BLOG 5/14/14. FREE TO COME OUT OF HIDING INTO COMMUNITY
What with the evident universal quest after true relationships, there is so much unreality in the actual pathways we seek to find such. We have all kinds of faux relationships, or contrived relationships. The advent of social media enables us to fabricate ‘friends’ on Facebook, and throw out there a persona that may give us some sense of not being isolated, but we know it falls far short of the real thing. To sit down, face-to-face, and engage in a meaningful conversation becomes more and more rare.
Sherry Turkle has written a fascinating study: Alone Together that details her research on this subject, and especially with the advent of robotic pets and robotic friends, who can be programmed to understand our moods and behavior, and to whom we can safely confess stuff that we can’t tell parents or friends. AI (artificial intelligence) is certainly a contemporary phenomenon that can provide such escape from loneliness, but it still enables us to hide from others and so to never know true relationships, or true community.
What if I were to propose that one of the most liberating disciplines we have in creating true relationships and true community—and true freedom—is the confession of sin—of our true, incomplete, broken, failing, self-doubting, falsely proud, boastful, etc. … selves? What if I were to propose that our Christian discipline of the ‘confession of sin’ is one of the most liberating disciplines we can engage in—a discipline that sets us free to have no hiding places, replete with “Keep Out” signs at the door?
I know I’m proposing something that is much larger than this Blog, … but even Alcoholics Anonymous, long ago, recognized that the first step in recovery is for one to acknowledge: “I am a drunk.” Oh, I know that within the church’s liturgy there are the classic confessions of sin (“We have done those things we ought not to have done …” etc.) but, we have reduced even these to something of an expected part of the aesthetic experience of worship, and often performed mindlessly.
I’m proposing here that there is, maybe, a reality therapy in confession that is a hugely liberating act, in which I come again and again to identify with the basic Biblical and Christian presupposition that this whole creation is experiencing an existential brokenness, falseness, capacity and idolatrous capacity to really screw things up—all of us: you, me, society, the whole scene—maybe most of all would be the ‘super-religious’ types who hide behind their ecclesiastical credentials. This whole creation is (as we say within the community of faith): ‘fallen.’
Jesus came to seek and to ‘save’ (big word: save) just such broken, confused, screwed-up folk. He came to call us out of hiding, to call us into new and redemptive relationships—into his New Creation. By his cross he reconciled us to God, so that we are free from the guilt and blight of our sin, but the doorway into that relationship with him is an act called repentance by which we come out of hiding and say to him: “I am broken. I don’t know who I am. I am not self-sufficient. I come to accept your promise of making me and all things new.” Such confession sets us free to be real.
That, which the New Testament calls ‘fellowship’ (Greek: koinonia), is a word that has intimacy and honesty and freedom written all over it. But that koinonia is impossible while we are still in hiding. Pastor Earl Palmer humorously makes the point that the Christian doctrine of total depravity is the great democratizing principle of the New Testament—it puts us all in the same level of honest acknowledgement about our great need, and of God’s liberating love in Jesus Christ. We come out of hiding when we truly come to Christ.
I want to continue this in my next Blog. Stand by.
