For some churches, it’s all about sin. For others, it’s all about that grace. And for still others, there is the regular insistence that we don’t talk about one without the other. We don’t talk about Good Friday without Easter.

It makes a certain sense, doesn’t it? that we so often tend to focus on the one thing, but it really isn’t just the one thing. It is the whole thing. And we need the reminder to help us out.

The more time goes on, the less I find that we can think of things in such either/or terms. It is a lot like the way I have come to see the Bible, our Holy Scripture as being about a story, about sharing a story together. Like how it is one big story. Our story, our life, is narrative.

Our story, our life, is narrative. Share on X

As I read about Jesus’s approach to Jerusalem in the gospel we call Mark, I see these stories and these moments, these encounters, and they all seem connected. I know they are, because I know literature well enough to understand how stories are written. So I feel skeptical of my own sense of things.

Mark is my favorite of the gospel stories. It certainly pushes me. And it sounds like Jesus to me. So these stories I encounter as I follow Jesus along the road: they’re all familiar.

So each one, as I approach them, is familiar and separate: a story propped up as its own by the lectionary. The Passion Predictions, the teaching on divorce, the man and the teaching on wealth: episodes which stand alone like good episodes of X-Files. But I sense in the back of my mind that there is a common element here, a story and a progression which means something, which intends for much more than a couple of episodes. That we aren’t really supposed to read it that way: isolated and separated.

And this time, as I read, I see these strands of connection, like threads of light which dance around and through these stories, holding them up and driving them into place around me, and I realize how very connected the story really is. And all these episodes are flashes of insight and opportunity to get the whole purpose of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem and his whole incarnate existence in three short chapters.

Jesus came to help us realize the Kingdom. In other words, he came to reconcile, bring grace to, absolve the world of sin and death.

To Absolve

When we speak of Confession, we speak of sin and repentance. It is both. It is the messing up and then it is the recognizing we messed up, acknowledge our messing up, stepping forward and speaking to our messing up, and seeking reconciliation for our messing up. We don’t get to just mess up and get forgiven. We have to come forward, we have to act.

We all know the first step in the 12-step program is to recognize we have a problem. But that ain’t nothin’ until we make it something. Until we start reconciling with people.

This is why Jesus took on John’s ministry at the beginning of Mark, proclaiming repentance from sin.

And yet we don’t do this in a vacuum or for the love of it. We seek forgiveness of sin because we hope that we will receive forgiveness. That receiving is absolution: a blessing.

Confess + Bless

In our tradition, we generally don’t confess without finishing it up with a blessing. And that is reserved for the priest. But we can ask for a blessing. This is an important moment to give our attention.

In our liturgy, we confess, as we just discussed, to all of this bad stuff in the world. It is stuff we’ve done intentionally and stuff we have no understanding about. And then the priest stands up, blesses us with the sign of the cross and we’re all good. But when there is no priest, the worship leader trades out all of the yous for uses. Like this:

Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins
through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all
goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in
eternal life. Amen.

Becomes

Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us all our sins
through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all
goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep us in
eternal life. Amen.

Of course, this doesn’t seem like much. I mean, only priests are allowed to bless in our tradition, so this is how we can have a blessing without a priest to do it. Very functional.

And yet, it reminds us that it isn’t the priest who is doing the blessing at all, but GOD. A priest might wave her hands in the air and pronounce that GOD’s mercy is upon you, but it isn’t magic hands or particles inside her body which bring mercy. It is GOD. And we invoke GOD, the Holy Spirit, to bless us and keep us, forgiving us all our sins. This is true, even when the priest is there.

Blessed

This blessing we receive, is not a band-aid or innate righteousness. It is not a total do-over, for that requires a more direct confession and a rite of reconciliation. Nor does it grant unjust power to run around with a fresh Jesus Stamp saying you are A-OK to resume your bigotry and hatred or that GOD is cool with the way things are.

This blessing serves to bring us back together, reconciling the sinner to a holy community of love and mercy.

For us, then, this serves as a corporate moment of forgiveness to match the corporate moment of confession: that we have sinned and we must repent for it.

We are pulled into a return to order, to faithfulness, that we may be reconciled with neighbor and with GOD. This is only part, a step in the process of becoming the renewed children of GOD. But it is the part in which we might look upon all of our work and pain and confusions and new ideas and see those golden threads of light which bind us to one another and to this crazy story. Threads that reveal that it isn’t all about sin or grace or the compound sin/grace, but about GOD and restoring creation with love and mercy.

And we try to return, to bring ourselves back, to thankfulness and hope, to meet GOD with abundant humility and confidence and hope and joy. And we come together, woven by these delicate strings, that even though we are surrounded by them, seeming to cocoon us in their center, it is a broad and sweeping whole pulsating with life and only seen from above, only understood completely from a higher perspective. This goal, to see: impossible. But to know its shape, its spiraling embodied form requires our imagination and the very grace of GOD.

Ask Yourself

Do you ask for forgiveness? Do you give GOD the chance to forgive you; to bless you and absolve you of your sin? Or do you carry it, like a comfortable backpack?

Do you hold these moments close, these times of blessing? Do you see in them the Holy Spirit’s movement? Do you seek them out?

Do you allow GOD to forgive your neighbors? Your enemies?

Do you trust that you are blessed and changed? Do you give yourself to the story?

 

[This is Day 19 of How to start deconstructing church. The next in the series is “Peace”. To start from the beginning, read the introduction here.]