Forgiveness, Pt. 2

"Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." — The Lord's Prayer

Forgiveness is a big and important topic. A part of that is the personal aspect of forgiveness, but what about the role of the church as a whole? What message does the church often send to the world? Probably not a good one.

A few weeks ago I saw a car with a bumper sticker I won't forget. It said, "I like your Christ but I do not like your Christians because they are so unlike your Christ." Clearly that person wasn't a member of a local church. But they were someone familiar with the message of Jesus Christ. It's just that the Christians they'd encountered had put them off the message of the Gospel. That's a sad reality of our world today.

So what's the root cause, and how do we fix it? I think the root cause comes from the poor way some Christians represent Christ in the world. One of my favorite movies is "Doubt," which is also an excellent stage play. There is a tendency for some people to focus on the micro with "Doubt" — with is the plot element used to create tension. In this case, it closely mirrors the accusations of sexual impropriety within the Catholic church. That, of course, is not really what the film is about.

The film is about two leaders within a parish that have an ideological difference about what the Gospel is and how to convey the Gospel. One is about the rigid rules that she thinks guide people to a better life, the other is about the spirit he sees in the Gospel. In one of the most beautiful scenes in the film, Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) tells a young nun (Amy Adams) that the message of the Gospel is love of others, but that too many in this world lead you astray.

“There are people who go after your humanity, Sister, that tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it. It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue," he says. Too often I think Christians lead with anger, judgment, and righteous indignation, when we should be leading with love. Mark 12:29-31 says, “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Again, not a lot of room for doubt and equivocation about what Jesus means to tell us about how we are to relate to God and to one another.

I love the works of Donald Miller, who is an incredible writer and thinker. In his most famous book, "Blue Like Jazz," there is a scene that I've always found to be particularly poignant. In it Miller and a handful of Christian students seek to make a difference on the campus of Reed College, a very liberal and secular university. As part of a campus festival, they set up a confessional booth. Many of the students expect this will be a fun kind of joke. But the Christian students running the booth had something else in mind. Instead of hearing half-hearted confessions from the students, they used the opportunity to apologize for the ways Christians had mis-represented Christ to the world. It was a beautiful, powerful, and inspiring section of book, and a powerful example of what love can do in the world.

For too long Christians have been a stumbling block for people coming to Christ. It's time we, as a church, consider the message of the Gospel and live accordingly.