June 3, 2005
Sin
Pentecost 3/5A
Jesus said, “For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9.13)
There’s an ironic similarity in Jesus’ description of his mission as he understood it and a cartoon by Peter Arno of New Yorker Magazine and Addams Family fame. Arno, in one of his frequent send-ups of the clergy, crafted a scene showing two young priests seated in a sumptuous, walnut-paneled study, sipping brandy and smoking cigars. One was saying to the other, “Do you ever wonder where we’d be were there no sin?”
Jesus knew for sure that his presence and vocation was not God’s reward for a virtuous people. He knew, as well, that it was our sin that called God’s hand for our redemption. But sometimes I wonder whether that fact is all that clear for us. If what I hear so often in church circles, we put a lot of stock by our own righteousness. We call it orthodoxy and we practice it at length by our pretentious exclusiveness. How much, indeed, do we enjoy the benefits, the prestige, the walnut-paneled study, the Pharisee’s pride of believing ourselves the ecclesiastical conquering heroes. And how painfully Jesus must weep, as he once said, like a mother hen over our unstewardly lack of attention to our own Jerusalems.
“For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
This simple phrase drives a stake through the heart of the self-righteous piety in both church and state in our time. We churchers should know better. But when the state starts talking piety, we can rightly sense the odor of a deceptive opportunism. When will we lament — as surely does Jesus — over what has come of our prophetic mission to indict such smug righteousness wherever we find it, even — and especially — where we find it among ourselves?
We are a separated people. The power of our sin is that it pushes us away from the world, from society, from the church, from nature, from each other, and ultimately from ourselves.
It is difficult to conceive of a time when that gap has ever been wider. It drives a wedge between us and our government. It decimates the churches and renders impotent any possibility of a prophetic ministry. It increasingly spins the nations of the world apart from any possibility of a mutual trust whose communal energy might better serve all humankind.
Sex separates us, but only to the degree it does not draw us closer as humans, but merely unites bodies and leaves them empty as a consequence. Whether we’re religious or not, our dwelling on our differences only widens the gap and decreases any prophetic presence. The separation resulting from our unilateral arrogance as a nation speaks for itself of its sinfulness.
Jesus’ call to us in our separation is to help restore us to ourselves. And doing so, to enlist us in his call to all. As for the righteous, well…