Confessions of an Honor Roll Jerk--June 24, 2020

Confessions of an Honor Roll Jerk--June 24, 2020

"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.  For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace." [Romans 6:11-14]

Some days it feels like none of us have left junior high school.  Some days it seems like we have chosen not to grow up and move beyond the meanness of those adolescent days.  And that is a real shame... because we were freed, long ago, to walk out the door and leave those old insecure, immature ways behind.  We could... if we dared to believe we really are free from the childish game-playing of middle school.

I'll confess, for my own part, at least, that I was a part of a lot of rottenness in my seventh and eighth-grade years.  (Probably in a lot of ways, I still am.  But God is working on me, and I am, in some ways, less of a jerk today than I was in that earlier era of my life.)  I could be vicious--using well-honed sarcasm to rip someone else apart.  Joining with other kids to find some weak spot in another kid and to keep making fun of them for it, in the hopes that the crowd would go after them instead of me.  We were like sharks at a feeding frenzy--once there was blood in the water, you just did whatever you could not to be the one eaten by the others.  So if some kid had the wrong kind of shoes, or their clothes weren't name brand, or if they liked a kind of music that wasn't popular, or if they wore their hair the wrong way, or if you could make everyone else think they were clumsy or slow or ugly, you would fixate on that and make sure to perpetuate any running jokes about them that you could.  And you did it because you figured that if everyone was targeting some other kid, you would get through the day without being ridiculed or mocked or branded as a loser.  

No, wait.  I can't say "you."  I mean "me."  I did those things.  You may have, too, but I can't hide from the ways I was a part of that kind of cruelty, that kind of meanness, toward other kids, back in junior high school.  I did those things.  I said those things.  I used my smarts to pick apart other kids... in the hopes that I wouldn't get shredded to pieces myself.  I need to own all that.

And this is the thing I need to be clear about.  I was, by all accounts, "one of the good ones."  Seventh and eighth-grade Steve was on the honor roll, in lots of clubs, went to church, and was student council president.  I was in so many ways the poster boy for being a good, upstanding and exemplary student.  But at the very same time, it was like there was this unspoken code that we all had to be merciless to other kids at the same time, no matter what other things made you look "good" to the adults, because none of us wanted to become the next target of the crowd.  It was like we could be nice and pleasant outside of school, but the moment we walked into the building, a whole new set of rules came into play, and we had no choice but to play it--either be cruel and mean-spirited to others to make them the easy target rather than yourself, or find yourself on the menu.  And in spite of all the other ways I was a good little boy in junior high school, I was also, without a doubt, so insecure in a lot of ways about myself that I was ruthless toward other kids I thought I could make into targets to keep myself out of the crosshairs.

I was both caught in a system I did not design that brought out the worst in me, and at the very same time, I participated in that system and accepted its terms because it was easier to go along and just try not to come out the loser than to be strong enough not to play.

Thank God junior high doesn't last forever.  And thank God that at some point I stopped caring what other people thought enough that I realized I didn't have to keep playing those asinine games that made me into a real jerk.  Thank God that at some point I began to see in myself the things I was so quick (and merciless) to make fun of in others, hoping to keep the attention off of my own shortcomings.  Thank God that old version of me could be outgrown and left behind.

I want to suggest that something like this is the human condition.  The Bible's word for it is "sin."  But we have a way of flattening that complex word into sounding just like a list of forbidden activities or swear-words you're not allowed to say.  But sin is more than just a list of bad actions.  It is so much worse, so much more insidious.  Sin is systemic.  Sin is cancerous.  Sin gets its tendrils into each of us, and all around us until every part of us is infected, even in ways we don't directly choose or realize.  It's an awful lot like being in junior high school.  You get to seventh grade (at least that's when the break in school years was for me), and you step into the system that was there already--a system of kids attacking kids, cool ones picking on the uncool, and a whole bunch in between trying to do anything they can not to become the next target.  And even though nobody I knew in junior high school wanted to be that way toward others, somehow it was like we all just stepped into the systems, the routines, the patterns, that were handed to us, and we just kept all that mean-spirited rottenness going, because we could not imagine things being any different.

Sin is like that.  We come into this world we willingly give ourselves into the system we are presented with, even though the game is terrible, and even though it petrifies us to come out as "losers" in that game, we play along.  It plays on our worst fears, our worst insecurities, and it draws out our meanness to one another, our selfishness, our cutthroat dog-eat-dog side, and it teaches us to do whatever it takes not to be on the bottom.  And so we all willingly give ourselves over to that order of things, and we look for someone else to keep down, someone else to hate, someone else to make into our scapegoat, someone else we can make into the evil "them."  

The thing of it is, we can be, to the outside observer, perfectly nice and friendly in lots of ways at the same time.  We can know how to put on a professional smile, to speak politely and kindly in certain circumstances (you know, like when someone important is watching), but then continue to nurture the rottenness inside as long as we think we're not letting it show.  That's the really insidious thing about sin--most of the time, it doesn't present itself as cartoonishly obvious black-hat-wearing villainy.  Sin has a way of making itself look respectable, and it does a fantastic job of persuading us that when we are selfish... or cruel... or indifferent... or hateful... or greedy... that we are just doing what we have to do in order to survive in the world.  Sin's greatest trick is making us unable to recognize how it works us like puppets, so that we can all tell ourselves, "I'm a good person!  I'm not selfish... or hateful... or greedy... or bigoted... or apathetic... or racist... or crooked!" And as long as we fool ourselves into accepting that lie, we will never see how terribly tangled we are in a system that is killing us.

And so we end up with, well, exactly the world we are living in: a world in which we have learned to look good and righteous (and to persuade ourselves that we are), while at the same time, we participate in systems and game-playing that lead us to do rotten and cruel things, say rotten and cruel words, and think rotten and cruel thoughts, all while we are convinced we have no choice but to give into those things.  In other words, it's junior high school all over again.

But... what if it didn't have to be this way?

What if I weren't doomed to keep reinforcing the system I inherited?  What if I didn't have to mindlessly accept the pick-on-the-weakest game-playing that keeps leading me to attack others so I won't be made the target myself?  What if I could honestly look at the ways I have participated in patterns that harm others, whether I realized I was doing it or not, in the hope that I could change?

This, dear ones, is what Paul the apostle says we have been given: we have been freed in Christ from the terrible game-playing we have been playing all this time.  We don't have to keep repeating the patterns that were thrust on us.  We don't have to keep giving ourselves to the habits and systems that we were told were "the only way things can be." We don't have to keep seeking to target others to make ourselves feel better. We don't have to keep running away from the uncomfortable truths about ourselves.  We don't have to keep being cruel to others (or being silent when others are cruel, which is just as mean and twice as cowardly).  We don't have to play any of those childish games, because we have been brought to a new life in Christ.

And in Christ, we could be done with the game-playing--except that we keep running back to it.  We can be freed from caring what the crowd thinks of us... and so we no longer have to attack someone lower on the social food-chain to make them the accepted prey.  We don't have to keep doing any of that.  It's just that we do keep running back to those old patterns.  

When we do, it's pathetic.  It's like a high school graduate coming back to their old junior high to go pick on the new seventh-graders, because they never really learned to be comfortable in their own skin. And Paul's warning is much the same: we are free in Christ from having to keep living in those patterns (patterns we inherited without choosing them, but which we are complicit in because we keep perpetuating them), but when we slide back into the old ways, it's as sad and tragic as refusing to leave our junior-high selves back in adolescence.  We are freed from that, Paul says, but we still live with this tempting impulse to keep running back to it.

That's why Paul finds it necessary to be so stark about things: he sees it in terms of death and resurrection.  Our old selves died in Christ, so when we insist on remaining in those terrible patterns and systems of sin, it's like we're choosing to stay in the grave rather than rising up to new life.  And that is a horrible shame.  It's a waste of a resurrection.

You and I, Paul says, have been given a new life. Already.  The old selves that were so insecure they would attack someone else in order to avoid getting attacked ourselves... those old versions of ourselves could be left behind like our eighth grade locker combination and Trapper Keepers.  We could let those old things die and step into the new life we have been given.  But it will mean that we finally decide we are done with the childish thinking that keeps bringing out the worst in each of us.

When you frame it that way, the choice should be obvious: why would any of us choose to stay in the old ways of death?  Why would any of us choose to stay in junior high school and the immature mindset that goes along with it?  And Paul's proposed answer is, quite simply, "You wouldn't!  So don't keep running back to the old ways and let sin keep getting its clutches into you. You are already freed from having to play by its rules.  Dare to live like that's true!"

So that's our daily struggle.  It means cutting through all the ways we try to present ourselves as nice, well-behaved boys and girls to be honest about the ways we are tempted back into the old ways of greed, selfishness, prejudice, hatred, and complacency.  It means being willing to reject the systems around us all the time--like they are in the air we breathe and the water we drink--in order to step into a new way of being human.  It means daring to look deeper into ourselves to see how we have been complicit in a lot of rottenness, and daring to believe we do not have to continue in those ways.

That's the freedom we have been given. Ours for the taking.  It is the freedom to live like we have been raised from the dead already.  It is the freedom to walk out of the junior-high mentality and never darken those doors again.

Come on. Step out into the light.  Take the hand of a just-beginning-to-recover jerk like me, and let us live like we are new people already.

Lord Jesus, help us to see honestly the ways we have given ourselves over to our worst impulses of self-preservation, so that we can be free for you and free to love all.