The Righteous or
Sinners?
November 11, 2020
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used
by permission. All rights reserved.
What is the church? Who is it for?
There are at least a couple of different visions of the church that answer
those questions differently. Here’s one ancient vision:
O Lord,
who may abide in your
tent?
Who may dwell on your holy
hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and
do what is right,
and speak the truth from their
heart;
who do not slander with their
tongue,
and do no evil to their friends,
nor take up a reproach against
their neighbors;
in whose eyes the wicked are
despised,
but who honor those who fear
the Lord. Psalm 15:1-4b.
The references here to the Lord’s
“tent” and “holy hill” are to the temple in Jerusalem. Psalm 15 gives us a list
of qualifications for entering into worship there. This vision of the temple
and its worship sees the temple—the church in our context—as a place for the
righteous. One must live properly to be included in the worshipping
congregation. Be blameless and do what is right. Do not do what is wrong. Then
you’re good to go, or rather good to come, to come into the house of the Lord.
We might think, Well, OK, but that’s
about a house of worship that hasn’t existed for the last 1,950 years.[1]
It doesn’t have much to do with us, we might think. Well, it wouldn’t have much
to do with us if the vision of the church that this psalm expresses had ended
when the temple was destroyed. It didn’t. I can’t speak for Jewish synagogues,
but I know that a great many Christian churches think of themselves in much the
same way as Psalm 15 thought of the temple. In these churches people must
somehow be “good” or “right” or at least act in compliance with what the church
considers to be good or right in order to be a member of the church or to participate
in the life of the church. A person who wants to be a member of such a church
must believe what the church says are the right things to believe or at least
say that they do. These churches will often expel people who they think don’t
measure up to their standards. They often expel gay people and divorced people
for example. In this vision of the church, the church is a place for the righteous
however a particular church defines righteous just as the Jerusalem temple was
for Psalm 15.
Here’s the other vision of the
church:
And as he sat at
dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with
Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes
of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they
said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When
Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a
physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but
sinners.’ Mark 2:15-17.
Because Christians strive to follow Jesus and even call the
church the Body of Christ, many Christians (though not all by a long shot) prefer
this vision of the church to the one expressed in Psalm 15.
Notice how different those two
visions are. In the first vision the church is a congregation of the righteous,
of the saved. It’s a club of religious insiders, those who have already gotten
the message the church proclaims and agreed to live in accordance with it. In
the second vision the church is more like a spiritual hospital. Indeed, that’s
how St. Augustine (354-430 CE) thought of it. The church isn’t only a gathering
of the saved, it is a place for those who know they need to be saved or at
least are open to being convinced that they do. It is a place people come for
spiritual healing. It is a place of confession and forgiveness. It is a place
of spiritual seeking, of the lost looking for a path to spiritual health and
wholeness. These two visions of the church could hardly be more different.
Given the quote from Mark above it
should be clear which of these visions
is truer to Jesus Christ and his call to the church. It’s not just that Mark
quotes Jesus here. It’s that the vision of the church as a place for sinners
and spiritual healing is so much more in tune with what Jesus was all about
than is the other vision. Jesus came to save the last, the least, and the lost.
He came to show us that with God we are always safe in the ways only God can make
us safe—claimed, loved, and forgiven. Jesus never said blessed are the
self-righteous. The Pharisees appear in the Gospels as exemplars of
self-righteousness, and Jesus never tired of condemning them for it. He would
do the same today with our latter-day Pharisees, those who think faith is all
about obeying rules and church is only for those the church considers to be
good.
No, Jesus said “I have come to call
sinners.” That’s what Christ’s church must be, a hospital for sick or wounded
souls. A place of spiritual healing. A place of love, acceptance, forgiveness, support,
and grace. Do those words describe your church? If so, wonderful. If not, what
are you going to do about it? Or do those words describe the kind of church you’d
love to find? If so, go looking for one. They’re out there. Keep looking until
you find one. You might start by going to churches of my domination, the United
Church of Christ (or these days logging on to their virtual worship) and
talking to their pastor. Many of that denomination’s church are like that.
Whatever your relationship to the Christian church is, I hope and pray that you
will find a church where your spirit can heal. We’re all sinners after all. We’re
the ones Jesus came to call. Thanks be to God!
[1]
The Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. It has never been rebuilt.
A mosque that is sacred to Muslims stands today where the Jewish temple stood
so many years ago.
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