God Chooses Imperfection

God Chooses Imperfection--September 24, 2018

"My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." [Gal. 6:1-2]

Ask the Bible what matters most to Jesus, and you get an answer like this: carry each other's burdens, and sometimes even carry each other when you are the burden for a season.  Carrying someone else's heaviness, and knowing that they carry yours, too--that's at the top of Jesus' list of values.

It has to be if we are honest with each other and if Jesus truly only invites messy, mistake-making, rough-edged, baggage-carrying people into his community.  (And to be clear, yes, those are the only kind of people Jesus invites, because those are the only kind of people there are in the world--including you and me!)

A community full of nothing but forgiven sinners (like the church, which is made up of nothing but forgiven sinners) is has to give some thought to how it is going to keep on going when someone messes up. And at that point, you have to decide whether it is more important to be "right" and alone, or bear with someone else and keep them in the community along with you. If we're not going to play the old game of eliminating the rule-breakers or keeping the "sinners" out of the family of God, then what will do we to bear with each other when we do keep on stepping on each other's toes, wronging each other, and missing the mark? This is what Paul is leading us to think about here.

There is something beautifully realistic about Paul's talk here--he's under no illusion that the church will be a perfectly functioning community where no one ever sins or says a cross word or offends or hurts someone.  Paul knows that this is the risk God runs by forming a people with the free and open gift of grace and forgiveness--if God lets anybody in (as God seems to be doing in Christ Jesus, through whom race and class and gender no longer hold power over us), then God runs the risk of conflict.  If God lets sinners and the ungodly into this community (and apparently God does--it is God's signature move!), then we are going to still have to deal with how we bear with each other's sin and failure and missing the mark.

And apparently, it is more important to God that all these broken, messy, baggage-carrying people be included than having a "perfect" community with no jagged edges.  Apparently God values the grace that welcomes all sorts of stinkers to share life together more than the need to be free of defect.  Think about that for a moment--God chooses a community of imperfection that keeps holding together even when its members mess up and hurt one another, rather than a community that keeps rooting out bad apples because they have messed up or carry blemishes.   I cannot stress enough how counter-intuitive that is to our usual assumptions about God and Respectable Religion. We tend to assume that when people mess up that God is the first one in line to vote them off the island and kick them out of the Heaven and Holiness Club--but in fact, the New Testament here insists that God values holding the community together, restoring people who have messed up, and bearing with one another, rather than taking your toys and walking away.  Be very, very, VERY careful before you decide that someone else's mess-up is so impossible to accept that you would rather overrule God's priorities in order to kick "sinners" out or part ways with them in the Christian community, instead of bearing with one another even in our sinfulness.

See, Paul's response to the ongoing presence of sin and failure and mark-missing in the Christian community is neither to sluff it off carelessly nor to launch witch hunts.  When we fail each other, when we let each other down, and when we live out of alignment with the values of Jesus, we are called to restore each other with graciousness and gentleness.  That neither ignore the offense, nor demonizes the offender--and both pieces are key.  By holding those together--seeking to confront, deal with, and repair the places we have broken relationship with each other--we enact for each other in flesh and blood what God has done for us in Christ--to confront, deal with, and repair the places we have been out of right relations with God. We do not cover over wrongs or deny that those who have been wounded are hurting, but neither do we throw others under the bus in the name of weeding out "sinners."  In other words, we model for each other and we practice what God has done for us already--to forgive, to restore, to welcome back in.  And beyond that, we carry for each other whatever other burdens we have been given to share.  Whether it is the community responding to some offense between members or the hardship of one person's sickness or financial troubles, we can do no other but to hold each other up, because this is precisely what God has done for us and keeps doing for us.  We learn to forgive because God has forgiven.  We learn to shoulder burdens because God has carried ours and keeps doing the heavy lifting.  And we intentionally talk about how to respond to such offenses and burdens that happen among us because we are realistic about life in a community of forgiven-but-still-messy-sinners.

Who is someone in your community of faith in need of being "restored"--and restored graciously and with gentleness?  Where is place in your life for which you need to be restored? Where might we all need to be reminded that God values us hanging together in love more than kicking each other out in the name of "holiness"?

O God who sees us truthfully and who yet chooses us in all our imperfect realness, grant us the ability to let go of blind or blurry-eyed idealism which cannot see the failures or hurts among us, and instead give us the clear eyesight that makes forgiveness possible--the sight that allows us to see and to name hurts between us and faults inside us and love enfolding us that binds us into one in you.