The Sins of Moralism

Grant me, O Lord, that I might see my own trespasses, and not pass judgment on my brother – St Ephraim

(Christians) seem to think that if they can move more and more people toward living “morally,” that we will then have a better society, nation, world: that “GOD will then be on our side, once again.” The problem with this assumption is that it is based on the idea that we humans can save ourselves (or our nation) by being “good.” +

People whom are primarily driven by morality are usually judgmental and haughty. Such people are often self-righteous busybodies, running around behaving as if Christ abdicated His throne and left them in charge of governing the world or at least their neighbors. +

Moralism only places value on those who adhere to a particular moral code. Loving others, treating all people with the dignity and respect due them, because each is made in God’s image, is nowhere to be seen among such people. +

When societal “morality” becomes the Christian’s Be All and End All, the means by which they seek to establish it will be legal: if we can just pass the right laws and get rid of the “wrong” ones, then all will be well. However, when we depend upon laws to keep everyone in check, what we will end up with is a revolt of slaves wanting to throw off their shackles. It is the heart that must be converted to love and obedience to God. If this doesn’t take place… expect a revolt. +

Moralism. Christians should consider the instructions of the Apostles Peter and Paul:

Peter’s advice (Acts 15) to Gentile converts whom the Jewish Christians were demanding be circumcised, if they were to be “good Christians”: “We’re not going to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols (stay away from idols and idolatry), from blood, from the meat of strangled animals (watch over your testimony before the Jews to whom you are a witness for Christ), and from sexual immorality.”

Paul’s advice to Thessalonians (I Thess. 4)

Love each other “more and more,” “mind your own business, work with your hands … so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.” And then, “If you do this, you’re good to go.”

What moral burdens do we Christians place on people, today?  I’ll wager it is far more than what Peter and Paul handed down. And have you ever met a moralist who minds his own business? Crikey: these people consider meddling in the lives of others to be their highest calling. +

God has never been impressed or even amused with people running around thinking that they can leverage His blessings by their proper behavior. It can’t be done. We can’t “save” ourselves via our “uprightness,” “integrity,” “sacrificial life-style,” or “following the straight and narrow.” You and I both know what lies in our hearts, in the hearts of the best of us, and it isn’t pretty. It is a heart being purified through a living faith and trust in Him and His grace that God is after in us. Trusting in our own morality is abhorrent to Him because, as Isaiah pointed out, compared to God’s purity, our “righteousness” appears as nothing more than so many filthy rags.  +

Antidote to Moralism:

Maintaining a constant awareness of my own desperate need for God’s mercy and grace.

I am the chief of sinners. -St. Paul

Note: Not “was,” but “am.”  

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

Transcending Tragedy and Suffering

Elie Wiesel, writing of his boyhood experiences at Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps and the pain and anger that remain to this day, in his book, And the Sea Is Never Full

Does this mean that I have made peace with God? I continue to protest His apparent indifference to the injustices that savage His creation….

            And what about my faith in all that? I would be within my rights to give it up. I could invoke six million reasons to justify my decision. But I don’t. I am incapable of straying from the path charted by my ancestors. Without this faith in God, the faith of my father and forefathers, my faith in Israel and in humanity would be diminished. And so I choose to preserve the faith of my childhood….

            I never gave up my faith in God. Even over there I went on praying. Yes, my faith was wounded, and still is today. In Night, my earliest testimony, I tell of a boy’s death by hanging, and conclude that it is God Himself that the killer is determined to murder. I say this from within my faith, for had I lost it I would not rail against heaven. It is because I still believe in God that I argue with Him. As Job said, “Even if He kills me, I shall continue to place my hope in Him.” Strange. In secular circles my public statements of faith in God are resented.

What do you say to encourage such a man, to help bring healing to the gaping wounds brought on by God’s “apparent indifference,” and the anguish and anger that constantly haunts him and those who survived along with him?

What I would have said to him at 22 would have deserved a baseball bat upside my head. “Do this, believe that, memorize these scriptures, and all will be well.” Today at almost 62, if I met him, all I would have are my tears and an unfathomable admiration for his witness.

Nothing and no one makes the suffering brought on by such tragedies as his go away.

Do you disagree? Then tell me this: When Job saw God, did it make all of his horrific losses disappear? Did his children come back to life and sit down with him and break bread that night or were they still dead in their graves? His suffering remained: only now, after seeing God, his faith and worship were deeper than his abiding pain.

Christians here in the US don’t much take to focusing on any theology dealing with tragedy and suffering. This is no surprise, as they don’t often deal with the tragedy of Christ’s crucifixion. “Let’s jump right over to the resurrection. That’s the ticket to the charmed Christian life!” The fact remains, however, that Jesus’ death is ever a tragedy. Yes, His resurrection gives new meaning to His suffering, but if we fail to keep the “tragic” as part of the Truth we bear witness to, we are glossing over reality and offering a peace or healing that is only skin deep.

What can a God who knows nothing of pain and suffering offer me in my dark nights of the soul? Sharing the love of God with others without sharing the tragedy of all tragedies at the Cross robs our listeners of The Anchor of Hope that comes with knowing that, as the God-Man, Jesus Christ suffered. He knows of our suffering, knows how to pray for us, and knows how to use it for bringing us closer to Him.

And, regarding our own spiritual journey, if “take up your cross and follow me” means anything, it means Christ does not promise us the American Dream. What He does promise to do is use what St Paul called our “dying to self,” for our soul’s sake, for the sake of our increased union with God, and being further conformed to His image.

Tragedies and sufferings, in and of themselves, do not redeem or restore us to God. This can only happen when we choose to convert them by seeing it as a means to an end. It is only through transcending the suffering by embracing Christ’s cross and then taking up our own for His sake, for love’s sake, that we open the door to a deeper union with Him.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

What Men Live By

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. –St John

In Tolstoy’s short story, What Men Live By, we meet the angel Michael who has recently disobeyed God in not taking the soul of a young mother with infant twins. Having no other relatives, she had begged Michael to stay his hand, at least until her daughters could make it on their own. He agreed. God didn’t. Shortly afterwards, God takes the mother’s soul and Michael’s wings, telling him that he will not get them back until he learns the answers to three questions:

What dwells in man? What is not given to man? What do men live by?

Our first encounter with the mortal Michael is outside a shrine, where he is sitting, naked and freezing, and wondering how he was going to go about learning the answers to God’s questions. A shoemaker named Simon sees him but, as he has just returned from an unsuccessful attempt at collecting a debt owed him, he is in no mood to help a stranger. After he walks past the naked, shivering man, however, his heart is filled with pity. He then goes back, gives the man his only coat, and takes him home.

Michael would later explain that when he first saw Simon all that he could see in his face was death, as he only cared for how he was going to get bread and clothing. But when he returned, “he was alive, and I recognized in him the presence of God.”

At first, Simon’s wife Matryona is livid with her husband; so much so that Michael later notes that she was covered with the stench of death. But as she was hurling bitter accusations and condemnations at her husband, Simon turned and asked her, “Have you no love of God?” and her heart was filled with compassion for Michael. They invite him to live with them, giving him the very last of their food, without any knowledge that he was a fallen angel.

Lesson Number One: Love dwells in the heart of man.

As an apprentice shoemaker, Michael’s skills became so renown that people were now beating down Simon’s door and asking him to make their shoes. One day a rich man comes bearing fine leather from Germany and explains that he wants his shoes to fit just so. They agree to the price and Michael sets about to make the man’s shoes. When Simon comes to inspect the work, however, he sees that Michael has made a pair of slippers. While anxiously explaining to his apprentice that this could ruin their business, a lady walks in, tells Simon that the man has died, and that she needs slippers for his burial. Michael walks over and hands her the soft slippers he had been making. He had seen the angel of death standing behind the man when he had come to ask Simon to make him a pair of shoes.

Lesson Number Two: No one knows when his time on earth is going to come to an end. When the evening comes, no man knows “whether he will need boots for his body or slippers for his corpse.”

After six years of working with Simon, a woman walks in with the twins of the mother whose soul Michael had refused to take. She had adopted them and reared the girls as her own. She had come to ask Simon to make them each a pair of shoes.

Lesson Number Three: It is not given to man to know his own needs. “All men live not by care for themselves but by love….God does not wish men to live apart, and therefore he does not reveal to them what each needs for himself, but he wishes them to live united, and therefore reveals to each of them what is necessary for all.”

Michael survived, not because he was able to fend for himself, but “because love was present in a passer-by.”

The orphaned twins were cared for because of the love of a stranger.

Therefore, we do not truly live by the thought and effort we spend on meeting our own needs, “but because love exists in man.”

Tolstoy via Michael: “I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love." Michael then sang praise to God, as wings appeared on his back and he returned to heaven.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014 

Turn On the Lights and Ask

You do not have because you do not ask. -St James

So many people go through life wanting what they refuse to ask for and then constantly creating back-stories to justify their passivity.

I am not worthy.

It wouldn’t really work, anyway.

They wouldn’t say yes, because…

She is mean

He doesn’t love me

They are selfish

It’s better to not set myself up for rejection.

It would only start an argument.

Asking will make me look needy.

And then?

The promotion goes to one of your peers because he went and advocated for the position, while you “humbly” kept mum.

Your raise was a mere cost-of-living-adjustment because you didn’t make a case for being worth more than this.

You remain frustrated or otherwise stressed in a relationship critical to you, because you won’t make your needs or wants known.

In other words, you provide no room for the materialization of all the possibilities that would be created by simply asking for what you want.

“But what if the answer is, ‘No’?” Well, how badly do you want what you want? What is it worth to you? If their answer was negative and you still want what you want, maybe you need to reframe your request. Maybe there needs to be a longer and more in-depth conversation about your wants or needs, as well as those of the one to whom you made your request: a conversation that either changes their mind or transforms the nature of your request. And maybe you need to begin adjusting to the reality of, “No,” and moving on to “What now?” which creates a new set of possibilities.

When you make the unknown known it causes a shift in your relationship. Maybe the shift will not be in the direction you had hoped. Maybe it will. You don’t and can’t know until you ask.

As long as you want what you want yet don’t have it because you have not asked, there is going to be a degree of agitation or confusion or frustration on your part, isn’t there? What is this going to produce in the relationship? And believe me here: many of those unspoken wants and needs that you think you have stabbed to death and buried have become vampires that are sucking the life out of you and your relationships.

Think of Asking as an act of turning the lights on and Not Asking as choosing to keep your heart hidden in the dark. Now tell me this: which of these are filled with possibilities and which is a self-made dungeon filled with vampires? However scary walking in the light can be at times, I think Undead Wants and Needs slowly sucking my life’s essence away is scarier. But maybe that’s just me.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014