Category: Without Sin

Done Being Good

May 15, 2024

Without Sin

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

1 comment on Done Being Good
Under a Stranger’s Sky

May 9, 2024

Without Sin

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Part 1 of Without Sin.

Too Big for Words.

When I was young I thought everyone’s life was essentially the same. I don’t mean I thought people were all just like me, I mean I thought the core conditions related to being human beings are largely similar.

Our home lives, our school experience, our difficulty making and keeping friends. Our always getting called out for squirming or talking when we were supposed to be working and not crawling under our desks. I think it was sometime in third grade that I realized not everything is our shared experience, and in fact, hardly anything really is.

I learned it was just me when I had a crush on a girl in the class, and I had the feeling she was laughing at me with her friends behind my back about it, even though I hadn’t said it out loud, especially to her. I felt embarrassed because I had the feeling everyone else knew what I felt and what I felt she was doing. I felt that the whole class was against me and I got so angry about it that I was nearly in tears from my internalized dialogue about what I felt was going on. I heard her laugh. It felt like she was laughing at me. I grabbed my faux leather Members Only jacket that I was unseasonably wearing and whipped it toward them. I’m pretty certain I wasn’t close enough to hit them, but they were scared. I was scared.

Feelings aren’t facts, but I remember wishing that the feeling of people laughing at me was what they were doing now, because all they were doing was looking. I felt their eyes. All these years later, I can still feel their eyes on me wondering what in the actual hell was going wrong with me. Honestly, I wanted to know that too. It didn’t feel like I did that, but I had my faux leather Members Only jacket in my hand and acid in my throat.

“Sometimes we all have feelings too big for words,” I tell my six year old. These feelings were too big not to burst out of me because I didn’t know how to separate my feelings from my identity. I didn’t know what it meant to externalize and observe my thoughts. I didn’t have the capacity to leave the gym because I was a student, and I hadn’t learned the discipline to process before acting.

I was in third grade and I can have a little empathy for myself now, but then? All I knew is that this is what the big feelings bring — the sense that people don’t care what’s going on with me; they just want whatever’s wrong with me to stop. God, I wanted that too.

Good Enough

Anger and its friend displaced rage were with me a lot until my twenties, but I’d learned since third grade that I could just hate myself instead of everyone else most of the time. It wasn’t until I took a psychology class and learned the Cognitive Behavioral Model of therapy that I first learned I’m not my feelings and my feelings aren’t me. I learned the discipline to choose to become an observer of my emotions and my thoughts.

At least in college I felt like my own self-medication gave me some sense of control. I was much better suited to the rhythm of college classes than the hellish constructs of high school, but I wouldn’t really understand and unravel my anger and displaced rage until I was nearly thirty, and had the good fortune to land a year-long residency in a Clinical Pastoral Education program. After a year, and a lot of intense work learning to become vulnerable, I was finally able to name what I’d misnamed for all these years.

I wasn’t angry.

I was wounded.

I was bleeding.

I felt like my heart was dying.

I was grieving not being the husband I wanted to be and not being the person I wanted to be. At my core, I think I was also still mourning the good enough child I could never be.

I was grieving my entire life of teachers “letting me” try again after one more time not attaining my potential. I was still unconsciously lamenting all those new chances teachers and adults always talked about in front of me and sometimes at me. So many conversations where they’d tell me this is a fresh start; or, now that we “all” agreed that I’ll finally apply myself, toe the line, carry my weight, and so on. I could now, finally, reach all that potential everyone was always telling me I had as they looked at me disappointedly.

“It’s obvious you don’t care because you don’t even try to complete the homework.”

I did try, but I just couldn’t move the pencil. Besides, they were right of course because they’re the teachers. They know. I obviously just didn’t want it enough, because — if I really did — if I actually wanted it badly enough before the next new chance arrived too quickly on the heels of the last, I could’ve reached it.

“All you have to do is try, Eric. Show me the effort. You just haven’t applied yourself enough to the tasks before you or you’d have completed them. I know you can do it if you just try hard enough.”

I tried. I tried, I tried, I tried.

And then I tried again, made promises to my parents, teachers, and JEE-sus (it was the South) that I’d finally get it right this time.

That old song about the new chances kept coming round again, five hundred eighty-second verse, same as the first. And that familiar refrain came with it. “I’m just not motivated enough / don’t want it badly enough / refuse to really apply myself enough. / Just never been enough.

Why did being me mean I had to feel so defective all the time?

By now, I knew it really was just me.

Bridge

This is the moment, when writing something that touches on some of my most vulnerable places I own, that I feel the pressing need to walk it all back. I feel the unstoppable need to reassure you my life wasn’t bad. My life at home was pretty well fine. People who should love me, did. We were members of a congregation where I felt mostly like I fit in. I feel the need to say that, only partially because it’s all true; but also because I still get hung up on everything that’s wrong with me.

Why can I never be good enough?

Made New

I was twenty-three. I wrote a short ninety-something page book as I was trying to sort out my head to marry the love I still love. I was wrestling with all the trying and all the wanting it. I was facing a second senior year in college, and even though I played it off like I planned it all along, like I frequently still try to do, I was embarrassed and hurting because, five months before the wedding, I felt like I’d let us down already.

I felt like I didn’t know myself enough to be enough for her. I didn’t know my own damn heart or mind, how could I when I felt like I was looking up from an island in the middle of nowhere where even the constellations were different?

After years of longing to be enough and failing every time, I was staring up at a stranger’s sky.

I lost my own a long time ago.

Continue to Part 2: Done Being Good

4 comments on Under a Stranger’s Sky

Category: Without Sin

Done Being Good

Under a Stranger’s Sky

Too Big for Words.

Good Enough