Grace Reconciled

Yesterday I chronicled, rather starkly, the moral erosion of the last several decades and in so doing we discovered that the fact so many are willing to excuse Lindsey Clancy’s murderous rampage is not really all that shocking.  But I did not explore what is perhaps the saddest portion of that narrative – the church’s participation in that erosion.  Let’s dive in.

Christianity has many mysteries.  Chief among them is reconciling the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New.  The great division of the Bible separates two very different pictures of the Almighty.  The Old Testament depicts a God of punishment.  Adam and Eve are removed from the Garden.  Saul is removed from the throne.  Israel is sent into exile.  This punitive God is capable of great violence.  Saul loses the throne for failing to follow God’s instruction to kill everyone and everything in a conquered land.  God uses a flood to destroy all mankind save for a single family.  The New Testament paints a very different picture of God.  He is graceful and sacrificial.  He preaches love above all else.  He heals the sick and feeds the poor.  He forgives our sins rather than punishes them.

These pictures are not readily reconciled.  God, I think, likes it that way.  He is so much beyond us that He must be, by definition, mysterious.  But we always try to solve the mystery – and that is where the problem arises.  I think we are supposed to hold the two depictions in tension with each other, acknowledging both, relying completely on neither.  And subsequently understand that God is way beyond our comprehension.  Yet our pride and our ego tells us we can figure it out if we just try hard enough.  And that is where mistakes happen.

In these decades of moral erosion the Protestant church definitely and the Catholic church to a lesser extent, has chosen to focus almost exclusively on the God of the New Testament – The God of love, grace and forgiveness.  It has gone so far as to get oxymoronic. I have heard calls to confessional prayer that proclaim “no shame.”  And yet, if there is no shame, what is there to confess?  We discuss endlessly God’s infinite grace and forgiveness without ever acknowledging that there is something to be forgiven.

People don’t like to hear that they are bad.  Hence the moral erosion we have witnessed.  And as that has happened church attendance sagged, collection plates dried up, pastors lost jobs.  And so many, many churches joined the chorus – singing “Happy, happy, joy, joy” while ignoring the other side of the coin.  Way too many churches became the rich man in the tale of the widow’s mite –  feeding the poor from their bounty, but failing to deal with their own shortcomings in other departments.

And having sacrificed the tension between Old and New Testaments – church has become socially irrelevant.  It no longer has a platform on which to stand to declare moral right from moral wrong.  Church is reduced from the role of societal arbiter of right and wrong to another, mostly anachronistic, expression of the same moral decline that plagues us generally.  Entirely too many churches in the last week or so have wept from Lindsey Clancy’s children and refused to speak about justice in that situation.  All the while declaring themselves agents of God’s justice because their food pantry was open again this week.

God’s justice exists in the tension between the Testaments – not in one or the other.  It is time to restore the tension.  I go to church this morning and pray for the return of that tension.