Then what are you for?

The question that makes up the title of this post was a question posed during a debate between atheists and Catholics, namely Stephen Fry and the late Christopher Hitchens on one side, and Ann Widdicomb and Father Onaiyekan on the other.  Guess which side was which.  Anyhow, I've seen the entire debate, and there is one bit that seems to be the stand out soundbite for those who are watching.  I was going to describe it, but thanks to the power of the internet, here is the clip for you.  I'll discuss it after you've watched it.  Go ahead, it's not long.

Wonderful.  There's the clip.  Now Stephen Fry has I suppose a point, and a reasonably good point too.  What is the purpose of the Catholic church, or indeed any other church?  You may find that question a bit strange coming from someone like myself, who is in the business of promoting church, and you may find my answers a bit strange too.

People join churches for all kinds of reasons, and lurking in the background is frequently the desire for morals and values.  That is, you want to have someone tell you, or help you, to be a better person.  You want and need someone to impel you to do better, to be better, and all that.  This should come as no surprise, since the daytime airwaves are full of this.  It's a constant barrage of people who are telling you tips and tricks on how to live, on being moral, what to eat, what to drink, all that stuff.  No problem, basically constantly.  

And the church would have a very hard time in such a crowded marketplace.  If the church was to wade into such a situation or a scenario, into such a packed house with a whole bunch of tips and tricks from the bronze age, it would get laughed out of the room.  Strangely enough, the Bible is not crammed packed full of a whole bunch of overly moral teachings, which is odd, because you think it would be. The teachings of Jesus, weirdly enough, don't tell you a whole bunch about internet etiquette, or about dating, or about any of this stuff.  It doesn't tell you what to do when you wake up, when you go to bed, it doesn't tell you about business or driving, nada.  There is a part of the Bible that does, but you find it to be hopelessly out of date and quaint. Or, to put it another way, 'it's uh very boring.'  

So, to quote Stephen Fry, 'then what is it for?'  Once you realize that the pinnacle of moral teaching in the Bible is 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' you have to ask yourself what is the Bible for, what are the scriptures for, what is the church for, any of it.  Well, GK Chesterton, that monarch of wit, was once asked why he joined the church, and his answer sort of hit the nail on the head, really.

To get rid of my sins.

That, my friends, is why we have a church.  To get rid of our sins.  And I'll be the first to admit that it's not just atheists that get this wrong.  It's an awful lot of Christians too.  Most of them, I'll wager.  In a church building, you are not going to find better people than you do outside.  You will find people every bit as bad as on the outside.  They may pretend that they aren't, and they may only really engage in church-appropriate sins like bigotry or pride, but they're just as bad as anyone else.  So what do you get from the church?  Forgiveness.

Forgiveness in two ways.  Firstly, you bring before God all your disappointments, all your wrath, your pride, your bigotry, your racism, your laziness, your rampant pride, your weaknesses and frailties, all that, and he promises to forgive it.  Anything you confess is taken away, up to and including when you confess just being a bit of a goofball in general.  That gets taken away.  Forgiven.  But there's a second part of forgiveness that happens in a church, that is woven into the fabric of the Lord's Prayer.  When Jesus gives his disciples the Lord's Prayer when they ask how to pray, he says this:

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And in case you missed it, or in case that wasn't clear, pretty much two verses later, Jesus says this:

If you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father

will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive others their

trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

But here's the juice.  I happen to know, based on the scriptures, that the congregation, as Christians, don't get to choose whether to forgive me or not.  I get to choose whether or not I want to confess, yes. I can hold onto my sins for as long as I want.  But when Jesus says that we have to forgive our brother who sins against us seventy times seven (thank you Jacob Ulrich), and if we won't forgive then we won't be forgiven, that gives me immense confidence in going before people, laying myself bare, and telling them that I'm a bit of a goofball, I shouldn't be, and they all deserve better.

Get that? I hope so.  On Sunday, I confessed sins to the congregation.  You'd have to think that I'm nuts, right? Going in front of a room full of people who pay my salary, and tell all of them, including ones who have no idea, that I'm a goofball, that I haven't called on people I should have, that I'm a bad administrator, and a dreadful organizer.  Ordinarily, that would be a silly thing to do.

So what is the church for?  It's for us to get rid of our sins.  It's for the atoning sacrifice of Christ to be made clear, so we can come before God with confidence and joy, so we can come before others and repair our broken relationships through mutual confession and forgiveness.  Because we must forgive.  

The moral teaching of the messiah, Jesus Christ, do tend to boil down to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' but that's not what Christianity is for.  You know it,  I know it, dogs know it.  You have known that this is a good idea for forever. You don't need the church to tell you to be nice to each other.  You need the church to pick your pieces up when you fail.  You need the church to be a safe place to come with your actual sins, confess them, and be sure of forgiveness from God, and from your fellow Christians.  Just like in a twelve step program, the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.  If we are going to be better people, step one is to confess that we aren't as good as we would like to be, that we're bad at keeping the rules we set for ourselves.  

It's a sad fact that I would say the vast majority of Christians have forgotten what the church is for.  It's a social club, most of the time, where you can go to be around other people who have the same view as you, who hold the right opinions, who believe the right things, and who have problems, but they're approved problems.  But that's not what the church is for.  The church is for sins to be forgiven.  You see that in the reading from Revelation from Sunday, in which John gets a vision of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and in it, there is no temple.  No church.  Because the whole reason we have a church now, the core of our church experience is to have somewhere to go, confess our sins, and be forgiven.  In heaven, no need for it.  But boy oh boy, do we need it now.  We have lots of sins, and we have lots of confession to make.  Let's try our best to remember that church isn't supposed to be a place where you go to remind yourself of how good you are, but a place to go where you can be openly and honestly imperfect, where you can sin boldly, where you can admit before God, and before each other that you're not perfect, and you have some serious problems.  And where you admit that in a room full of otherwise respectable people who are admitting the same.  And where you can be guaranteed that you will be forgiven by both God and man.  

You already know the moral law.  But you need to know what to do when you break it.  Come to church.  Have your sins forgiven.

PJ.