BILLTESKA

The collect for today prays for the grace to forsake our sins. It does not pray that each of us may receive grace to forsake his or her individual sins, but that we may have the grace to forsake our sins. I will not suggest that there is no inner, individual meaning to this prayer, but isn’t it interesting that we usually think that is all it means. Our consciousness tends to be so individualist that our sins seems an obvious reference my own shortcomings and failings (not to mention yours!). But it says our sins, and that is a collective thing. However important it surely is for me to forsake my own individual sins, it is much more important for us to forsake our sins.

Reinhold Niebhur wrote an influential book entitled Moral Man and Immoral Society. I refer to the title only as a good expression of modern consciousness: right and wrong, sin and salvation, are an individual matter. Society is by nature corrupt and irredeemable. The best we can do is to avoid being too much tainted by it. This is a central theme of American Protestantism, alongside its reforming streak. From separatist communities, such as the Amish, to the early fundamentalists, who shunned any political activity, to the later rapturists, who believe that salvation is to be snatched bodily out of the world as an individual, while the rest of society and the world itself is consumed in the wrath of God, redemption has been seen as God’s gift to certain individuals, or separated elect groups, not to the whole society or the whole creation. The latter can, literally, go to hell.

This is by no means the only, nor even the dominant current in our religious history. There is also the reforming streak I mentioned, which sees social improvement as a religious duty, beginning with the abolition of slavery, and eventually extending to the liberation of other oppressed minorities, and the attempt to end all poverty and injustice. This too is American religion, just as authentically American as the over-sexed revival tent preacher. Martin Luther King Jr. is as American as Elmer Gantry. Still, when we hear someone speak of our sins, we are more likely to think of Elmer Gantry’s hypocrisy and sexual predation than of the social sins of racism and injustice. But those are the kinds of sins that interested the prophets, not Elmer Gantry’s zipper problem.

The sins that the prophets warn us to forsake in preparation for the Day of the LORD are sins of social injustice. Ancient apocalyptic writing shares this concern with still more ancient prophecy: the Day of the LORD is about the recreation of the world as a Kingdom of Peace and Justice. The prophets saw it as a restoration of the Golden Age of King David. Baruch exults in his vision of the Jews returning from Babylon to Jerusalem, on a royal road prepared by God. Isaiah sees the LORD Himself walking on that road, prepared by human agency at the call of the One Crying in the Wilderness: YOU prepare His Way. The prophets tended to think in historical terms. What they prophesied was to happen in time and history, ushering in a new age. The apocalyptic writers thought in cosmic terms ~ this world, time, and history was to be swept away, and a whole new creation to take its place.

But in both cases, the events were social and communal, not merely individual. The picture of chosen individuals hovering over the death throes of a damned world on their way to an otherworldly heaven is a strange mixture of ancient apocalyptic imagery and modern individualism. And there is no joy in it. Not for anyone who really loves creation or his fellow creatures. What joy could there be in watching them burn up? But the collect calls us to greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer ~ that is our Liberator. To do so, we must forsake our sins. Not just mine and yours (especially yours), but ours.

To see the coming of the Liberator as anything other than a disaster, we have to forsake our so-cial sins, the structures of oppression, because His mission is to destroy them. That is the nature of Redemption, of Liberation. As a society, we must forsake the structures of oppression, which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. For example, we must repent of our willingness to live easily at the expense of our fellow human beings, and we must repent of our suicidal assault on the planetary life-support systems. If we do not forsake these sins, there will be no joy in His coming.

Because these structures will be destroyed one way or another. Either we will forsake them and dismantle them with all deliberate speed (to quote a great phrase from the lexicon of American reformism), or they will be dissolved in Apocalyptic cataclysm, people fainting with fear and with foreboding for what is coming on the earth. The choice is ours. Either we will heed the prophets’ warnings or not. But one thing is clear to those who are able to listen to John the Forerunner ~ wild-eyed and ragged and disreputable and marginal as he is ~ the time is at hand. The Liberator is on His way.

His winnowing fork is in His hand, to clear His threshing floor, and to gather
the wheat into His granary; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire

This sounds frightful, but it is good news to be greeted with joy by all who will forsake that sin, whose hold on the world He is coming to loose.

# posted by billteska : 2:41 PM