The Good Shepherd

 The goodness of the shepherd is understated. 

Things from the Bible take on a life of their own after a while, one of the more notable is the story of the Good Samaritan. In common parlance these days, we only use the word 'Samaritan' with the qualifier 'Good.' And if someone were to refer to someone as a 'Samaritan,' you would assume that the person in question had done something good or charitable. You would assume that the 'Samaritan' was by definition good.

But hold on, gang, because the reason that the story was so surprising was that the audience was not expecting the Samaritan in the parable to be good. They were expecting the priest or the Levite to take care of their own, to do the good thing. They weren't expecting the Samaritan to do that. So the surprising part of the parable is that the Samaritan is good, though he is not expected to be, though he has no motivation to be. He doesn't owe the beaten man anything, they're natural enemies, but he still does the work to take care of him, nurse him back to health, at his own expense. 

So the Good Shepherd works the same way. We would expect a good shepherd to be good at the job of shepherding. That is, does he keep track of the sheep, does he take appropriate bathroom breaks, does he show up to work on time and give 110% while he's at work? Does he show up 15 minutes before his shift, and leave no earlier than 10 minutes after his shift is over? What a good shepherd. 

We think of a good employee at being good vis a vis his employer. Does he do his job to his employer's satisfaction? Or, we can look at it from the other direction, does the employee give great service to the customer? Is the waiter attentive to the needs of the diners whether the manager or owner cares or not? Where we don't tend to think of it is the question of how does the employee treat the goods? That's a much lesser concern, and one that doesn't factor in to the decisions of big capital. Are you good for the boss or the customer? Not are you good for the product. 

But the good shepherd is set apart for the goodness that he has for the sheep. Not for the employer, nor the end customer, but for the sheep. And that's unexpected, because the feeling of the livestock very rarely factors into decisions. Who cares if the sheep are enjoying themselves? The average farmer or rancher, though caring and conscientious, won't die for the livestock. The livestock are an investment, a store of value, something to help you live your life. They're there to enable you, not for you to enable them. There's no sense in you laying down your life for the sheep any more than there would be sense in you laying down your life for your work truck, or your toolbox or whatever. Those things are there to help you in your livelihood, which is harder to enjoy if you're dead. 

The Good Shepherd is there for the sheep. He cares about the sheep far FAR more than he should. He doesn't view the sheep as a store of value, or as a means to an end, he views them as important in and of themselves. This is much more of the way a person would view a pet than livestock. There was a time where people would view dogs as a working animal only, to live outside and do their jobs. And nobody would lay down their life for that. But perception of dogs changed over time, they became companions and friends, and eventually family. And as family, they were the sort of thing that people would lay down their lives for that animal. Why? 

The dog didn't change. Dogs haven't changed much time since we viewed them as tools, to be sure. But what did change is how we viewed them. We changed our perspective on them, changed our view of what it means to live with dogs, and then changed how we treat them and behave around them. All that was required was a change in our perspective, not a change in the dogs. We decided to view them as family, and therefore they became so. If a shepherd decides to view the sheep as family, as worth more than an financial investment but as family, then he would then treat them as such. If the shepherd declares them as family, they therefore would become family. The shepherd decides. 

So what that means is that you have a rare assessment. The sheep get to decide if the shepherd is good or not. The hired hands are deemed to be bad based on the fact that they would choose to desert, to leave the sheep defenseless. But the good shepherd is viewed as good by the perception of the sheep. It's rare, to be sure, for the sheep to get a vote, but they do. And if sheep could vote on the quality of a shepherd, what would they vote on? They'd vote on whether the shepherd makes them down to lie, leads them beside still waters, restores their souls, leads them in paths of righteousness for his name's sake, etc. It wouldn't be a vote on whether the shepherd is efficient, or prompt, or anything like that. How does the shepherd treat his sheep.

It's rare then as now to consider the possibility that a shepherd would care so much for the sheep that he would die, but that's the difference between a shepherd and a good one. That he would declare the sheep as worth it, and then would act accordingly. 

Righteous anger

 Okay.

We know that Jesus is without sin. That's sort of a definite part of the Christian faith, Christ as a perfect, sinless man, who took on flesh and dwelt among us. If you don't think that Jesus is perfect, that he was sinful in some key way and that his perfection isn't real or important, then skip ahead a few paragraphs, because certain things in the Christian faith remain true whether you believe in them or not.

If Jesus is sinless, which we believe that he is, then what he does is sinless by definition. That is, he can't do anything sinful, since it would be mutually exclusive with his perfection. If he's sinless then he can't commit any sins by definition. Now that we've covered that, we can get into his outrage in the temple. You need to understand that when he is clearing people, sellers, animals out of the temple, he's not doing it calmly and placidly. He's angry. Zeal for the house of the Lord consumes him. It's a matter of him looking at injustice, looking at people standing between humanity and God through exploitation and profit seeking, and did something about it. 

Now, I'd like to offer the following hot take: It was good for Jesus to clear the temple. I know, I said that something Jesus did was good, wow, very brave. But hold on a moment, it's worth discussing that you don't have to make any apologies for Jesus clearing the temple. If anyone says something like 'Jesus was angry and threw people out of the temple by driving them out with whips' your response as a Christian should simply be 'Yes.' 

Yes, Jesus did clear the Temple. Yes it was necessary, and beyond that, yes, it was good. Don't make excuses for it, and don't minimize it. And don't minimize the anger of Christ either. This is one of a very few parts of scripture in which Jesus shows and displays anger, and we should, as the kids say, let him cook.  

If you saw the movie 'Inside out' from Disney, which was a while ago, the essential message was that all the core emotions that you have are good and good for you, they just have to be used correctly. Anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, they're all good in the right way, and place. They're all helpful, and none of them are 'bad'. This is true in the case of Christ too. His anger isn't misplaced here, it's a good thing. He is rightly angry at the division between God and humanity, and sought to address that injustice by driving out everything that would stand between people and God. 

But then what?

That's the big question that lurks at the base of it all, isn't it? The big question that lurks behind everything is the question of what does Jesus do after he's done driving everyone out? He doesn't just cast them all out with whips, once he's done that, he stays in the temple to teach. And that's a real difference right there. This is what law and gospel looks like in practice. If there is sin, it has to be addressed and corrected. This is the law part, and this should be the best reminder to anyone that it's not as though old testament God is mean, and new testament God is nice. In the New Testament, there is still law. God, in the form of Christ, is present, and rightly angry. He wants to see the behavior stopped, and stopped hard. But he doesn't replace that bad behavior with nothing though. He replaces it with gospel, which is the point. 

Jesus sits down in the temple and teaches from that point on, you know. He teaches about grace, the Gospel, forgiveness and life. The purpose of anger isn't anger for its own sake, rather the anger is to remove what divides, and to replace it with reconciliation and forgiveness. The problem these days is that you're told to just keep everything under wraps, to not have discussions of any topic that matters, and to let people drift away if holding the relationship together becomes too difficult or taxing. But anger isn't a sin, you know. It's not inherently sinful. But it should be used for a good and fruitful purpose. That is, your anger should be used to move through sinful behavior, and towards reconciliation. Reconciliation that would not be possible without the anger.

Do you think for one moment that if Jesus had been passive in the face of the commerce in the Temple that they would have stopped? His anger was right and justified, and served to put grace back in the temple where there had been only works before. Properly considered the anger is the surgeon's scalpel, the dental drill, the thing that removes the death and rot so that healing can happen. Your anger hopefully is the same. Anger isn't a sin, but it is supposed to drive forgiveness, grace and reconciliation. You're supposed to be angry but not sin, to be impelled to make things right, to insist that forgiveness is there, even though sins have to be repented of. As Christians, you're not supposed to ignore injustice, nor to dismiss it, or claim that it doesn't matter. You're supposed to deal with these things head on, and to be angry where anger is required. But that anger must lead to repentance, and that repentance must come with forgiveness. This is a Christian absolute. And if that's the case, you're not going to be as tied up in knots about whether anger is or is not sinful, but to ask what the purpose of that anger is, and to ensure that it moves into a good direction.

Never Lord

 The interesting thing that happens is that Peter rebukes Jesus when Jesus says that he's going to have to take up his cross and die. Jesus in turn rebukes Peter by saying to him that he has in mind the things of man, and not the things of God. And that seems to be the breakdown between God and humanity. Peter does not have in mind the things of God, but is that a problem unique to Peter? When Jesus says 'get behind me, Satan,' is this an issue that Peter has, or is it a bigger problem?

Honestly, if we were able to have in mind the things of God, we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in. I'm more convinced than ever that a lot of issues that are at the root of our problems are formed in a complete inability that we have to see things from each others perspectives. That is, you will be fighting about where someone left a plate, or whatever. Both sides believe, sincerely, that they're being perfectly reasonable, whereas the other person is being completely unreasonable. That problem is brought forward by the inability of the other party to seriously engage with the viewpoint of the other. There was a semi-viral blog post out there that had the title of 'she divorced me because I left dishes by the sink.' That blog post, whether you agree with the content or not, encapsulated the issue perfectly by illustrating a matter that was irrelevant to one party, of great consequence to the other, and the inability of each person to see and understand the perspective of the other person. In other words, the husband at the time said 'I don't think this is a big deal, so you shouldn't either.' And that line of thought is a real, genuine issue to be pondered. Can you, not as a husband or wife, parent or child, but human being in God's creation, ever really have in mind the things of another? Is it possible for you or I to effectively see things from someone else's perspective to the point that it adjusts our behavior, or are we likely to filter their experience through our own to the extent that we will view the other person's needs only in relation to our own.

That's why when the Lord Jesus Christ discusses morality in what we would call the Golden Rule, he does so by using our own perspective, turning that from a liability into a benefit. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus knows what is in the heart of man, and therefore he is going to work with the material as it actually exists, not as we would hope it exists. So he's not going to say to you 'you should treat people the way they want to be treated' because that would run things through our own perspective anyway. But that perspective you have is supposed to influence how you treat other people. If your wife says that she would rather you not leave dishes by the sink, you're not supposed to say 'she shouldn't care,' but rather 'If I voiced a concern to someone, how would I want them to respond to me?' Then you act accordingly. 

We can, and should, do this with one another, but what about when it comes to God? When it comes to the Lord God, can we default to the golden rule? Not really, for God doesn't need anything from us. We aren't living in a universe where we can treat God the way we want to be treated. Our job is not to behave that way, but to be obedient, to listen, and so on. But part of the reason that we can't have in mind the things of God is because God is utterly alien to us, as high as heaven is from the earth, so far are his ways than our ways. The end of the book of Job is simply a big long discussion of how difficult it would be for Job to possibly understand how God operates. Job is a man of dust. He can get sick and hungry, he can weep when his children die, he can starve when his crops get stolen, that kind of thing. God cannot. It's real hard to have in mind the thing of God when you're starving, or grieving, or hungry, or just living in the world. The great wager between Satan and God was that Job would curse God if his human condition became bad enough - Satan believed that Job would only ever be able to view his relationship with God through his own lens as a human.

So, once again, if we were able to do a good job of having in mind the things of God, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. But if we can't have in mind the things of one another, if our morality must, by necessity be run through a filter of ourselves, then God is going to have to bridge the gap for us. He's not going to wait for us to have in mind the things of God, because we're never going to get there. But what he will do is to say 'if you're not going to have in mind the things of God, then God will have to have in mind the things of man.' A great part of the incarnation is understanding how close God has to get to us in order for us to have any kind of relationship with him at all. This ain't 50/50. It's not even 70/30. You're looking at a world in which for any kind of relationship with God to happen, he's going to have to do all of it. We're not going to have in mind the things of God, so he's not going to make that a condition. He's going to instead have in mind human beings, their lives and relationships, their weaknesses and frailties, and to do all the work of redeeming them, because they're just not able to do that on their own.

In disguise

 I don't like to get too bugman on stuff, but there is a real utility to talking about Christ in terms of super heroes. That is, an awful lot of super heroes operate in normal society as regular people, with what we call 'secret identities.' Some don't but a lot do.

Thor, for example, is just Thor. That's it. He's an Asgardian alien who has the ability to lift 100 tons, can fly, is immune to disease and so on. He had a secret identity back in the day, Dr. Donald Blake, but that was retconned away as an illusion, because it was deemed to be unnecessary. After all, if you can lift 100 tons, can fly, are immune to disease and damage, why would you need a secret identity? Nobody can do anything to you, not much point in ever being in disguise, right?

So why Clark Kent? 

Surely Superman and Thor have very similar powersets, yes? Surely they have similar powers, abilities, invulnerabilities and so on. They can both fly, lift over 100 tons, are immune to disease and damage, that kind of thing. So why does one have a secret identity and one does not? The explanation is to be found not in the power sets, but in their origins. Thor comes to earth as an Asgardian exile, but as a fully grown adult. His secret identity was to blur his recollection of his Asgardian roots. The Clark Kent secret identity, though, was given to Superman by his Ma and Pa Kent parents who raised him from a baby that they found in a rocket. Superman is invulnerable to all damage that mortals could do. You could shoot bullets at him, stab him, run him over, and it wouldn't do too much. But Ma and Pa? Lois Lane? Jimmy Olson? Lana Lang? Those are all flesh and blood humans, who aren't immune to damage. Shoot Superman and the bullets bounce right off. Shoot Lois Lane and the bullets go right through.

A large part of the plots of Superman stories is not about him being in any real peril, after all, outside of kryptonite there's not much you can do to him, but the stories tend to be about the vulnerability of those around him. Can Superman save everyone? He's not at risk, but boy, the people around him sure are. So in that case, Superman has a Clark Kent secret identity not for him, but for them.

And that brings us to Transfiguration. At the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus is preparing to descend into a world of mania that will end with him being killed. And this dangerous world has knives and daggers, nail and whips everywhere. It's a world of death and destruction, and a world into which Jesus must descend, to be killed. But at the mount of transfiguration, the disciples get to see him without disguise. The secret identity is revealed only to a select few, three in fact. This tracks with this information, which has a select few people, 20 in all, knowing the secret identity of Superman. Not everyone knows, as this is a secret identity. If the vast majority of people know Superman as Superman only, then his human family is safe, his colleagues are safe, and so on. But if they know that Superman is also Clark Kent, then everyone is in play, and nobody is safe. And like it or not, Superman can quit being Superman a lot easier than he can quit being Clark Kent.

The secret identity isn't for the super, it's for the normals. Jimmy, Lana, Lois, they're the ones who need that secret identity, if they don't have it then they're shot. And when it comes to Christ, the veiling of his identity isn't for him, it's for the disciples, it's for us, it's for the normals. The people who would want Moses to veil himself so that the reflection of the divine would not trouble or alarm us. The people who need God to show himself in approachable ways. The people who need and crave a closeness with God, but who would find the grandeur and majesty of the ineffable God to be overwhelming, and which would reflect badly on our own sinfulness. 

Which is why there's a secret identity. To know Jesus is to know God, but through a lens that we can wrap our minds around. He speaks with a mouth, washes feet with his hands, breathes on his disciples, eats fish, bread and wine, and weeps at the tomb of his friend. Through that lens, we can start to see the eternal God, and at the Transfiguration, as he heads back to die, we can count on his ability to save the world because it is God, and man, who is mighty to save.

Everyone is looking for you

 I like our Gospel reading where the disciples are the best kind of correct - accidentally correct.

A lot of the time, our idioms are imprecise. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you say 'nobody is available tonight,' what you mean is that none of your employees are available. When you say that you have 'nothing to eat' at home, what you mean is that what you have at home isn't what you want to eat, but I would wager that there are a lot of things you could be eating. You just don't want to.

Now, when we talk about our Gospel reading, the disciples come up to Christ and use a similar idiom - 'everyone is looking for you.' This is standard exaggeration, you understand, the disciples mean that everyone in that house, that village, that area is looking for Jesus. They surely don't mean that everyone everyone is looking for Jesus. But they're accidentally correct. They are right in ways that they can't really imagine.

What I mean by that is that the hyperbole of saying 'everyone is looking for you' is shockingly correct. Everyone is absolutely looking for Jesus. Whether they know it or not. Why is everyone looking for Jesus? They're looking for him precisely because he offers a solution to all the problems. Usually, we want to treat the symptoms, not the cause. We're good at trying to deal with the symptoms of our sinfulness without dealing with the underlying causes. We want the fighting at home to stop, but aren't willing to address what got us into that mess. We want to still talk to our friends, our family, our neighbors, but are unwilling to deal with why we're squabbling with one another. What's driving these wedges and schisms betwixt us? 

Ultimately, it comes right down to the truth of a simple sentiment - all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is none righteous, no not one. The difficulty usually lies in you or I thinking about what the other people need to change. A lot of the time, when people come to talk to me about broken relationships, problems, hangups, all that stuff, it revolves around them telling me how much everyone else needs to change. 'Pastor, you need to call my mother and tell her to talk to me.' 'Pastor, you need to tell my kids to be nicer to me.' 'Pastor, you need to get my friend to listen to me before it's too late.' 

You know, I bet that's the case. I bet that your mother / child / friend should really smarten up, and there's almost certainly a ton of truth to it. I guarantee that's true, without doubt. But that's not the issue, really, or I suppose it's half of the issue. The issue, really, is that there are two people (minimum) who are at odds, and who are both flawed but viewing themselves as flawless. And that's the trouble. In these disagreements, we tend to view ourselves as being good and right, and the other party as being generally wrong, and we expect and seek for the opposition to conform themselves to our views as though that was right. But we're actually expecting and asking for the other party to move from being wrong in their way to being wrong in ours. But that's still wrong, folks. It's just wrong in a way that benefits us. 

So ultimately, things keep on being wrong, as long as both parties continue to view themselves as being right, their opposition being wrong, and there being basically no middle ground to find. But your job as someone who is a human, and a human who is frequently in conflict, is to treat the cause, not just the symptoms. It's real easy to treat the symptoms, to excise picky pushy people, to squabble further and to try to get family and friends to see things our way, to dig in our heels and force, but it's much much harder to do the work of seeing our own role in the dispute, and our position as the one that needs to change. As both do. 

If you're both sinners, then you both need to repent for what got us to this point so far. And if you both do, then we can get to some sort of resolution, because you're not both sitting there waiting for the other person to smarten up. Rather, you're in the position where both you and the other party have the same flaw, and will have to work together to find common ground. Normally, the first person to admit weakness is seen by and large as the weaker of the group, but in reality, as Christians, admitting weakness and fault is a given. That's the basic position. And if you've wronged somebody, you have to ask for forgiveness. And they have to forgive. It's a system that cuts to the core of what's wrong by exposing the fact that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you forgive the other party, and they forgive you, not because of the greatness of spirit that you have, but that we forgive as we have been forgiven. We love because he first loved us. 

If this is true, and is the path towards reconciliation, then what the disciples said is accidentally very true indeed. Everyone is looking for Him.

All at once

Wednesday's service had the verses that are all about a combination of the transfiguration and the burning bush. These readings have strong themes of holiness of place attached to them. Moses is told to take off his sandals, as he is standing on Holy Ground. In the same vein, when on the mount of transfiguration, Peter wishes to build shelters to stay on that mount, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

But that misses the point of what the incarnation is all about, really. The idea of holy ground is a topic that you'd think would make perfect sense - you go somewhere to find God. God holds court somewhere, and it is the job of humanity to tread very carefully around sanctified ground. But that implies that there is a place, or multiple places on earth, where the presence of God is more fully manifest or realized. There is a place you can go, somewhere, that the holiness of God is not just more fully felt, but more fully is. If you're looking for God, you can literally find him there. Now, is he everywhere else as well? Maybe. But not absolutely. And that's the issue right there, which is that if there is a place where God is, then there are places where he is less. Those places where he is less would be the vast, vast majority of places. And that' the trouble, isn't it? 

We are people who have a lot of trouble finding God. He isn't as easy to track down as we might want. For a lot of time, experiences of the numinous are rare, and few and far between. That is, the dreadful mundanity of life really shows itself early. So much of life is taken up with general, bland mundane activity, and very little of that is rapture and bliss of encountering the divine. It's like it is with everything else, too. When you get married, everyone is in their absolute finery, they look terrific, they are eating great food and dancing the night away. Will this be every night of your marriage? No, it won't. It won't be any night of your marriage, really. But the deal with your marriage is that you carry the finery and majesty with you for the rest of your marriage. Because you carry your spouse with you.

When you get married, it's not the party that makes your spouse special, rather it's the spouse that makes the party special .And you can test that, because you've been at weddings that weren't your own, and nice as though they may have been, they didn't fundamentally change everything about your life. Your own wedding did. There's a good chance that your spouse may very well have been your plus one at those weddings that you attended, but even though you and your spouse both attended the wedding, it wasn't a life changer to the extent that your own wedding was.

And that's the key. The act of being present at the wedding ceremony isn't what makes it important. The location, the food, the party, all of that is nice, but it's not what makes it important. What makes it important is that it's your wedding. And that makes everything about it special, and the fact that you bring your spouse home from that wedding is what changes your life. So, holy ground, as described in Scripture, isn't where God lives, but it's where Moses encounters God. But from that point on, God goes with Moses, throughout his journey from Egypt all the way to the holy land. Part of what is so profound about the story of the Exodus is that God liberates the people of Israel from slavery, but not because Israel is where God lives. It's clear that he is operating right the way through the book of the Exodus, whether the Israelites are in Egypt or not. This is true to the text, unless you think that someone else was parting the Red sea, turning the Nile to blood, and causing darkness and hail in Egypt. It seems pretty clear that even though Moses meets God up on the mountain at the burning bush, it's not as though God stays or lives there. God is present everywhere. 

Like Moses, we tend to have certain spaces set aside in which we can experience the divine. Churches, cathedrals, monasteries, these are places set aside for that purpose, where our spiritual batteries can be recharged, where we have time and space for God to speak without interruption.  But this is for our benefit, not for His. It's not as though he's bound by the doors of that space, and that you will only find him there. Rather, it's a situation in which, like at the mount of transfiguration, you can see and experience Christ with astonishing clarity, but then he goes down from the mountain with you.

Peter wanted to stay up there, where there was clarity, where there were Moses and Elijah, where there was a voice from the clouds and where Jesus was dazzling in his divinity. But when the prophets were gone, and Christ looked the same as he did before, he came down from the mountain with his disciples and continued his ministry alongside them. As said before, that's the nature of worship as a Christian. Where you can see God with clarity is great for you, but don't forget that there's nowhere that he isn't.

New Year, new you?

 The new year is something that is both arbitrary, and not, at the same time. What I mean by that is that there is objectively a point at which the earth completes a revolution around the sun, yes, but based on what as the starting point? There are multiple cultures that measure the new year in multiple ways. Hopefully by now you've heard of Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year, taking place in late summer or early autumn. Or you're aware of Chinese New Year, taking place between the end of January and the end of February.  These are different in terms of dates to our New Year taking place on January 1st, but are functionally identical. That is, a year has elapsed, even though the start date and end date of the year differ. 

So what that means is that the New Year as a concept is empirical, and immutable. But the new year start and end is arbitrary, and you can start measuring, well, whenever you want I suppose. If you decide that the new year begins on March 10th, then every year you can count down on March the 9th, and it's every bit as valid, because a year has elapsed in the meantime. 

Now that's an important concept, because as a society we have determined that the end of a year, the beginning of a new one, is a good time for introspection, change, resolution and so on. But there are a lot of good resolutions that get made at this time of year, a lot of them get broken, and people become disheartened, and call the year a wash, waiting for the next year. But in the Christian faith, we are encouraged to do something else. Introspection and resolution. In the church, though, it's called 'silence for reflection on God's word, and for self-examination.' |And that right there is a much much faster way of slicing through the issues. For you don't need to wait until January the first to figure that out. Say you're at January 3rd and you've already blown through your resolution. I know, seems unlikely but bare with me. You can either shrug, say you've blown your resolution and wait for 364 days until you can make another one, or you can be introspective now, and deal with you missing the mark today.

People like to talk about guilt in church as a big problem and a great failing, but it actually isn't guilt the way you would think it would be. Rather, what you have in church is a way out of guilt, not a means of being mired in it. It is a way for you to deal with your sins, your failings as they arise and to not internalize them as a problem integral to yourself. It's arbitrary, yes, it's not based around the change from one year to another, but it's crucial for your own individual growth that you not just give up on January 10th and say 'this is just who I am now.' You have a chance every day to give up the consequence of your sin and to divorce that from yourself completely. Once you've realized that, then you'll work out that the church insistence on pointing out your sins isn't to give you more guilt, but to take your guilt away. 

Otherwise, you end up with resolutions made, broken, and abandoned. Not wanting to feel guilty about a lack of progress leads to you excusing every last bit of progress not made. No, the law highlighting your sin leads to you having a chance to get the guilt gone. And that opportunity is available every week, constantly, every time confession and absolution is offered, it's a chance for any of us to be introspective constantly, to be able to say 'what I have done so far will not govern my future simply based on the fact that it was me that did it.' If you do that, then you can take resolutions, whether made at the beginning of the year or on the spur of a moment, and say 'these were good things to do. Good resolutions to make. And it was the right thing to do to follow through with it.' 

Will that increase your chances? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly will allow you to make the decisions you want to make, not the ones that you feel bound by.