Grace

What I like about the scriptures is that they're inflexible in what they say. There's something about the Lord Christ, which is that he doesn't walk anything back. Nothing at all. Unlike the rest of us, he says what he says and stands by it hard. He isn't the type to say what he says and then walk it back and apologize. Instead, he says what he says and leaves us with it.

This is unlike everything else that we have. Consider the constitution of the United States, a country in which I don't live. That constitution was written by the men of the day, some of whom owned human beings. It seems so foreign to us now that the nation to our south was one where humans could be owned, but that was outlawed by a constitutional amendment, the 13th one, in 1865. That was where the US Government declared that owning people was to be, from now on, illegal in the United States. 

This is a matter of some interest because the constitution of that country, and most others, is a document like magic mud - both solid and liquid depending on what's happening to it. It's set, but malleable.  But it can be changed, if people move on, then you're going to be in a world in which the way in which things were done no longer helps, you know? If this were impossible, then people who owned people a long time ago would be able to have their actions define the future in perpetuity. If you're an American citizen, you don't have to let what people did a long time ago dictate what you are allowed to do now, you can say that things change, and you can walk stuff back.

But Christ doesn't. His words stand, no matter what we do or say or believe. For the words of Christ, and the words of scripture which are the same thing, don't change based on how much we change or develop. And that's hard for us to get our heads around. Usually, we change laws and so on to fit what we're doing right now, or what we want to be doing at any given moment. Usually something becomes moral once we begin doing it, and things that were outlawed for a long time can become permitted in a moment.  But we don't get to change the Bible, nor the words of Jesus Christ. Those things stay the same in season and out of season. And that means that we get to choose what to do with passages like we had on Sunday, where we hear about how we are to treat one another. Now this was in Paul's letter to the Romans, and the romans had some pretty unusual ideas according to us, things like using urine as mouthwash, and feeding the dead.  You'd think with a society that wacky, that you could by and large ignore most of what they say about life and such. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. 

As a Christian today, you're living a couple of thousand years after Paul wrote his words, but most people would find it hard to argue too much with his words today. In reality, not much has changed in the two thousand years since he wrote them. That is, we don't feed the dead a lot these days, and we tend to use scope or whatever, but the material function of humanity is much the same as it always has been. You have friends, you have enemies, you have to navigate a world in which you have both at the same time. Not everyone is going to like you too much, you're not going to like everyone, and you're going to have to deal with that fact, like it or not. 

By and large, we believe that we are supposed to be good and kind. And that's a thing that gets said a lot, a sentiment expressed constantly, and if it were the case that we were supposed to be good and kind, and everyone believed in us being good and kind, why are things in the state that they're in? All we're doing is saying be good, be better and so on, but we can rarely pull that trick off. Rather, we all have the best of intentions, but something gets in the way - that thing tends to be other people. L'enfer c'est les autres, as Sartre would say, or in English, Hell is other people. The main difficulty in being good, kind and better is that you're going to run into real human beings. And those human beings tend to want to do things that you don't want them to do. If you could be good in a vacuum, if you could love in a vacuum without having to be good to people, or to be kind to people, you'd be set. But people aren't like bricks or butter or anything - they're people. And most of our rhetoric is about being nice without any practical advice on how to pull that off. Which means that by and large, we have an idea where we should be better, yes, and then when we can't because people are rotten and seek their own way, then we default to treating them as toxic people, and avoiding them. Cut that negativity out of your life!

So what that does is to reduce our human being interaction into a very small world. Love people, but only those who are safe to love, and that's a problem, because nobody is safe to love, really. And then we have as our capacity only to love those who we haven't found out are scumbags yet. But we will. Over a long enough period of time, everyone will let you down and disappoint you, if you eventually let them. The only ones who won't are the ones who die before you can find out. But everyone else, from the people with whom you live to the people in your neighborhood, will bother and upset you. Will you cut them down, or will you be good to them.

Ah, but you don't feel like being good to them, do you? They're toxic and bad and narcissistic and whatever else the buzzwords to describe sin are. Well and good, and that's extremely true. But what do you do with them if God tells you to love them? Well, Paul tells you what to do - 'If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he's thirsty, give him to drink. In doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head.' Friend, you're called to love those who are difficult to love. Sometimes you'll feel like it, and then it's really easy for you to be good to them. Sometimes you won't want to, and then you can be encouraged by God to heap burning coals on their heads like scripture tells you to. 

But you know that you're supposed to be good to one another. The world tells you to be kind, Christ tells you to be good, and though it's hard, you are called to love your enemies. How do you begin to grapple with that? To understand the level of grace that was given to you in Christ. That is, if you understand properly what was given to you through Christ, then you'll be far more willing to be good to those around you. It's hard for us to love one another if we believe that we are good, and that when things don't go well, they're the problem of everyone around us. But if we understand ourselves as forgiven people of grace, then it's far far easier to love those who are hard to love. Because you understand yourself as hard to love too. You can find yourself as someone who is loved by God in spite of your self obsession, not because of it. And once you get that, then other people are far harder to fight on that topic.