Wednesday, October 14, 2020 (today’s lectionary)
Cain and Abel
Driving and then driving some more, 275 miles through the heart of Arkansas and 200 more into the heart of Texas, we talked about Cain and Abel for awhile, especially Cain. Why did he pretend everything was fine when God confronted him with his sin?
But more importantly, Margaret asked, what about us? How do we respond when we get called out?
Blessed is the man who does not follow the counsel of the wicked, nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent.
I think there are four kinds of sin. Individual sins of commission and omission, and corporate sins of commission and omission.
When someone points out sin (or anything else) to me, I listen when I think they have earned the right to be heard. But the distance between humble description and arrogant judgment isn’t far, so I’m careful when I begin to listen. And that applies to both what I’ve done, and what I have not done. Sometimes this caution runs me into trouble (call it denial) and sometimes it saves me from it (call that good boundaries).
The corporate, or community environment is more complicated. Ron Rolheiser, when he points out in The Holy Longing that we are the body of Christ, also says that the body of Christ absorbs individual sins and shortcomings. The grace of God not only covers all sin, but lends strength to our battle against it. In the embrace of unconditional love, we are safe, but not excused.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
Patience, kindness, generosity,
Faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Against such things there is no law.
That’s the good side of things. Richard Rohr points out the bad side. Because we don’t make our own food or fuel or clothes or virtually anything else, we participate in various slaveries or ecological abuses without even knowing it. This semi-conscious method of slipping freely through life isn’t free at all, and our sin is all the more difficult to stop when we don’t even realize it’s happening. The natural process of noticing my sin, then acknowledging and naming it, confessing it and receiving forgiveness, gets rolled over a cliff. We are all victims in the crash.
You pay no attention to justice and to love for God.
You love the seat of honor,
But you are like unseen graves over which people walk without even knowing it.
As the evening sun blinded nearly all of us driving west on I30 through Dallas, rush hour not quite over, Margaret dialed in to a zoom conference on the Enneagram. I pretended like I could see, just as all the other drivers were pretending too. That we didn’t all end up in a crushing mass collision is a vast miracle.
This seems to me an exceptionally clear analogy to our experience of corporate sin. The grace of God rescues us from an impossible situation which we haven’t exactly created, but with which we willingly cooperate. And then we think nothing of it.
In Enneagram language, what does that look like? I want to just call us all idiots and find a place to pull over and sleep. But I’m a 7 and Margaret’s a 5, and we have our own ways of finishing things.
My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord.
I know them, and they follow me.
Our daughter Andi didn’t expect to join the zoom meeting, which originated at her own church in Austin (Grace Covenant), but a change of plans allowed Andi to be in the same breakout group with her mom. This is the first time in many years they’ve had the chance to participate together in a women’s faith conference. I think that made them both very happy.
(Galatians 5, Psalm 1, John 10, Luke 11)
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