"You are a sinner but you are saved" undercuts the Gospel

The faith “formula” many of us have heard goes something like this:

1. Everyone is a sinner. We all fall short and we need salvation.

2. The consequence of sin is death and so since we are sinners we all deserve to die.

3. The death of Jesus Christ paid the price of the world’s sin…

4. And so, anyone who confesses Jesus Christ and places their trust in him is saved from eternal death because Jesus died in your place.

It is a tidy formula and there is little here that Christians would call into question. Some quibble about what the death of Jesus really accomplishes, and still others argue about the different atonement theories. Some progressives insert a step before step one above by saying something like, ‘before there was original sin, there was original blessing.”

In the end, most Christians that I encounter (of all sorts of leanings) share the Christian story as moving from sin to salvation, from sinner to justified. You are a sinner but you are saved. The problem is that this story undercuts the power of the Gospel because of the “but'“.

Ask any human you know about what it is like to hear a “but” in a conversation and you will hear a common refrain, “nothing someone says before the word but really counts.” It is why managers and parents are taught to avoid the “compliment sandwich” - giving someone a complement then provide a point of critique. People do not hear the complement and only hear the critique. It does not matter what was said before the ‘but’ because it does not matter in the mind.

And so, back to the common salvation formula: You are a sinner but you are saved. We don’t hear that we are sinners and only hear that we are saved. While this may be good news to our egos, it is not the Good News of Jesus Christ. The Good News of Jesus Christ is more akin to what Luther suggested, “Simul Justus et peccator” - Justified and Sinner.

In this just as simple formula, the but is removed and the two positions are made equal. You and I are justified AND sinners. Secondly, notice that in the common telling, the humans are the first actors - humanity sinned. Being justified and sinner proclaims that it is God who is the first actor. Even before you were aware of it, before you acted, God acts. In the Methodist tradition we say this is prevenient grace - grace that goes before you are aware of it.

But the most potent aspect of being justified and sinner is that it is not good news to the ego but it is Good News in Jesus Christ. This way of seeing God’s grace means that you are justified, you are forgiven, you are made right by God AND still you are a sinner. Name any other relationship in the world like that. Betcha can’t. Humans build our relationships on the premise that we expect each other to become less and less of a sinner, problem, immature jerk. And that the future of the relationship is at stake if you do not “get better”.

The Good News, the Gospel News of Jesus Christ, says that God’s work justifies, redeems and forgives - no matter what! And when we come to see there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God (not even sin), then we interact with the world and with God differently. We no longer look to please out of fear, rather we are pleased to look through fear.

You are a sinner but you are saved is a very human formulation. Any parent will say this to their child. It pleases the ego to hear this.

You are justified and a sinner is revolutionary and only the imagination of the divine could consider this as a way to the death of the ego and the resurrection of a new creation.

I Am Not Good Enough To Be Anything Else

There are a lot of reasons to be Christian, but there is only one reason that I have heard from another person that I deeply resonate with. She said, “I am Christian because I am not good enough to be anything else.”

I am too emotional to be a stoic. I am not very disciplined in my logic to be a philosopher. I am too jittery to be a Zen Buddhist. I am too theistic to be an atheist. I am too angry at injustice to be a hippy. I am too ignorant to be a social justice warrior. I am too privigleged to be voice from the margins but not famous enough to be a leading voice from the center. I am too unsure of myself to be a life coach and too hesitate to be a leader. I suffer from imposter syndrome most days and on the other days my head is larger than a balloon in a parade. I am too clean to be a shepherd and too dirty to be a priest. I am too happy to be a pessimist but not Pollyanna enough for optimism. I like to be a realist but find that I am not practical enough but still not intellectual enough to be thought leader. I don’t spell well and have all sorts of bouts and fits with grammar.

I have learned about many different religions and am just not good enough to make the grade.

I am not good enough to be anything else and so I give thanks for Jesus Christ who gives mercy and grace in more abundant ways than I could imagine. Christianity is the last best hope that I have to belong with others, discover God and receive Good News.

Maybe this is where Christian preachers fail. We have been preaching a gospel of striving, achieving and success and few people are good enough for that news. The Good News is that Christianity is full of sinners, losers, failures. Or as I like to call them, people like me.

If you are good enough to be something else, good on you. If you are not, then you might be the best Christian.

Yes, Productivity is not Working

There is a fantastic article called “Productivity is not Working” by Laurie Penny. Take time to read it here.

Penny suggests that so many of us are addicted to the treadmill of our work lives, not because it takes us anywhere but only because it is comfortable and known:

This is how most of my peers have experienced the modern economy. We were told that if we worked hard, we would be safe, and well, and looked after, and the less this was true, the harder we worked.

The idea that hustling can save you from calamity is an article of faith, not fact—and the Covid-19 pandemic is starting to shake the collective faith in individual striving. The doctrine of “workism” places the blame for global catastrophe squarely on the individual: If you can’t get a job because jobs aren’t there, you must be lazy, or not hustling hard enough. That’s the story that young and young-ish people tell themselves, even as we’ve spent the whole of our brief, broke working lives paying for the mistakes of the old, rich, and stupid. We internalized the collective failures of the ruling class as personal failings that could be fixed by working smarter, or harder, or both—because that, at least, meant that we might be able to fix them ourselves.

Penny comes to the obvious conclusion that “the cult of productivity doesn’t have an answer for this crisis. Self-optimizing will not save us this time…”

Really, you should read the article.

While Penny’s article ends with a word of hope, I would like to offer what might be the Good News hidden in the title.

There are several ways to read this title (“Productivity is not Working"). One way is to say that being productive in the traditional economic sense is not helping right now. There may be a day in the future when we can all be “productive” again, but today is not that day. To put it another way, it is saying that “productivity isn’t working”. Like the refrigerator that isn’t working, in time we can fix it and it will work again.

Another way to read the title is that is productivity equals (is) not working. But how can this be? How can productivity BE not working? This is the mystery of grace in the world. If we want to gain our life, we have to loose it. The only way that God can produce fruit (be productive) in our lives is when we are not working. When we step aside and realize that we cannot save the world. When we submit to the reality that all our works can never fill the deep desires of our hearts and souls. That we will be “restless until we rest in thee.”

You may be tempted to think that what this suggests that the Good News is to live a lazy life of not doing anything. This is the false choice given to us by the soul-sucking economy - we either are working or we are lazy. We are either striving or we are abdicating. We are either growing or we are dying. These are all false choices because there is another way to life - not by working and not by being lazy but by receiving.

We have such a cult of productivity that even today some of the “best” leaders of our time are encouraging us to use this time to think through how we can be better and more productive in the future. These liturgical sermons from the priests of productivity are not new. We have heard them before. And for many of us, we build our lives around their gospel. As Penny says, “There is nothing counterrevolutionary about keeping busy.” There is something that is counterrevolutionary and that is by receiving the Gospel that productivity is not working.

Which can only mean that God is.

The Day There Was No News, Was Good News

Friday, April 18, 1930 is an interesting little tidbit of history, because of the 8:45pm BBC news cast. The story goes that the voice came over the radio and announced the following newscast, “There is no news.” Then piano music played for the next fifteen minutes. No news. Not a single bit of news.

If you are a Christian church calendar savant, you will know that April 18, 1930 is anything but a “no news” day. It is the day with the best news.

April 18, 1930 was Good Friday.

On the day in the church year when we recall the love of God forgiving the worst humankind had to offer, the BBC said, “There is no news.”

Of course there is no going back to a time when a voice would say, “There is no news.” News organizations fill every moment with a talking head, peddling a politics of grievance, outrage and victimization. However, even on April 18, 1930, one of the largest platforms in the world overlooked that there was in fact GOOD news that very day. It is a shame they missed the story.

Surely today we would not miss the same story. Would we?