LOVE THE SINNER; HATE THE SYSTEM
While Christ showed scandalous grace to sinners, his opposition to the corrupt temple system—to its hypocritical patriarchy and exploitative moralism—was biting and frankly, threatening. His prophecies of the fall of Jerusalem came with tears of grief, but nevertheless, he graphically foretold the catastrophic and inevitable demolition of that house of cards. “It’s all coming down,” he would say. “Every last stone, overturned. The city walls and its temple will burn with unquenchable fire. The Valley of Gehenna will once again smolder with the corpses of those who think they are exempt from judgment.”
Why? What sins would warrant such a collapse? Same as today. God’s grace for the penitent sinner does not extend to the worldly power systems that enslave both victim and perpetrator between its serrated teeth. Corrupt networks are slow to come down, but they must and they will, even when they use a temple or church as its covering infrastructure.
Jeremiah outed the fallacy of crying, “The Temple, the Temple, the Temple” as if it were an impenetrable safe house. “Your temple won’t save you. You’ve repurposed it as a den for thieves!” The system would topple, first to Babylon, then later to Rome. My apocalyptic side says it’s happening again. Right now.
It’s not as though God strikes down his Temple or his people directly. The wrath involved is intrinsic to the sin—a self-devouring mechanism with a long but finite shelf-life.
THE CURRENT CRISIS
One commentator on the current crisis of the clergy abuse scandal messaged me his diagnosis of the problem:
This is an unpleasant result of absolute power and control. A medieval city-state, ruled by bitter old men who want to control and manipulate every aspect of human life, obsessed with other people's sex and sexuality, is bound to end in catastrophe. Patriarchal societies that lack a male-female balance cannot be healthy societies. A testosterone hegemony is a recipe for anything except peace and normalcy. There is a reason why we are created male and female. A concentration of power and manipulative ability, a society that attracts people with infantile sexuality, is always going to have this problem. These people have built a culture which ultimately has no meaning and without real meaning. They also have no boundaries. In the end, sexual abuse is an exercise in power. Lawful authority can come from God but power is almost always from the devil. When there is that kind of power, it finds perverse outlets.
The commentator (a priest, by the way) sees the obvious link: religious institutions obsessed with sexual prurience and repressive moralism inevitably become systems of perversion, precisely because of their obsession with sex. How is it that religious residential schools for native children in Canada and Evangelical missionary boarding schools for MKs (missionary kids) across the globe feature histories of the same systemic abuse? For that matter, why do we find the same cancer in Buddhist monasteries across Asia, Hindu temples in Nepal and in Boy Scout dens across America? How did a common poison infect such diverse wells? And what’s the solution?
A NEW TESTAMENT RESPONSE
It’s not as though the New Testament authors were ignorant of the problem or silent as to the solution. Is the wisdom of Christ and his apostles too obvious for us—or just too inconvenient? For the path forward is already laid out in the New Testament gospel. Let those with ears hear what the Spirit already said to his church:
The church Christ founded subverts and disarms worldly power:
“Lording it over” (top-down domination) is over. In fact, any sense of “overness” is banned in the kingdom of Christ:
25 Jesus called them together.
‘You know how it is with pagan rulers,’ he said. ‘They lord it over their subjects. They get all high and mighty and let everybody know it. 26 But that’s not how it’s to be with you. If any of you wants to be great, he must be your servant.
27 If any of you wants to be first, he must be the slave of all. 28 That’s how it is with the son of man: he didn’t come to have servants obey him, but to be a servant–and to give his life as ‘a ransom for many.’”
—Matt. 20:25-28
Instead of political kings and kingmakers or apostolic CEOs, Christ offers the church faithful shepherds, spiritual parents and servant leaders.
In John 10, Jesus says that hired hands run away from every threat, while the Good Shepherd models faithful care and protection for the flock. Few are up to that responsibility. I am not. I relinquished my pastoral post a decade ago. But faithful shepherds do exist. And I notice they all walk with a spiritual limp. If your pastor seems squeaky clean and impervious to failure, you’re being set up for a great disillusionment.
Similarly, Paul complained that spiritual guardians are a dime a dozen but a rare gem is that spiritual parent who cares for God’s children as if they were her own. We need spiritual parents who let go of helicopter control and raise critical thinking independents who can believe and stand on their own, sans indoctrination. Too often, leadership has infantilized their congregations, creating spiritual dependents and refusing questions or critique, making their disciples gullible and vulnerable to predators of all types.
And we need servant leaders who see the church as an inverted hierarchy and who know what comprises true greatness in the kingdom of God. Their motivation is cruciform(sacrificial love) and their means are kenotic(self-emptying or self-giving care). If you want to be great in God’s kingdom, learn to be a servant of all.
The church Christ founded lays aside privilege and erases identity barriers:
Paul’s model was first to see and critique the ways that race, sex and status create unjust privilege and power-wielding. He addressed the imbalance with something central to his gospel—the erasure of racial (Jew nor Greek), gender (male nor female) and economic (free nor slave) boundaries to fellowship AND leadership. The gospel restores wholeness and balance across these boundaries rather than simply transferring privilege from the old guard to a new power block. Paul saw and wrote about the necessity of fulfilling this new balance by intentionally empowering the weak and including the marginalized. He knew that simply overthrowing the powerful and installing new overlords was naive (as you see Orwell’s Animal Farm). The true inclusivism of the kingdom lets go of labeling, exclusion and “othering”—exposing the ideologues as secularized religionists. Instead, the New Testament planted a ticking gospel within the racist, sexist domination system of Rome’s top-down Pater Familia that would blow it up—much to the chagrin of religious institutions that became fond of it.
The church Christ founded facilitates reconciliation between victims and perpetrators through restorative justice:
We recall Isaiah’s vision of justice that operates on a higher plane than retribution, litigiousness and media lynching. He did see a day of judgment—a great and terrible truth and reconciliation commission administered by a wonderful Counselor, the Prince of peace. And after that, he saw the wolf and lamb lying down together, the leopard and baby goat nestled safely for the evening (Isa. 11:6).
Isaiah’s vision was never about carnivores becoming vegetarian (thank God!). Nor was it about the lambs eradicating the carnivores. Rather, it is a picture of reconciliation between predators and victims in ways that rehabilitate each to dignity and a create safe space for both to cohabit the kingdom of God. This is not about fluffy forgiveness that sets up perpetrators or victims for re-offense, but rather, authentic reconciliation initiatives that include healthy boundaries, rehabilitation processes and non-retributive segregation as necessary.
More literally, it might look like Paul sending Onesimus, the runaway slave, home to Philemon with instructions that he be welcomed as a brother—an equal—without further consequence or recrimination for his crime. Forgiveness and reconciliation would sound scandalous to Philemon and scary to Onesimus, but their reconciliation becomes Paul’s allegory for Christ’s welcome to all us prodigal runaways. Some critique Paul for perpetuating the master-slave system (as his deluded commentators did for many centuries). But how much more clear that “in Christ, there is neither slave nor free” did he need to be?
Feed My Sheep
I spend a lot of time thinking about the harm perpetrated by systems, religious or not. I think more about the array of reasons why leaders disqualify themselves, myself included. I can relate to the apostle Peter’s sense of post-denial inadequacy and the painful reality of how my flaws impact others. In fact, although I continue to write and teach about my experiences of God’s great mercy, I also walk that out with a significant spiritual limp. Given my own brokenness, bowing out of pastoral responsibility and formal inner healing ministry in 2008 was the right move for me.
But I’ve also had that awkward walk with Jesus down the beach.
“Do you love me, Brad?”
“You know I do.”
“Feed my sheep.”
Three times. Thirty times three times.
To love Christ means loving those who need his care. To follow Christ is to stumble upon others who need a hand along the way. It means deliberately refusing to turn away from the discomfort of witnessing brokenness. And learning to humbly help rather than obsessively trying to fix or rescue. None of this requires a power infrastructure or institutional forms that facilitate failure. Nor am I condemning the faith families that facilitate healing. I'm just trying to be more watchful of how systems corrupt good people ... and I'm keeping a better eye on my own shadow side.
Maybe it's as simple as simply being human--empathetic, compassionate and merciful wherever we go, structured or not? Humble help can take many forms. May God free us from religious 'overness' and grant us the grace to find and develop healthier patterns of spiritual nurture.
Well said. I ponder these broken systems as well, and how we can move forward without creating more broken systems to replace the old ones! Faithful shepherds, spiritual parents, servant leaders. Can we get there? With my own life and my own heart, I will try to.
Posted by: Jessica Cotten | February 04, 2019 at 01:04 AM