The epistle reading for the second Sunday of Easter was the famous passage from I John: “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins”(I John 1: 8 and 9). I looked at the thick green cross at the front of the church and stood for the gospel. I sat down, swallowing hard, pulling my mind back again and again to pay attention to our pastor’s words about how people who know him would tell us what a sinner he is, and about how God has completely forgiven him. I don’t want to say I have no sin, but my sins are not in my thoughts like they used to be. Should I feel guilty about this?
Sure I say the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” This prayer has blocked terrible, self-destructive thoughts. It has comforted when I couldn’t fall asleep. It has pulled my mind back to center when I’ve walked the dog down the road. I’m told that as we say it we are saying it for the whole world, not just us. (Just this week I ordered The Way of the Pilgrim, a Russian story about a man searching for how to pray without ceasing. Paul Kingsnorth of The Abbey of Misrule has started a book club with this one as the first. He challenged us to read it and review it on our blogs, which seems like a good challenge.)
When I was a young girl, I leaned hard on the word “wretch” in the line “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” Wretch named my deep self-hatred. Confessing a long list of sins came easily. I apologized for breathing.
If I were the only one who’d sinned, I knew Jesus would have died for me. It was my sins that sent him to the cross. I suckled on the doctrine of original sin and hell fire sermons and Jesus bearing God’s wrath on the cross. One of my earliest memories was the image of sin as a black icicle. While my therapists’ eyes took on that deer in the headlights look, I shrugged, chalking it up to hearing how sin was like an arrow that missed its mark. It was winter with clear, glistening icicles dripping from our eaves when I put the two images together.
I cried through high school because I thought I was supposed to hate myself. I heard sermons about how the world, the flesh and the devil were enemies of our soul. I wept for my high school friends to accept Jesus because the preachers said they were hell bound. Looking back, I had the gift of tears, where a person grieves for their sins and the sins of the whole world. I am grateful that my work with therapists came years later. Sometimes the road you walk, even one full of tears, is the road you need to walk.
The long walk toward liking myself began when my boyfriend broke up with me because I was so schooled in chastity I wouldn’t kiss him. So I could weep, without my parents hearing, I walked back to the rock and read my Bible. I could barely stand the cold on my bottom. October had turned bitter. I looked upriver at the colors on the trees. I read Hebrews 4 in my Bible. “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.” A rest. My pastor had given me Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret to read. (Hudson Taylor was a 19th century missionary to China who adopted their customs and clothes, so that his western ways did not impede the preaching of the gospel.) What Taylor wrote, resonated with my spiritual journey. Like me he had been riddled with guilt and wept over his sin. And then he was walking on Brighton Beach and realized that his walk with Jesus wasn’t about guilt, but that we were called to rest in Christ’s finished work.
“In great spiritual agony I wandered out on the sands alone. And there the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God and for this service. I told Him that all responsibility as to the issues and consequences must rest with Him; that as his servant it was mine to obey and follow Him, His to direct and care for and guide me and those that might labor with me. Need I say that at once peace flowed into my burdened heart? I turned homeward with a heart enjoying rest such as it had been a stranger to for months, and with the assurance that the Lord would bless His own work and that I would share in his blessing” (114 Taylor, Moody Press).
Something released in me, not unlike the release of blood during my period. “There remains therefore a rest” (Heb. 4:9). It’s not on me, or my guilt, but on Christ. It’s his life that lives through me. I don’t have to work to please him because I am already forgiven. It was all by faith.
Later I read my Bible, again while sitting on that rock. “I am crucified with Christ…and the life that I now live, I live by the faith of the son of God” (Gal. 2:20)…That little article “of” took the burden of faith off my shoulders. I could rely on Jesus’ faith, on “Lord help my unbelief” for my belief. The long walk away from guilt, from self-hatred began on that rock, in all those tears over H’s decision to ghost me.
These days I cannot say our church’s good Lutheran line in the confession, “we are by nature sinful and unclean.” No, no we are not by nature sinful and unclean. We are made in the image of God. We are so valuable to God he sent Himself as Jesus.
I continue with the rest of the confession which goes somewhat like this: “Most merciful God we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.”
Lest you think I’ve jettisoned the idea that we are nothing but goodness and light, I refer you to Jesus’ story of the wheat and tares, how the field can be a picture for our humanity that is a mix of good grain and wild weeds. One day those weeds will be harvested and thrown into the fire, while all that is good for making bread, is saved. Also, Solzhenitsyn says it best, “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
These days I don’t dig at my sins like I did as a young woman. I don’t spend hours telling God how I am lacking in goodness. I’ve stopped apologizing for being. I say the Jesus prayer often. I am aware of my inadequacy. That second Sunday of Easter, I sat in church and told God I didn’t want to be a liar, but I just didn’t want to muck around in the specifics of how I’ve failed to be the person He had in mind when he made me. He can search out those failings, but if I knew the full extent of my sins, I could not function. If He wants to give me the gift of tears, as He did when I was a young girl, that is up to Him, but they are not something I can conjure. Maggie Ross in The Fountain and the Furnace says, “Tears that are a gift are a sign of willingness to let go, of desire to let go, and the power of God acting in response to the person’s prayer of longing” (44).
When we walked out, we shook our pastor’s hand, thanking him for his compassionate, honest sermon. The air chilled us. I watched the sun settle on the horizon as we drove home. Later that week I read Stephen Freeman’s Glory to God for All Things blog called Passionately Drunk. He quoted St. Isaac of Syria:
“I knock at the door of Thy compassion, Lord: send aid to my scattered impulses which are drunk with the multitude of the passions and the power of darkness.
“Thou canst see me my sore hidden within me: stir up contrition—though not corresponding to the weight of my sins, for if I receive full awareness of the extent of my sins, Lord, my soul would be consumed by the bitter pain from them.
“Assist my feeble stirrings on the path to true repentance, and may I find relief from the vehemence of sins through the contrition that comes of Thy gift, for without the power of Thy grace I am quite unable to enter within myself, become aware of my stains, and so at the sight of them be able to be still from great distraction.”
This ancient saint had said what I had been trying to pray in response to “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” As I watched Morgen walk in circles around me, the wind smacking my cheeks, the sky a beautiful blue, clouds racing across the fields my sins slowly rose to the surface. I lifted them to Jesus. I turned back to the Lord, asking for power to let them go. I dropped them like leaves into the great river of my baptism. I have seen some of them float away. I have even been able to answer my mare’s longing for my company, where before I could not. I remember what John Behr has said, “If we didn’t sin we wouldn’t need Jesus.”
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