Part 2 of the Without Sin series. See Part 1 here. | Home

Lord, to whom shall we go?

I was trying to sort out my head so I could be a good husband or at least a decent human being, and wrestling with all the narratives of my past that I described in Part One. After years of longing to be enough of anything and failing every time, I found myself staring up at a stranger’s sky because I was getting married in about five months and didn’t know myself well enough, let alone how to become an us.

I sat down to write because I’ve always worked out my struggles with identity and my internal sense of value and vocation theologically. I’m Christian. It never really occurred to me that this is likely a strange practice until relatively recently. I guess that’s why I’m a pastor who frequently goes by the pen name Eric the Lutheran. It’s written deep in my heart.

We learn from an early age in the Lutheran tradition that our core identity is Beloved, Child of God through the waters of baptism. As God’s beloved children, our life’s calling is to learn to love God who first loves us. In so doing, we (hopefully) learn to love what God loves — and who God loves. For me, part of that work was learning to love myself a little so I could love others more fully.

I was coming to terms with the fact that part of what I was actively hating in myself was rooted in my desire to lay down the part of myself that I profess to be captive to Sin, and cannot free myself. Yet I’d recently realized what a dead end that was for me. Trying to be good in ways I can’t hadn’t gotten me anywhere but stressed and depressed.

Whatever my path, whatever my calling, I’d become convinced that it wasn’t about being good, but about listening and following where I was called to be, good be damned.

When I found this space that wasn’t filled with my own expectations and the weight I carried from all the ways I felt I’d disappointed people in my life, I had the thought that maybe what I needed was some sin. I played with this idea because it was funny to me that trying to be good hadn’t gotten me anywhere, so maybe sinning would.

After rolling this around in my mind a little, the thought led me back to our liturgy’s Brief Order of Confession and Forgiveness. I’d said these words so many times. They still call out to the depths of my faith as words of comfort, and oddly, it offers a kind of comforting conviction to confess with the congregation that something about me — and all of us — is ill and broken. Shoulder to shoulder with folks I’d known since childhood, we confessed that there’s nothing any of us could do to fix it.

We confess that we are captive to Sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole hearts, we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.

It’s funny this confession leading to freedom was right there in front of me my literal whole life. I’m not good; I can’t be. In all honesty I probably wouldn’t be if I could. In this new line of thinking, I turned forever aside from the idea that my life is defined by Sin. I began openly disbelieving that God’s love could be so clearly defined by wrath on account of creation’s Sin over which creation literally has no control.

With this thought, I began newly constructing my theology of what confession is because I realized that we don’t confess, repent, or seek forgiveness because God needs to hear the words in order to get over our Sin and sins.

Sin isn’t a Divine Problem, it’s a human problem.

I recognized in that moment that being good isn’t what God expects of us — God knows us, how could God expect what God knows we cannot do?

Clean Hearts.

Confession and repentance are the act of taking a posture of loving honesty with ourselves before God.

I’ll never be enough, O Lord. In my not-enoughness, fill me with your presence. I’ve tried so many ways to fill myself with my own fullness, I’ve always ended up lost and lonely. Fill me, and teach me to love me as you always love me so I can love you and others with a clean heart.

Over the years, I’ve come to hear — and speak —the words of absolution during our confessional liturgy differently as well.

In the mercy of Almighty God, Jesus Christ is given to die for us, and for his sake God forgives us all our sins. As a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by this authority, I therefore declare the entire forgiveness of all our sins in the name of the Father, and of + the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Together, we hear this proclamation of God’s love week after week. Together, we hear again this pronouncement of God’s eternal loving disposition toward us. Together, we gather to hear that God bears no grudge against us. Together, we’re invited to ask the invitation I find most challenging to receive, to forgive myself all those things I cling to because God never holds them against me.

Create in me a clean heart, O Lord.

Love looks like love.

God’s love doesn’t condemn or destroy. God’s love welcomes and creates.

It’s only in the space of my own self-condemnation, that cruel space where I betray it all in my very core inability to offer the mercy to myself that God commands, that God is creating within our clean hearts the capacity to experience release, hope, and the salve of God’s presence. In our brokenness, God declares our healing.

In hell, God plants heaven’s seed.

In the deepest anguish of my broken heart, I face God’s truth that we don’t have to be whole, just open to love’s recovery.

Theologizing My Psychological Pain.

The presenting symptom of my internal upheaval was angst about my life changes. To be honest, it’s a pretty generic twenty-three year old thing to do. At this later time, I can give myself a break for being so self centered, in part because I realized as I chewed on this that what I was sitting down to write wasn’t really about me, at least not as such.

This writing was to be about my core understanding of God’s disposition toward creation. God’s loving disposition beckons creation back to God’s own heart even as creation continually attempts to fall away in its brokenness.

What lay before me was so much more than “how I can feel better about me,” or convincing myself I could be the decent human being I’d thought I was supposed to be. I was so done with being good.

I felt the questions brimming as pen met paper about the conflict I’d always felt at the core of my Christian identity, a question I now phrase, “If God loves what God is creating, why do we want God to destroy it all so badly?” Also, “why would we ever believe God loves someone God condemns to hell?”

If God is love, why doesn’t our rendering of God look loving?

How can love so desire and be so inextricably tied to eternal wrath that the only way to satisfy it is with the death of God’s own Son?

Is this really what love looks like?

And as I prepared to write, I began to ponder this absolutely most crucial question in my life and faith with more questions. It was thinking and it was prayer.

It was hope in its infancy.

If God’s love is constant and God’s grace free; if the death and resurrection of Jesus is God’s act of love to reconcile creation in its fullness — but I can only benefit if I accept it and I go to hell if I don’t accept it — that still sounds an awful lot like salvation through works righteousness to me. If the agency belongs to me in my choosing or not choosing, then why bother with Jesus at all?

If it’s ultimately really up to me, don’t I just save myself?

So I Wrote.

There I sat in my side corner booth inside the Waffle House on Broad River near I-26. Coffee and cigarette in one hand, a poem, more of a prayer really, flowing fully formed from the pen in my left.

There is no law but God’s law.

There is no love but God’s love.

There is no grace but God’s,

And no light,

no darkness,

no good,

no evil,

or breath,

or death,

except that God allows it.

There is no time but God’s,

and it is always now!

Amen.

Continue to Part 3: More Than Words