The Joy of Being Wrong

The Joy of Being Wrong--August 2, 2016

"For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus." [Galatians 1:11-17]

There was a book that came out not quite twenty years ago (my goodness, can it be that long ago now?), whose mere title got me thinking at full tilt.  It was James Alison's The Joy of Being Wrong, and while the book itself is a dense, rich, challenging read (the subtitle is "Original Sin through Easter Eyes") that I can barely muddle through to fully comprehend, just the title itself still catches me off guard every time I see the words along the spine of the book, peering at me cock-eyed from the bookshelf.  The "joy" of "being wrong"?  That doesn't sound right at all to our ears.

No, we live in a culture in which "being right" is a marker of success--you can't be a "winner" unless you have convinced everybody else (or at least yourself) that you are "right." And what's more, you have to then convince the world that you have always been right.

It's why we see people get into petty comment wars on Facebook.  It's why there are people you know at work or in your family who always want to get the last word.  It's why our politicians seem incapable of saying, "I thought this way, and then I reconsidered the facts, and now I think that way," or even of simply saying, "I'm sorry."  It's why public voices so easily lash out by saying, "Somebody else misconstrued my words!" or "If someone was upset by what I said, it's THEIR fault for being offended!"  It's why so often we confuse being loud with being courageous, because we see people doubling down on things they said without thinking, rather than considering the possibility that real courage includes the ability to say, "I was wrong."

And in the midst of all of that jockeying for "right-ness," the followers of Jesus are invited--no, summoned--into a different kind of joy.  We are called to be people who have courage enough to admit when we were wrong... and to discover there is joy in seeing things from God's new angle.  Instead of always having to double down on our foolishness, or to dig our heels in with grudge-holding, instead of thinking we always have to put up this fake impression of always having the right answer, we are freed to be able to say, "God is teaching me, and I am learning.  Grace is changing my heart."

Amazingly, Paul (who wrote like half of the New Testament) found himself brought to that point, too.  In his own life, he had been stuck in the mindset of "I'm-right-and-I'll-threaten-anyone-who-says-differently," to the point of actually rounding up people who belonged to this strange and dangerous-sounding religion that he thought was threatening the values he grew up with.  Paul was outraged that "followers of the Way" (what they first called Christians) were allowed to roam free within the Empire, and in particular in his own backyard of traditionally Jewish regions, and so Paul had spent a lot of his energy not only insisting he was right, but that anybody who did not see things as he did should be locked up and bound--including women and children, according to the story in Acts.

Paul had staked everything on his own "right-ness," and it shook his world to the foundations when God finally smacked him upside the head and knocked him off his high horse to see that the very Christ he was persecuting was actually God-in-the-flesh, the God of Israel who he thought he had been serving.  It turned Paul's world upside down, and he had to rethink everything else he believed in.  That's scary stuff--we don't like to be shown to be wrong, and we don't like the notion that everything in our lives might be thrown up into the air.  It's like that line of Flannery O'Connor's: "All human nature vigorously resists grace, because grace changes us, and grace is painful."

Paul knew that, too--and yet he could call it grace when God got a hold of him and drew him to be a follower of Jesus.  It meant a whole new kind of courage--there was no more room for bluster or press-conference spin-doctoring that he had somehow been right all along.  There was instead the surprising joy, as James Alison would put it, of being wrong.

It is, of course, scary for us to consider that God might be leading us to do the same.  It is always easier to just scoff at anybody who thinks differently than I do, or to write them off as hopelessly backward, or that they just have dangerously different values.  It is always easier to be angry at people who say, "But have you considered it THIS way?" But Paul himself tells us that even with the things we had staked our lives on, God's grace sometimes reaches out to us, turns us around, and frees us from the silly need to make people think we had all the answers. 

Today, how might God's grace be reaching to you and mean to change our hearts?  Will we let God in that close?

Lord Jesus, help me to have the courage to see where you are changing me... and to let you do the remodeling in my heart.