Where There Is No Sin
Funny this … it comes a year after my last crisis of faith.
For me, there are few places I retreat … places where there is no sin … places where there is only beauty, that watermark of God’s Divine Being and Perfection. My parents showed me nature – mountains, streams, woods, animals – and taught me music. I didn’t realize any of this until tonight while listening to U2.
The song You Can’t Make It On Your Own climaxes with the following lyrics:
Can you hear me when I Sing,
You’re the reason I sing
You’re the reason why
The opera is in me…
It’s really sweet lyrically and musically because the entire song is about the strife and tension between Bono and his father, but here … this is the first affirmation … non-accusal … a heart felt thank you. This is the place that Bono’s father has shown Bono where there is no sin … the place that Bono cannot escape the love his father … the place where Bono ever knows that he is indebted to his father and so cannot ever leave his father alone.
Beauty is not to be horded: it is meant in its being to be shared. So it is that in a world where there is sin, it is not enough that we may be satisified in the pursuit to attaining to merely not sinning – to believe otherwise is the mistake (and sin) of the scribes and Pharisees. If it were only and ever about not sinning, God would not need to manifest Himself as part of the world … because God’s perfection by definition is undeniable. So if God makes Himself part of the world to be known undeniably by the world, then there has to more to it than just demonstrating His Perfection.
And what it is, is Love: to take the beauty you know, inside and out, to others. To merely not sin is to make a person’s concern beyond himself, at first glance, unimportant. But what it truly means to not sin is to love and love unconditionally. And when you love, you don’t love selectively and partially. You don’t go through the motions to fulfill a requirement. You don’t hold back, keeping some beauty for yourself or keeping beauty from some others. You give it all up … in your home … in the grocery store … at work … where angels fear to tread … the very heart of the den of your enemies … on a cross … because that’s the only cure to sin – to love it out, to take beauty everywhere as you can. Without fear, without hesitation, without doubt, you go, you share … you say, “Yes,” against the odds … in hopes that people will accept that cure and in turn begin themselves to love. It is necessary to have the hope that each and every person can truly, freely say,”Yes,” or else love, again, loses its meaning.
Christ’s invitation to and atonement on the cross is not offered for a few. As much as He is the All in All, He offers His All to all … or else it’s meaningless … Love is something a good deal smaller and finite than what I believe it to be.
And so, I find myself, wondering how and why I got from Bono, to love, to sin, to salvation. And what it is, is this: I’ve been missing what it means to love … to love as Christ/God loves. I have until now thought of “loving” as something I do to others … but it’s more organic than that. Bono’s father loved Bono and so took him to the opera. My parents loved me and so took me into nature. God loved us, breathed on us, walked before our eyes, touched us, healed us, died for our freedom, and has never hence stopped talking to our hearts and to our lives through silent words and the love in the lives of His lovers. If I am to love, it’s not something I do to someone else. It’s being unselfish in who I am … showing beauty … taking people to places in the world where there is no sin … telling them the story about a path to a cross whose beauty knows no equal … learning what it is I have to give … and giving it.
Dear Lord, show me what I have to give.
That piece was so beautiful it nearly took my breath away. Just in the way you wrote you succeeded in sharing some beauty with us, the very desire you were writing about.
One of the most significant directions in my theology in the past year has been this very realization, that the call to discipleship in Jesus is far more than a negative call not to sin; it is also, or even more so, a call to be a part of restoring God’s world to where it was meant to be, or even better yet, to be helping the future perfectly beautiful world, one even better than Eden, to begin to break into the present. And we do that with every small act of love, in the grocery store, to our wife and kids, in the toughest part of town.