Sinners

Monday, March 2, 2026

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Sinners

Lord, great and awesome God,

you who keep your merciful covenant toward those who love you

and observe your commandments!

We have sinned.

Yesterday Margaret and I sat in church awhile after the service finished. Holy Spirit birds flew around my head. After Ray’s prayer – yearning for peace and power to respond to the new war and a mass shooting in Austin on Saturday night, praying with David T over Jesus’ body and blood, seized by Matt’s excitement at the treasures he found in the first two verses of Romans 12 … then singing a song of surrender, I was overwhelmed. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

This has happened before to me, and I hope it’s happened to you too. I remember watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in Springfield with Nancy and two friends the summer of 1967, a week or two after high school graduation. After we left the movie I couldn’t speak, couldn’t re-enter what had been our common world just hours before. When our friends too quickly returned to normal conversation, I would not go with them.

Nancy noticed. She waited with me in the car’s back seat. What did Jesus say about Jonah, and Solomon? “Something greater is here.” My heart strangely warm, thoughts spinning, I was captured in God’s playground of time and space. It’s been decades, and still I feel the upholstery of that car seat against my skin.

For a few days now, I’ve felt more of that, inviting, rushing through me and around me, just beyond reach. Thoughts, images, connections, convictions. Before me beautiful, behind me beautiful, all around me beautiful. Or … not always so beautiful, but it catches me and I catch my breath. Paul in Romans … Matt says … we can’t remember the past, we have very little control over the present, and Paul is begging us, “in view of God’s mercy” to choose the only future that makes any sense, to be transformed (in Greek, metamorphoó).  Reverse what Kafka saw.

On the plane home from Wilmington I watched Sinners, or some of it, skimming some, reveling in the music, fascinated and repelled as vampires and lovers of the blues clashed at midnight. It’s labeled as a horror film. It has won several awards and will probably win some more on March 15. A young black guitar player yo-yo’s back and forth between his father’s pentecostal pleading for his son to come home to Jesus, and … the other way. So what is “sin” anyway?

Oh, I know I’m a sinner. So did Sammie in the film. Both of us “miss the mark.” Missed the mark. Will miss the mark.

Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins.

Remember not against us the iniquities of the past;

may your compassion quickly come to us,

for we are brought very low.

Robert Duvall, Hollywood maverick and not-so-gentle genius of The Godfather and Lonesome Dove, died a couple weeks ago on the Sunday the Sandels celebrated our uncle and aunt’s 196 combined years. Duvall himself was 95. Last week I was ambushed on YouTube by his speech at the end of Get Low, a film which re-imagines the true story of a 1930’s Tennessee hermit who decided to stage a funeral before he died. Just to see what people would say.

I watched, listened. Could not turn my eyes away. Weeping. Sobbing. Like Felix Bush in the film, like Matt said yesterday, I don’t much remember the past, the present is mostly a mystery, but I knew/know/hope-I-remember that giving myself over to God is the only rational choice I have. Preferably every morning. One day at a time.

And sometimes when that light breaks in, I just can’t move. Can barely breathe. Goosebumps everywhere. Matt called it “being born again … AGAIN.”

Let the prisoners’ sighing come before you;

with your great power free those doomed to death.

Then we, your people and the sheep of your pasture,

will give thanks to you forever!

Through all generations we will declare your praise.

 

 

In church these days it’s like I’m a bowling pin, knocked over and set back up again and again by the automatic Brunswick machine, one white guy surrounded in the middle of the rack, and I know that soon the big black ball will knock me over again. Knock us all over actually. Everyone. I’m surrounded by the unmistakable echoes of strikes and spares.

I think of the big Lebowski’s somewhat successful efforts to “abide.” I track down a YouTube scene and unmute my screen. There are the pins falling, Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliott considering things, and Matt, preaching … all of it. At once.

Took me a minute to figure it out. Then I just relaxed and let it roll over me.

Forgive and you will be forgiven.

Give and gifts will be given to you;

a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,

will be poured into your lap.

For the measure with which you measure

will in return be measured out to you.

Jesus said that. Jesus has always said that. And he always will.

(Daniel 9, Psalm 79, John 6, Luke 6)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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