Tag: spirituality

For Our Sins

I have always believed that Jesus isn’t coming again, because I don’t think he ever left.

We are promised that Jesus “will come again in glory…”

I have always believed that Jesus isn’t coming again, because I don’t think he ever left. In every generation there are those prophetic voices echoing the message of Jesus: love one another and let your life speak. Often we kill them. Three examples would be Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Luxemburg and Mahatma Gandhi.

In a recent Woodbrooke course we learned that crucifixion was a political death – the Roman equivalent of being hanged, drawn and quartered. It was meant to be painful and public and humiliating. A warning to those who follow — both those who would come after and those who were his disciples.

We are told that Jesus died this death for our sins. To redeem us for the sins we have committed but also for the sins whose burden we carry that were committed by Adam and Eve, two people who didn’t actually exist historically. 

But what if Jesus didn’t die for our sins but because of our sins? Not to pay for our sins but because the sins we carried couldn’t let him and his message live? 

The sins that were responsible for this particularly cruel and harsh political death are still with us: pride, domination, ambition, control, lust for power, empire. And they are the ones responsible for the continued assassination of those who tell us that we are enough, that we are worthy of love and so is everyone else. They tell us that we should love one another because God loves us just as we are.They tell us that we are all equal and that none are more equal than others. When we can accept this we lose the need to dominate and control others. We also lose the ability to be dominated and controlled, which can be a dangerous thing.

Sin separates us from the love of God. These particular sins – pride, domination, ambition, control, lust for power, empire – also separate us from our fellow humans. This separation is part of what enables the dehumanizing process which allows us to kill each other. This separation is lost if we can believe that we are all equal in the eyes of God, who loves us just as we are; that is why this message is a threat to those who need for us to be able to kill each other. 

The message that God loves us is also the message that we are not separated from God. The radical danger of that message is that if we believe this then we don’t need elite power structures to ‘save’ us from ourselves and each other. We only need to know that we are loved and that we can pass that love to others. It’s that action of denying / dismantling the power structures that triggers the need to wipe out the ones who teach it, often in cruel and very public ways.

I believe that Jesus died not to save us from sin today but because he was saving people at that time and in that place, as those who are murdered today are saving people in this time and in this place. The need to dominate and control cannot allow this radical message of love and equality to continue to be spread.

What if we could hold the belief that we are good enough just as we are? Would we be able to give up the need to dominate and control others? Could we give up pride and ambition? Could we know that we don’t need to accomplish anything more than we have already done? What if we truly loved ourselves and others, as equal recipients of God’s grace? 

If we could do that we might be able to vanquish the sins which separate us from the love of God and thus cause the death of those who teach us to love one another. 

Photo by Jack B on Unsplash

Perfect Imperfection

We are all imperfect. But we are perfectly suited to the work we are called to do.

In the church I grew up in we memorized a creed, a statement of the beliefs we held in common. The life of Jesus was described this way: he was “conceived by the holy spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried…” 

This creed ignores the fact that between “born of the virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate” lies the whole story. That’s where we find the love of God shown in the life of this man who left his family to tell us how much God loves us as we are, to minister to the poor and oppressed, to bring God to the godforsaken. 

He said to us, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. … Whatever you do for the least of these you do for me.”

I do not find God in steeplehouses or meeting houses or even in meeting for worship very often. I find God in the actions that let my life speak. I believe that Jesus isn’t present in the ones who feed the hungry or in the hungry who are fed. Rather, he is present in the action of feeding them – the action that binds them together in a connection that is godly. 

The message from my childhood church was that I was not (and would never be) good enough. That I was born tainted by sin, that nothing I could do short of confessing my imperfections and following directions of men who had no idea about my life would make me acceptable to the God who created me. I learned that I had to be perfect to live a godly life. Or at least try to be.

However, I once visited a church whose pastor said that God loves us JUST AS WE ARE. I was in my 40s and this was something I had never heard in church before. It was absolutely life changing for me. I broke down in tears. 

We all struggle to be perfect, to live up to the perceived perfection of Jesus, to earn the love of God. But what if God loves us just as we are? What if we can learn to accept or even embrace our imperfection? That might mean also accepting the imperfection of others, understanding that they too are doing their best to struggle with their imperfect-ness. What if we could love others unconditionally, just as they are? As God does.

As a Quaker I believe that it is not necessary to be perfect or cleansed or absolved to have a connection with God. It is not necessary to feel love for all of our fellow humans or to be always calm in our spirit. It is only necessary to do the work and the connection with God will manifest itself.

I have heard that our ministry, our ‘right work’ is where our great joy meets the world’s needs. We are all imperfect. But we are perfectly suited to the work we are called to do. We can all bring the message of Jesus – that we can and should love one another, that we can and should feed the hungry, tend the sick, bring the kingdom of God to this imperfect world. We are the hands that God has to do this work.

This, then is the measure of our perfect imperfection. 

Photo by sum+it from Pexels