Someone once said, ‘Show me a fifty year old man who
believes exactly what he believed when he was twenty and I’ll show you a man
who has just wasted thirty years of his life.’ That’s a nugget of truth with
which few would disagree, and yet so many of us interpret changing your mind as
a sign of weakness.
Richard Rohr,
founder and Director of Center for Action and Contemplation makes the
following observation: ‘The Christian life is a matter of becoming all that God
wants us to be.’ And he adds, ‘But the path is more about unlearning than
learning.’
What Rohr appears to be saying is that life is a series of
opportunities to question something we have always assumed was written in stone,
and if it does not stand up to rigorous examination we should have the courage
to reject it. The implication appears to be that we have been mis-taught by our
society’s values, our parents, our education system or our religious leaders,
and our progress along the road of becoming what God wants us to be, is a measured
by our willingness to reject firmly held beliefs. But we don’t like change, we
tend to believe what we believe because we have always believed it. And that is
not good.
Allow me to suggest that we all make a New Year’s Resolution
right now. Unlike the others that involve stopping this or cutting down on
that, this one requires us only to believe and act on something that deep down
we know is true.
For example, let me take you back to the creation story. In
Genesis we are told, ‘God created human
beings in his own image... male
and female he created them.’
Now move forward only two chapters to where the woman is beginning
to doubt what God had done. The tempter said, ‘You will not die (if you eat the forbidden fruit), for God knows that
when you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.’
Most of us miss the point here because our vision is clouded
by arguments about how long God took to create all that was created and how he
did it and the Big Bang Theory and all that angry Richard Dawkins’ nonsense.
The remarkable is buried under the ordinary, for the woman and the man were
already created in God’s image! They were already like him regardless of
whether they ate the forbidden fruit or not! But they both failed to embrace
what was glaringly obvious.
Many of us trudge our weary way through life crushed by a
great weight of guilt because we have been misled by our religious leaders and
the meritocratic world system we inhabit. Regardless of the rhetoric we hear
from many a pious pulpit the truth is that there is little room in religion for
grace: getting what we do not deserve, or mercy: not getting what we do
deserve.
Preachers tend to give with one hand and take back with the
other, but the liberating truth, which when believed will change lives for good
and forever, gives and does not take back. Here it is: ‘He was pierced for our rebellion,
crushed for our sins, beaten so we could be whole and whipped so we could be
healed.’
Let’s take this truth with us into a new year and
we will find new life: if God punished Jesus for my rebellion and sins, will he
punish me as well? I don’t think so, but does that not suggest that I have
already been forgiven? And if already forgiven am I not throwing his forgiveness
back in his face by refusing to forgive myself?
We all woke up this morning with a completely clean
sheet. Write these immortal words on it: There
is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and there is nothing I can do to
make him love me less.
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