Being for More

Last updated on: August 7, 2017 at 12:03 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Being for More 2017-08-07T00:03:40-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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“What did the pastor preach?”

“About sin.”

“What did he say?”

“He was against it.”

So goes the old church joke and there was a point to it: being against sin isn’t much, certainly not much for an entire sermon. Of course, nowadays being against sin seems almost daring, since abusing the poor, killing the unborn, and sexual sin are lauded by different centers of power daily.

Yet if we think back over history for just a minute, we recall that the list of fashionable sins might change (though oppressing the poor seems ubiquitous), but that some elites somewhere urging a new morality is not new. When my grandmother was young, there was scientific racism that mocked our naive belief that all people were brothers and sisters. There was courage in preaching against the sin of racism, but it was not enough.

We need a positive outlook, what the good old King James called a “vision” or we perish.

Where there is no vision, the people perish; but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

The law is God’s alternative way of living in a community of people: the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is defined by God and God is. We worship the “I AM” not merely obey the “thou shalt not.”

This much is obvious and has been said often, but in our approach to ideas, education and culture are vital. As we work to build a school community, we are working to define ourselves by what we are for, are doing, and are called to do, and not so much to what we are against. Safe to say, I am not a follower of John Dewey, but I will not define my teaching by being anti-Dewey.

I love reading, not opposing not-reading. I marvel at great art, not exposing kitsch. Our first response is love, all men and women are family, and only then reluctant opposition. This makes all the difference in the world. We do not wait for some withdrawal, some retreat, some rapture to remove us from the struggle. Instead, we embrace the pain, the ups and downs, and we work to see wisdom, beauty, and joy in the struggle.

We are against sin, but only incidentally because we are for justice.

Recently, I wrote about reclaiming civilization and a good friend questioned what I meant. “Did I mean that all was bad and we had come to fix it?”

No.

We see so much that is good and have come to claim it as our common inheritance as children of God. Fortunately, everyone can own an idea: our reclaiming what we had carelessly cast away (the beauty of ancient hymns) or foolishly condemned (the possibilities in modern forms of music) does not mean they are ours alone, but our shared human inheritance as the children of God.

Tomorrow may come for me or death. If death, then all of the Kingdom finally will be revealed. If not, then I can work to learn, see, build, grow, love something new. The one unerring lesson of my childhood was that the people who were out doing, loving, appropriating the good were jolly folk.

We are against sin: damnable sin. Mostly though we focus on our own sin: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Every so often we must condemn civilizational sin, but only to return to the building of a community of friends, brothers and sisters, jolly chums.

Hurrah!

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