All right. This has bugged me enough over the past several days that I’m gonna write about it. Yep. (And it’s not even the thing I’m “stewing” about as mentioned in a recent post. That’s still a-stewin’ and a-brewin’.)
Two things of late. First, I heard this from a Christian acquaintance: “Do we really have to keep hearing that we’re all sinners?” Okaaay …. Maybe I should’ve said something, but I’m actually trying to keep my mouth shut more …. which is why, I guess, I have a blog. Seems there’s only so much I CAN keep my mouth shut. Anyway, the comment sorta stuck in my craw.
The second craw-sticking comment came on the heels of my recent post, “some straights and some homos.” The comment was posted over at The Anchoress, not here, and in it, the author — who I think rather missed the point of the post — asserted the idea that, after 2,000 years, the notion that we’re all sinners is a “fairly banal” one.
Am I crazy? Is something wonky and wrong here? (Or maybe it IS just me?)
Is the very reason for which Christ died, robbing sins, shattering history, becoming a bore, a “no biggie”?
“Yeah, yeah. Jesus died the most brutal, torturous death on the cross for my sins, actually IN MY PLACE and …. uhh …. whatever …. (*yawwwn*) …. hey, what’s on TV?”
Are we as Christians so numbed and so succumbed to our culture that our Savior’s sacrificial death is becoming just a tiresome, quaint tale to tell our children? A story of no greater import than the dreary old bedtime variety told to induce sleep? Are we becoming so slyly yet thoroughly seduced by the world’s siren call of self-sufficiency that the truth of our sinfulness is an offense — even to us?
Certainly there are times in this Christian life when we feel we’re alone in the landscape, forgotten by the Lord, but that’s never the truth. Certainly there are times when we become achingly weary of the journey, our hearts fainting, our feet stumbling, our minds crying, “O God, I can’t do it anymore!” But please tell me we can’t truly behold our Lord’s bruised, battered body, our sins heaped upon it, with dulled hearts and glazed eyes.
We are frail. We can be tired forgetters and petty forsakers. WE can be banal. But not our Lord, His precious sacrifice, or the reasons for it. The whole world stands on wobbly legs of sinfulness, united in its need of a Savior. Our sin was our lost cause, but Jesus Christ was its champion.
In the wake of the tsunami in South Asia, I’ve wondered how many of the over 150,000 dead had even heard the beautiful, blessed, banal truth of our sinfulness and the Savior who died for it.
And I’ve wondered how many of them, in their roiling, thunderous deaths, surrendered as lost causes, never knowing their Champion.