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.
