"The person who has come to know the weakness of human nature has gained experience of divine power. Such a person never belittles anyone...He knows that God is like a good and loving physician who heals with individual treatment each of those who are trying to make progress." St. Maximos the Confessor (seventh century) |
Only A Small Beginning
Week of Monday September 6, 2004
Lectionary Readings
Jeremiah 4:11–12, 22–28
Psalm 14 or Exodus 32:7–14
Psalm 51:1–10
1 Timothy 1:12–17
Luke 15:1–10
When our family had our picture taken for the church directory, Olan Mills encouraged us to "upgrade to a touch up." For an additional $10 the touch up would erase age lines, blemishes, wrinkles, sagging skin, and even the glare on my forehead. An airbrush here, a digitalization there, and your photographic image looks considerably better than the reality you see in the mirror each morning when you wake up.
As we left the studio (yes, we paid for the upgrade) I thought how often I wished my progress in the Christian life could be as simple. Of course, you can find Christian books, seminars or sermons that promise to repair your marriage, fix your finances, teach you to pray, or make you the best parent on the block, all in a few easy steps. But after 30 years, my own Christian experience has proven otherwise. The "touch ups" feel more like a set up for frustration and failure rather than the quick fix that is promised. Burnishing my image is one thing; altering my basic realities is a different story.
When you read the Psalms carefully you discover a liberating truth, that before God we can be truly Christian and yet fully fallen and human at the same time. This is one of the reasons that monastic communities immerse themselves in the Psalms, reading, singing and chanting their way through all 150 Psalms every few weeks, and that for the rest of their lives. The Psalms range the gamut of human emotion and experience. These poets celebrate, praise and rejoice, but they also vent their bitterness, anger, loneliness, regret, and despair.
Kathleen Norris recalls how as a little girl, going to church meant dressing up, both outwardly in pretty clothes and inwardly in cheerful optimism. But the Psalms liberated her from this impossible standard. Instead, they affirmed all the complexities and contradictions of her normal human experience. The Psalmists taught her that praise and optimism are not the same, that anger need not be denied, that wanting God to slay your enemies can feel ever so good even though it's wrong, that she need not repress "offensive emotions," and that their religious experiences mirrored her own "inner chaos." In short, the Psalms were "unrelenting in their realism about the human psyche," freeing her to walk honestly and openly with God.1
|
Other saints far wiser and holier than I am have made similar, sober observations about Christian progress. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer remarked that disillusionment with the church is a good thing because it disabuses us of "false expectations of perfection."2 Lewis Smedes, former professor at Fuller Seminary, recounts that one of the reasons he joined the Christian Reformed Church was because its "modest expectations" comforted him "in view of the sluggish pace of my own spiritual improvement." The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), which forms the heritage of his denomination, contains a long exposition of all the Ten Commandments, after which it asks whether a Christian might keep these commandments perfectly. The catechetical response is disarming in its candor: "No, for even the holiest believer makes only a small beginning in obedience in this life."3
The two Psalms from the lectionary this week elucidate why Christian maturity proceeds in fits and starts rather than as one victory after another. If the great American religion is optimism and denial, the Biblical view of things begins with the bad news of sin: "The Lord looks down from heaven / on the sons of men / to see if there are any who understand / any who seek God. / All have turned aside / they have together become corrupt; / there is no one who does good, / not even one" (Psalm 14:2–3). This does not mean that every person always sinks to his moral nadir, but rather that there is no part of any one of us that is not spiritually compromised. Our human stain bespeaks breadth if not depth. Similarly, in the famous Psalm 51 for this week, David, who elsewhere is described as "a man after God's own heart" (Acts 13:22), confesses his sins (plural) of adultery and murder, but he also confesses his deeper problem of sin (singular), that he has been "a sinner from birth" (Psalm 51:5). In medical terms, he struggles with acute, episodic sinful actions, but his tragic reality is a chronic, congenital, sinful condition that he will struggle with the rest of his life.
John Donne's famous Sonnet XIV is unsparing in its realism about our captivity to sin's power:
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like a usurped town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but, oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend;
But is captive and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain;
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
"Even if you are not what you should be, you should not despair." St. Peter of Damaskos (12th century) |
Echoing the Psalmists, Donne longs to love God and be loved by Him, and he labors hard to do so, but he confesses that he is weak, captive, untrue, and engaged to the enemy. He has little hope other than that God would "batter his heart." There is no use asking for a finishing hammer when what you need is a sledge hammer.
In a third text from this week Paul describes himself as "the worst of all sinners." Before his conversion he was a "blasphemer, persecutor and violent man" who murdered Christians. He uses himself as an example that however limited our Christian progress, God has "unlimited patience." We should "fully accept," writes Paul, that Jesus welcomes sinners just like us (1 Timothy 1:12–17). That brings us to the Gospel text for this week where we find Jesus mingling with the despised tax collectors and people of ill repute, much to the chagrin of the religiously righteous Pharisees who muttered, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them" (Luke 15:1–2).
My wife recently heard about a study on National Public Radio that suggested that the most successful marriages had modest, realistic expectations. On the journey with Jesus, says the Heidelberg Catechism, every believer should "begin with serious purpose to conform not only to some, but to all the commandments of God." True enough, and we pledge our fidelity to God with joy and gratitude. But we also journey with the sober realization that as pilgrims we are a long way from our ultimate destination. However far we journey, we will only make a small beginning, and that is okay, because nothing should shake our confidence that God's unlimited patience will take us all the way home.
[1] Kathleen Norris, Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997), pp. 90–107.
[2] As quoted by Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), p. 163, commenting on Bonhoeffer's book Life Together.
[3] Lewis Smedes, My God and I (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 61–62.
