Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
Even Those Things we may Perceive as our
Good Work Need the Umbrella of God's Grace
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, March 2001
The old prayer book prayed that God would "prevent us in all our
doings." Now we pray that God’s grace would go before and
follow us. As Lent comes, these words are on my mind, because I
have nowhere else to turn if I take the season seriously. If this
is a time to be serious about sin in our lives, grace needs to
be the framework. That is because in one sense, there is no such
thing as a clean slate.
You see, I had hoped that there would be a seamless transition
from the cocksureness of youth to the quiet wisdom of age. I seem
to find myself much too old to be cocksure and too young to be
quietly and calmly wise. What seems to lie between the two, if
the latter is in the cards at all, is a wide desert of stocktaking
and reflection, and I keep walking into cactus.
It is shocking to find that things I was proud of twenty years
ago I now recognize as sins of arrogance or cowardice; other things
that seemed good at the time now appear to have been expressions
of gross stupidity, inexperience, or just not getting it. It is
painful, of course, to have this feeling about similar mistakes
made last week. It is much worse to discover that important parts
of my story, memories I may have cherished, were blunders.
Many of my sins are in a sense well-intentioned. Trying to change
people I care about is one of my biggest pitfalls, and I suspect
I am not the only spouse, parent, or leader who has this weakness
from time to time. In my actions and those of others, I have learned
that when micro-management is taking place, the devil is not far
away. If it sounds like nagging or control-seeking, it probably
isn’t love.
No doubt, ten years from now, I will have a different perspective
on aspects of my present life and behavior, and perhaps even discover
that I made some lucky guesses along with the occasional anxious
caving in to the lower nature.
Nonetheless, there still is no such thing as a clean slate in
the sense of ever thoroughly knowing ourselves and repenting of
all our sins. That is why in some traditions we confess all those
sins we "cannot now remember."
This inability to know ourselves accurately is a thought expressed
over and over in the Psalms. It means that we do not think of our
lives as "pretty good," with the balance covered by God’s
grace. The truth is rather that we rest in God’s grace, period.
The slate is clean only because God has called it clean in Jesus
Christ. If this were not true, nobody would have the courage to
take any risks.
The reality of that observation caught me when I was rethinking
those items of twenty years ago, and realized that some things
that I had considered steps forward actually harmed some people.
Even those things we may perceive as our good works need the umbrella
of grace. Again, if we could not depend on God’s grace to
go before and follow after us, who would dare to try anything at
all new?
Again, I share these somber thoughts as encouragement to go more
deeply into the Lenten journey. Uncomfortable as self-examination
sometimes is, there is nothing to fear: even our good deeds are
covered by God’s grace in Jesus Christ. We sometimes fear
to look closely at certain episodes in our lives because we do
not think we can stand the pain of seeing how wrong we have been
or how much we have complicated other people’s lives. The
truth is that once we see things and name them for what they are,
the worst is over, and we can hear again those words Jesus spoke, “Indeed,
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but
in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe
in him are not condemned.”
Have you ever been in a situation where the last thing you were
going to do was admit you were wrong, even about something trivial?
As we increasingly understand how much God loves us at our worst,
we have increasingly less to defend or deny – more freedom
to admit that we are wrong and to get about the business of opening
our hearts to change.
This newspaper should arrive in your mail very close to Ash Wednesday.
I hope that each of us receives the Lenten call to self-examination
and repentance not as a bore or burden, but as a opportunity to
enter more fully into the life God wants to give us. Knowing that
Christ is with us in mercy and grace gives us the courage to face
ourselves and let God lead us to new maturity.
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