left to us becomes what we live and die for.  All our resources are turned to protecting and justifying it.  This trap of distance and devaluation is the chain that sin forges for us, the chain that holds us back from the life abundant that Christ has for us.

The hope found in the cross allows us to face our pain and our failures, to own them rather than to shrink from them, reducing ourselves thereby.  The crazy truth of God’s boundless forgiveness and ceaseless presence with us allows us to hurt without losing hope and to fail without despairing.  When this happens in our lives, we are freed from the need to turn parts of ourselves off, to make our relationships shallow, or reduce our values to lip service.  We are set free from the chain of the mediocre life.  Christ alone can halt our downward spiral into isolation, self-satisfaction, and endless quests for diversion. 

Winning the Mommy Wars

The commentators on the news this morning are at it again.  It seems that yet another study has come out revealing the astounding information that working moms struggle with guilt and stay-at-home moms struggle with feeling unfulfilled.  Really?  This is news?  ‘Cause I’m pretty sure there are also some working parents who feel unfulfilled and some stay-at-home parents who feel guilty.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that there are plenty of people who don’t even have kids who yet manage to feel both guilty and unfulfilled at the same time.  Has anyone considered the possibility that both of these emotions are just an unavoidable part of what it means to be human?

            In case anyone is wondering, I am both a stay-at-home and a working parent. That is to say I work part time, and largely either from home or with my daughter accompanying me to work.  This is the new thing, this working and parenting simultaneously thing.  It’s touted as the perfect compromise that means no one has to give up anything, and know what?  That turns out to be what we in the religion game like to refer to as a lie.  Working from home largely means the following for me:  It means I get to experience both the guilt over leaving my child to learn witchcraft from Dora the Explorer for hours at a time (parents of pre-schoolers, back me up.  We all know Dora’s a witch, right?) at the exact same time I experience the frustration of knowing that my work will never, ever really get done.  Guilt over the ploys I use to distract my child coincides with aggravation at how ineffective they actually are.  Everyone gets cranky, and we all need a nap. 

Know what?  I’m pretty sure that all the guilt, all the aggravation, all the moments of feeling like a failure at pretty much everything are in no way indications that anything is really wrong.  I never signed anything that said I get to be happy all the time, or have everything go my way.  The Bible says straight out in Romans 8 that frustration is part of God’s plan for the world.  That verse is right before the popular passage about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God.  I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence that those two ideas are presented together, or that everyone always quotes the victorious bit at the end and glosses over the whole “aggravation is part of the plan” bit. 

So, if we accept the premise that a certain amount of headaches, doubts, and regrets go with any path we choose, what do we do, especially with regards to the challenges of turning children into functioning human beings with minimal neurosis?  Well, I look at it this way:  It takes a certain amount of time, energy, attention, and bread-winning to make and keep a home and raise a family in it.  There are many different ways to split that work up, and how each family wants to manage that is really up to them.  Maybe it takes both parents at work just to pay the bills (or maybe there’s only one parent and you do the best you can do.)  Maybe it takes a full time parent at home to attend to the business of homemaking.  Maybe you both work part time or maybe grandma moves in to help out.  All of those systems are fraught with aggravations of their own.  It doesn’t matter what set-up you come up with, you’re going to have to work a few things out, so take a deep breath, switch off all the angry voices in your head, and figure out what is the best use of everyone’s time and resources.  Just remember these two things.

1.     Domesticity matters.  Whether it’s someone’s full-time job or everyone’s part-time job, home, and all that goes with it, is terribly important.  The temptation to measure self-worth by net-worth is overwhelming, and shouts at us that if something isn’t a revenue stream, it is of minor importance.  That pressure can drown out the deeply human need for refuge.  Creating a space that is safe, welcoming, peaceful, and maybe just a little boring is important work.  It is anything but a small or limiting task.  It can absolutely take everything a person has to give, and it is an endeavor worthy of giving everything you have.  If you doubt it, just go ask anyone who never had one.  Every participant in a home has to contribute to it or it won’t work, so no matter how many hours you put in at your job this week, don’t forget that you are needed in the place where you live.

2.     Home, work, family, career, fun, sacrifice, guilt, fulfillment, it all needs to be part of a bigger picture.  There is work to be done in this world, and for whatever reason, it seems that we are more useful in groups, (families, churches, communities, offices,) than we are as individuals.  We are also more dangerous in groups, but more on that later.  Every family looks a little different, but whatever yours is like, it’s been given to you for a reason.  What is the mission God has given your family?  What contribution can you make to the lives of others?  What is that you can share because of what you are already sharing?  Servant-hood, not out of guilt but out of purpose, may be the best path to fulfillment.