Saints and Sinners

Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future

- Warren Buffet, CEO Berkshire Hathaway
(Said regarding pointing blame in middle of the worst of the economic downfall)

I remember being in high school and not quite being a Christian in the sense of I had made my own choice for Christ. At camps we would always hear about those people who had been at the bottom of the spiral and reached up to accept Christ and the sudden and somewhat dramatic shift in life. And I couldn’t identify fully with these stories. The idea of heading in the direction of ‘downward’ just to experience God’s sudden and dramatic grace didn’t seem like a good idea either. I had this strange idea that I ‘needed’ to have an emotional and somewhat spiritual engagement with God in order to be saved, even if I knew I was ‘basically’ a Christian.

Strangely enough that was about 10 years ago and I don’t think I knew the ride I would have since then. For some reason Buffet’s quote above stuck with me as I have kinda been watching the economic stuff in the background of my life. In a sense I realize that I’m not quite a saint, but I still have a past; and that I am a sinner who stands on the brink of a very unknown future. Not just in the sense of where I will get a job, but will there be a denomination that will still exist for me to go into. My adviser for all things Presbyterian told me ‘Think about the Presbytery that you get ordained into, as it could have some long range implications.’

This saddened me.

Mixed into this whole mess is a confrontation with the quote ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner.’ This is something that I used in the back of my head for a decent period of my seminary career. I was confronted with an idea (by a fuller prof) that our sin makes us who we are and to try to separate the two is not only impossible, but also insulting to the person. I realize more that my sins have long shaped the person that I have become and the person who I continue to become. This person has laid up many sacrifices of what I have wanted to say for the sake of love. They have never been easy points to reach in life, but they remain places where I seem to learn more about myself and become more and more able to accept the fact that I am not the judge, but God is.

One of the things I’m learning here in my internship is that God is using the very foolish here to confuse the wise. The unbelieving are coming forward to be baptized. The sinners are placed in charge and the church grows. The ideas that are crazy, above and beyond normal sanity, are the ideas that bring people to follow God and to enter into community. What saddens me is that most of the issues of the Presbyterian Church are on the order of detailed theology, which almost makes me angry. Not in the sense that the issues don’t need discussion, but that we have forgotten the whole mission of the church for the sake of one detail.

Do we spend too much time trying to be saints and burying our sins when we need to embrace both? In trying to become saints ... do we become the worst sinners?