I was 15 when my brother Chris came home from the Navy. He had brought all of us little presents and whatnot and a day or two later we were alone and he was like, "Oh dude, check this out." and he introduced me to his collection of Playboys. To a lonely young man, they were like heroin, drawing me to them over and over even as my disgust with myself grew, eventually the feelings of helplessness and loss of control caused me to throw them out just to get a little bit of peace. And that peace lasted more or less until I moved into a college dorm with a broadband internet connection.
A Psalm of David. To bring to remembrance.
O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your wrath,
Nor chasten me in Your hot displeasure!
For Your arrows pierce me deeply,
And Your hand presses me down.
There is no soundness in my flesh
Because of Your anger,
Nor any health in my bones
Because of my sin.
For my iniquities have gone over my head;
Like a heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds are foul and festering
Because of my foolishness.
I was raised very strictly Baptist, and 23 years of addiction to porn has brought me all of the guilt, and shame, and secrecy, and self-loathing that anybody is likely to find in this life. I threw the magazines away so long ago, but I can't throw away every computer, every cell phone that I find myself alone with. And no efforts to throw away the part of me that is drawn to what I profess to hate have been very successful.
I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly;
I go mourning all the day long.
For my loins are full of inflammation,
And there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am feeble and severely broken;
I groan because of the turmoil of my heart.
Lord, all my desire is before You;
And my sighing is not hidden from You.
My heart pants, my strength fails me;
As for the light of my eyes, it also has gone from me.
My loved ones and my friends stand aloof from my plague,
And my relatives stand afar off.
Those also who seek my life lay snares for me;
Those who seek my hurt speak of destruction,
And plan deception all the day long.
But I, like a deaf man, do not hear;
And I am like a mute who does not open his mouth.
Thus I am like a man who does not hear,
And in whose mouth is no response.
For in You, O Lord, I hope;
You will hear, O Lord my God.
For I said, “Hear me, lest they rejoice over me,
Lest, when my foot slips, they exalt themselves against me.”
We were always taught that Christians can rule over and conquer sin, and when we can't we are left lower than low. Depression has lived in the backs of our minds for so long, ready with just a nudge to take over us. And all of the inspirational racket the church makes has never changed any of that for me. If I were to define addiction, one part of the definition would have to be that the addiction is stronger than you are. You are bound to it, and all of the people that say you can overcome with willpower, and when the church tells this lie they add in the Spirit like the pixie dust that makes Peter Pan fly if he just thinks the right thoughts. We just have to try harder, love God more than the sin and the self, do this, do that, and you will be free. But I've been at this game long enough not to believe that anymore. How many times do you think I will go around the same circle expecting to wind up somewhere different?
For I am ready to fall,
And my sorrow is continually before me.
For I will declare my iniquity;
I will be in anguish over my sin.
But my enemies are vigorous, and they are strong;
And those who hate me wrongfully have multiplied.
Those also who render evil for good,
They are my adversaries, because I follow what is good.
Do not forsake me, O Lord;
O my God, be not far from me!
Make haste to help me,
O Lord, my salvation!Psalm 38
Mea Culpa-My sin, my fault. Calvin said that whatever you feel, whatever is in your heart, the Psalmist has felt it and found a way to put it into words. And maybe that is the great power of the Psalms, not their beauty or their uniqueness but their plainness and their commonness, their simple humanity. Their power is the power to make us no longer alone, to let us see that at least one other person has felt what we feel and stood where we stand, and you know he did, David did, come out of it ok. The Psalms descend into the miserable depths of the human soul, and they don't back away, they don't run off, they stay there, they live there unless and until God, through faith brings them out the other side. And it's this common humanity, this lowliness, this refusal to draw back from humiliation that is the touchstone of the truly Christian.
The seed of all sin, the first lie is "You shall be like God". If the truth is that God is way up there and we are way down here, then the lie works in two ways, it raises us up, at least in our own estimation, above common humanity, which is why Augustine says that all sin comes from pride. And secondly, it brings God down, our desire to close the gap between ourselves and God causes us to see Him as less than He is, causes us to believe like Adam and Eve that He is holding out on us, that He has good things that He doesn't plan to give us, which is why Calvin says that all sin is unbelief. Pride makes us see ourselves as more than we are, makes us despise humanity as something beneath us, while it actually erodes our humanity. Unbelief, lack of faith, makes us see God as less than He is and do all we can to injure His Divinity.
For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, “The man who does those things shall live by them.” But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down from above) or, “ ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.” from Romans 10The classic Protestant theory of preaching is to preach Law and then Gospel. To use the Law to "afflict the comfortable", to make us feel our sinfulness, and then use the Gospel to "comfort the afflicted", to make us feel His salvation. My criticism of this is that we have plenty of Law inside of us, our sense of our own failures is never far away, guilt and shame are the stories of our life. When you see someone doing everything they can not to think about something, it's not really that necessary to remind them of it. On the other hand, the Gospel is never inside of us. It is always strange and alien, it always comes from outside as a shock and the Glorious Invasion of the Return of the King. That is the only way that the Good News can still be news after 2000 years and good news to people who have lived with it their entire lives, by always being strange to us. There is no little voice inside of us saying, "You are forgiven. You are free. God Himself has taken up your cause." There is only the proclamation from outside, "I baptise you.", "I absolve you", "This IS my body, broken for You."
In our pride, we despise humanity, which we see as beneath us. We have nothing but contempt for the weakness and foolishness which really are, and always will be, our defining features. We despise the commonness of bread and wine and death, which are really the tokens of our humanity, which is what we truly despise. But to Christ, and in Christ, humanity is become a chosen vessel and a royal priesthood, not by becoming something other than what it always has been, not by changing into something more than human, but by His glorious Choice, by His bare and solitary election to be human, to be weak, to eat and drink and die. Because He has chosen to come to us in the things that we have rejected, we have rejected Him.
That means that all of our attempts to "draw nearer to Christ", are actually more of the same old shit. Our spirituality remains a rejection of our own humanity, which is the only thing that we have in common with Christ. God in Heaven was too high for us so we tried to snatch Him down. God in the manger and the grave is too low for us so we try to pull Him up to an acceptable moral altitude. But the "Word of Faith" latches on to His humanity, His humiliation, His lowliness and so comes to terms with our own sinfulness, our own humanity and this is the new thinking, the new mind which is real repentance.
A movement toward Christ must always be a movement toward our own humanity. It is a rejection, a repentance of our upward striving, however spiritual we may believe that to be. Our objective is the God in the Manger, the God walking in sandals laughing and crying, hungry and thirsty, lonely and tired, loving and frustrated, the God who is happily among His friends and the God who is betrayed and tried in a kangaroo court. So, what is the movement to Christ? Maybe the simplest way to describe such a move is to consider how it differs from religion. Religion always aspires upward, to become increasingly removed from ordinary life and thus closer to God In Heaven. But drawing nearer to Christ makes us closer to other people not further away. Every religion is esoteric, which is to say that to move deeper into the religion involves obtaining hidden, secret knowledge that those at lower levels do not possess, that may even contradict the beliefs which are openly taught. On the other hand, what is first taught In Christianity is the sum total of the whole and those who think that they have progressed are advised to hold the beginning of faith unchanged, and return to their first love. The difference between the experienced saint and the novice is not that they have a different or larger creed but that they have more thoroughly internalized the creed we all share. Growth in Christ is not knowing new things but taking the original ground of faith and integrating it more deeply into our lives.
So, we know where we are, we are at Mea Culpa, I am the guilty one, it is my fault. What will take us away from that, who will deliver us from this body of sin? It is not some new stronger faith, not some will more impervious to temptation, not some strategy or trick, not some new knowledge, not some upwelling of love for God or one another. It is to remain at and return to the beginning, the Creed. To simply believe in the forgiveness of sins.
