The sin that dare not speak its name

Guest post by anonymous
I have asked Byron for permission to remain anonymous since I fear the backlash (personal and official) that may occur if I put my name to this post.

There is a grave sin openly celebrated in our nation (perhaps especially in Sydney) that makes me feel queasy. At certain times of year - and this is one of them - its advocates feel they can come out of the closet and proudly flaunt their unfortunate condition. Criticism is difficult to raise in polite company, especially amongst educated people. To speak out is considered ignorant at best, hate-filled at worst. Yet the Bible is clear and so we must be too. It would be cruel to remain silent.

This perversion is aggressively defended by highly organised and well-funded lobby groups. Some political parties treat it as a normal and desirable pattern of life, and most teach it is necessary to at least tolerate it. I know that every political party has strengths and weaknesses and that no party is perfect, but I still struggle to understand how a Christian can in good conscience vote for any party that openly and brazenly supports a sin so roundly and straightforwardly condemned in the Bible.

Advocates want to teach our children to embrace it and indeed in many schools it is put forward as perfectly natural, even necessary for a well-functioning society. I personally know of parents who have had the courage to question the ideology being taught in our classrooms and who, as a result, have subsequently been slandered and ostracised - or perhaps worse, condescendingly patronised as backwards and ignorant.

From my study of history, I realise that this abomination has been tolerated by the elite of some societies, but I am not aware of any civilisation that has embraced it so wholeheartedly as ours.

It was not so long ago that the church's teaching of such things carried more weight and a man would have been ashamed to admit such desires in public. Parents would have warned their children against it with serious and hushed voices. The tables are now turned and it is those of us who still hold to the conservative position embraced by the church for centuries who are shunned. I was sickened to discover that is possible to buy children's books that celebrate what ought to be anathema.

And worst of all, many churches now overlook members who ought to be disciplined - preferring perhaps to avoid controversy - or even teach inclusion of this most egregious wrong, claiming that the cultural conditions of the biblical authors blinkered their vision, that they had not seen the great good that could result from accepting such desires as part of God's blessing upon humanity.

Don't get me wrong; there is such a thing as natural and healthy desire. But not every desire is healthy. Some are simply corruptions in which we mistake our true needs for manufactured false wants. Whether cursed with corrupt genes or seduced by an iniquitous lifestyle I cannot say, but those ensnared in wickedness are not to be despised. They are to be pitied and helped, not attacked. We must try, as the saying goes, to love the sinner while hating the sin. Let us remember that none of us are without fault. I am sure they make all kinds of positive contributions to society in other ways. And they are not beyond repentance. With the help of God's Spirit, they can begin afresh and discover healing.

What am I talking about? What is the sin that dare not speak its name? I am referring, of course, to the love of money, which is a root of all kinds of evil. Tolerance is cruelty. Repentance is possible. Healing is promised.

On the blame game

Brad also has an insightful reflection on the fallout from the recent tragic shooting in Arizona.

Christian tradition has never been content to leave the blame for sin at the feet of the sinner alone. Sin is not simply something that each of us as individuals choose for ourselves; it is a disease we inherit, a poisoned air we all breathe both in and out. While the shooter is not excused or exonerated by such considerations, ruling out any reflection upon the context within which this assault occurred is short-sighted.

Who is a child? II

A few weeks ago, I began a new three part series hoping to reflect upon the theological assumptions behind parenting. Although it’s taken me a while, today I return to that series with my second post. A third will complete the sketch at some point in the future. My first post argued that a child is a a precious gift from the Father of all and a member of the community of creation.

A brother or sister for whom Christ died
If children are a gift from the one who is Father of us all, then they are also brothers and sisters with us in the same family. Our children are also our siblings. Although they may be younger siblings, they are nonetheless full members of God’s family and in that sense our equals. They belong within God's community as much as any adult and they are as welcome to approach God as the rest of us. Jesus said, “Let the children come unto me” - and woe to those who would turn them away. Children are therefore not proto or potential Christians, but can be welcomed from birth as those who are loved and welcomed by God. And in this, they are in the same position as everyone: we all only love because God first loved us. Our loving is always learned from a prior experience of receiving love.

Although it is a much disputed issue in some circles, this is the theological basis for the ancient and widespread Christian practice of baptising children. While their confession of faith might not yet be explicit, they are nonetheless already enfolded in God’s love, included in his promise and welcomed by Christ.

And God’s love is manifest to all through the death of Christ on our behalf. And this death was for all, and so also for children. There is a widespread belief in contemporary society concerning the primordial innocence of children. Yet this Romantic conception is relatively novel and only became popular during the Victorian period. If Christ died for the sins of all, then he also died for the sins of children. They are just as much in need of salvation and healing as the rest of us. Traditionally, this has been expressed in the doctrine of original sin. Despite much confusion, this teaching basically claims that we all begin in a broken situation, with divided hearts and amongst a fractured world. Even before children are able to express any kind of conscious or deliberate rebellion, they are born and raised in patterns of behaviour that dishonour God and diminish life. This teaching can be unhealthily overemphasised, but without it, our conception of children will be dangerously naïve.

An image-bearer called into service of neighbour
Like the rest of us, the young need to be taught how to live. To act naturally no longer comes naturally. It is only through repentance and humility that children (or any of us) come to learn what it means to be human. And when we stop trying to fly, we might learn how to walk. Indeed, the metaphor of walking is used repeatedly in the holy scriptures as an image of how we live. For those of us who seek to walk in the true and living way of Christ, learning how to live means learning to take up our cross and follow him. As Christ was the image of God, giving us a picture of God’s love and generosity, his gentleness and patience, his grace and truthfulness, so we are to mirror Christ and so also present an image of godly character to the world.

But what can it mean for children to be bearers of the divine image? Jesus said that the rule of God belonged to children, and that unless we become like children, we can never enter it (Matthew 18.3; 19.14). Again, it is not their alleged innocence or purity that we are to emulate, far less their ignorance, and not even their curiosity. To be a child is to be dependent; and children mirror to us the deeper truth that applies to us all: we all rely on resources beyond ourselves. Not one of us is self-sufficient. No one is a self-made woman or man. We have all received our existence from others and our life is lived for others. Ultimately, we have all received our lives from our heavenly Father and it is towards him that we are oriented. And so, to become a child in order to receive the kingdom of heaven means that God’s rule is acknowledged by those who give up the project of making themselves something and recognise the limited scope of their agency and responsibility.

Yet children are also to grow up. There is a way of embracing one’s limitations that is irresponsible and seeks to escape from the tasks placed before us, that uses our relative impotency as an excuse. Children need to learn and grow and become more than they presently are, to delight in new experiences and gradually to shoulder new (though still limited) responsibilities. To be mature is better than being immature. But if we listen to Jesus when he tells us to become like children, we also learn that part of maturity is recognising that I am not yet mature, that I still have room to grow, new responsibilities and possibilities to embrace.

And so we raise our children as equal siblings in God’s family. And we raise them as those who share the same vocation of mirroring God’s love. To grow in the capacity to give and receive love is what it means for a child to flourish. And we raise them aware of our continuing immaturity and the perpetual openness and ongoing repentance required of us all as we seek to grow up together.
See here for the first post and here for the third and final post in this series.
First image by JKS.

Jesus: friend of sinners

Church: a place for broken people

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Christ Jesus? Thus, the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by the one Word and Deed which really binds us together--the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 15-17.

Jesus was not ashamed to share company with tax collectors and prostitutes; he was called "the friend of sinners" and invited national traitors to join his renewal movement (Mark 2.13-17). If we would eat with Jesus, we too become friends with the friend of sinners and are revealed as those who are sick, in need of a physician. The company Jesus keeps is not with those who believe themselves perfect, or superior, or pure, but with those who know they need such a friend. The church is a place for broken people.

With whom do you eat?
Ten points for guessing the Sydney church building.