Sinner, Wretch, and Reprobate

Gospel reading: John 11.1-45
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Late yesterday morning I was put under general anesthesia. For all I know, my dentist then braced his feet against my shoulders and extracted my wisdom teeth with a pair of vice grips. Mercifully, I'll never know.

I'm pretty grateful just now for anesthesia. I wouldn't trade it for a shot of whiskey - even a good single malt Scotch - when it comes to oral surgery. But I also wouldn't trade it for consciousness. I was only out of it for less than an hour, although Ardelle might argue that I wasn't entirely with it for much of the afternoon.

Kathleen Norris discussed three words that are disappearing from our religious vocabulary: sinner, wretch, and reprobate. I wonder if the urge to be rid of these terms is something like the perfectly sane desire for anesthesia. There are some things I simply don't want to be conscious of.

But anesthesia is meant to wear off. Oblivion is meant to be a short term experience.

I think this is why we should resist anesthetizing language, as well as art. When a term or concept is beyond the pale, we lose access to something real not just for a while, but forever. Too many of us have had experiences of sin, of wretchedness, of reprobation for us to dismiss them altogether.

On the other hand, we need to be find a way of talking about these all to familiar human conditions that doesn't let them define us completely. In fact, we may need only to hold on to the word 'reprobate' as Christians to say clearly that it applies to precisely no one. No one is 'rejected by God and destined for damnation'.

It makes a lot of sense to me that localized and temporary anesthesia might be appropriate for some of our faith's harsher words. When we've been beat up and belittled by them for a long time we'll need a little distance for a time. But I'm not sure we need to anesthetize ourselves completely from them.

Because when we look around in our world we see the results of something like sin. We see hatred and bigotry and cruelty. Christians have always held that we are partly complicit in our world's trouble. Jesus brought us the good news of our forgiveness. But he also told us that we carry the seeds of murder in our heart when we simply hate another person.

I don't think Jesus taught this to make us feel worse about ourselves. I think he was trying to remind us that we're in this thing together. You and me and Charles Manson. We matter to one another. But our goodness matters as surely as our failures do. Anesthetizing ourselves from this reality isn't a good long term policy.

Like the best art, the best religion shouldn't flinch from the grimmer or more glorious details of life. For anesthesia is never very local. We lose our capacity for wonder and goodness when we protect ourselves too well from the experiences of loss and pain.

In Sunday's gospel we saw Jesus weeping, and 'greatly disturbed in spirit'. There's something in us that wants to anesthetize Jesus from such emotion. And it's all the more surprising to find it in the gospel of John where Jesus seems so otherworldy at times. But there it is. Here he is. Here he is in the world of loss and death that we recognize. It turns out that the healing he means to bring is meant for lives like ours, for losses like ours. And the healing he means to bring can flow through lives like ours, sinners that we are.

The effects of last night's pain meds haven't worn off completely. If this blog's even less coherent than the others, I suppose I have an excuse. If it's not, well, never mind...