What I've Learned (3)

Section One of this series dealt with what I miss now that I am doing "secular" ministry after thirty years as a parish pastor. Section Two was about what I don't miss. Section Three is talking about "secular ministry."
Links to earlier sections:
Introduction
1. What I Miss: Part 1, part 2, part 3
2. What I Don't Miss: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Interlude
3. Secular Ministry: Part 1, Part 2
4. What I've Learned: Part 1, Part 2
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One more set of things that I need to talk about before I get to the ideas that I would work from if I returned to the parish ministry following my present time in secular ministry. There are some things that I learned that took me more by surprise than I thought they would. It is not a big insight. It even sounds obvious. But it still surprised me.

The world is full of sin.

This is far more true than most people are willing to admit or perhaps even aware of. It is going on all around us. It is embedded in our human psyche. It is part and parcel of who we are. What’s more it is far more embedded in each of us, even those of us who follow Jesus than we can confess. We try constantly to put a different face on our lives. We try to appear better than we are- striving, perhaps, to reach a higher level of action of faith than we can admit to.

Such is the basis of the cries of hypocrisy that come at Christians from many different corners. Such is the basis of the periodic revelations that cause the perfect TV or other preachers such pain when they are discovered to be just as human as any one else.

I discovered this issue when no longer wearing the symbolic mantle of “ordained clergy” in the daily world (again as Barbara Brown Taylor describes so well in her book, Leaving Church.) It is amazing how people act differently when they are not aware that you are or have been a clergy. You hear language and stories and actions that they would have hidden or been embarrassed to describe in front of a “person of the cloth.”

So all of a sudden I was seeing and hearing and participating in a world at its basic normal activities. I was hearing about things that few pastors get to hear about in their daily walks of life. These stories and events and words came from strangers, from co-workers, from clients, from atheists, from church members, from young, from old. In other words- from just about every walk of life. Some are deeply aware of this gap between action and morals, values and weakness. Some could care less.

Why was this so much of a revelation to me? I have no idea. I have always known the power of sin and its hold on us humans. Original sin is a reality that I have never sought to deny. I even know many of the surveys and polls that periodically show that church members, by and large, have the same basic activities and issues as the population as a whole.

But the whole thing took me by surprise anyway. Or, more to the point, I was surprised by how open so many people were about what they thought and in some cases did. I was used to the silence of so many of us in the church about the kinds of lives we and others in the church might be leading. I was used to the polite ways in which people keep their real selves away from the eye of the pastor-types.

Unfortunately it is in this make-believe-seemingly-perfect-world that we develop the potential for arrogance, holier-than thou attitudes, and the whole movement toward control and legalism in the religious and political structures. We give off the feeling that people need to be perfect before they can come to the church. We allow an attitude that says we love reformed sinners, but they better reform first. We can unwittingly appear judgmental and intolerant. Or worse, become judgmental and intolerant. In so doing we close the doors on many people’s honesty and perpetuate false fronts and deeply painful woundedness.

Yes, sin abounds, far more than most people are willing to admit or perhaps even aware of. It is going on all around us. It is imbedded in our human psyche. It is part and parcel of who we are.

But so is being formed in the image of God. One of my mentors for a few years, a wonderful retired pastor and missionary once brought me up short. In response to some mistake or shortcoming or sin I had noticed, I commented, “Well, we’re only human.”

To which my friend qquickly replied, “Only human? We are created in God’s own image. Only human is far more than you think! It is God at work.”

Amen to that, I realized. God's image is within us- not Satan's. We may be in the midst of being sinners, but that isn't our underlying foundation. God's image in our soul is.

Therefore I believe, grace is part and parcel of what the church is to be. If we are the Body of Christ incarnate in this 21st Century, then we cannot miss out on grace. We cannot allow legalism and fear of sin or judgment, especially by others to force us into the mask of sinlessness and the unbearable mantle of fake righteousness.

For I have learned that we are all imperfect, fallible, fearful human beings. All of us. Me. You. Christians of every stripe. People of every nation and language and race. We are far more alike than we are different. To deny that in ourselves, to deny that the church is anything but a gathering of such sinners, is to lose our ability to hold forth the opportunities for healing.