Recent Musings:

A state of sinlessness.

Thursday, March 9, 2006

I wonder if as Christians we reach a sinless plateau where we get to a place of not-so-serious sins and are able to hover in a sense of safety. I think this may be true.

I attended a Christian worship event in which members of the audience could pick up a different color ribbon representing a different type of prayer: adoration, confession, thanksgiving or supplication. During the appropriate songs, people would bring their ribbon forward to have it weaved into a tapestry of prayer.

A nice idea, a good visual, a unique way of involving the audience within their present prayer life. People jumped at the opportunity to run forward with their ribbon. Yet I noticed, no one went forward with a ribbon of confession - no one, not one person, had anything to confess.

Now it's possible people didn't want to go forward alone once they realized there weren't others joining them. It's possible people didn't do ribbons, my guest and I didn't. But I find it odd that out of the 100 people there, not one person had a wrong to admit, publicly or to God. People looked inside themselves and felt they had more rightness than wrongness inside.

It's like the priest I heard tell a wedding party that if they didn't have any "serious" sins to confess, they shouldn't worry about confession before communion and just say a prayer of contrition.

I think as Christians it's easy to fall prey to a plateau of sinlessness, where the wrongdoings committed aren't so horrible or so punishable or even so sinful. We begin living in bubbles of safe, sinless environments, where we all attend the same sinless activities, talk to the same sinless people and believe the same sinless things, leaving ourselves uncondemnable and our lives sin-free. Oh sure, we all know we're "sinners," but we don't really have anything to confess - we haven't killed anybody or robbed any banks or slept with anybody's husband.

I took part in communion the other night and was moved to tears; usually I can control the emotion, but I was sobbing in front of the church. Things paused until I composed myself, but as I sat back down and as the service ended, I felt like I had the plague. People avoided me as if I was contagious, as if they could catch sin from me. Perhaps I just felt that way; perhaps people were giving me space (I was kind of tear-stained and snotty). Yet I felt as though the admission of my weakness, the recognition of my own wrongness and sinfulness is what kept the people from me; I might contaminate their sinless bubble.

(One young girl stayed with me, held me hand, hugged me and asked if I was okay. I appreciated her willingness to accept the rawness of my emotion; she didn't fear what it was I was broken about.)

I guess I don't like this sinless state that we allow ourselves to get to; it makes it too hard for people to accept their and others' broken humanity. It makes me feel that I'm the only horrible Christian out there that still sins on a regular basis and feels broken over her inadequacies. Since that can't be true, there must be something larger happening here. But to me, it seems as if I'm the only one who doesn't really get what this Christian life is about.