“The LORD builds up
Jerusalem;
he gathers the exiles of Israel.” Psalm 147:2
At least
Arthur Dimmesdale wasn’t married. At
least there wasn’t a a wife and kids around to suffer the dismal fallout of
their husband and father’s tryst with Hester Prynne. At least Dimmesdale was a bachelor when he
dirtied the sheets.
Not so
the latest evangelical pastor to bite the dust—he had a wife and
children, not to mention a church of some 15,000 souls in the heart of the suburbs. Not only that, but the whole sordid truth
came gurgling forth, like hot tar, right before a national election in which,
as his congregation would have it, the forces of evil were so obviously pitted
against the forces of God—or their side.
And now there’s a fox in the hen house, or, to put it more boldly, a real
rooster. So much for family values.
The whole
truth wasn’t as ordered as the army of the faithful assumed it was. The general
got himself tripped on his own lance, so to speak, and he’s limping today, groveling as
well he should. After all, it’s one thing for him to have done what he did,
quite another for him to have acted for so long as if he were blameless.
Dante
relegated hypocrites to the lowest circles of hell because he thought of fraud,
a peculiarly human sin, especially displeasing to God. Sexual vices are only sins
of the flesh, not the spirit; you can do much worse than love someone when you
should not. But when humans deliberately mislead people who are in their trust, especially when it's done with false piety, Dante considered that kind of hypocrisy particularly evil
and put its practitioners way down there on circle eight of the Inferno, with Cain and Judas, where
the heat is really bad.
The
fallen pastor wrote out a confession of his sin, and when that confession was
read to his congregation, many of the parishioners explained quickly that they
were ready to forgive. Wonderful. We no longer live in Puritan New England. The question is, will they perhaps rethink some of the ardor of
their political judgments? Will be they at least a bit less quick to judge
others?
Probably
not. What characterizes contemporary
American evangelicalism these days is its forever carping tone, its commitment to drawing
lines in the sand. Changing that is not easy, even when their preacher
confesses to the sin they most despise.
The glory
of this verse of Psalm 147, the truth of the scripture itself, is that God will
gather his own as he sees fit. He will use his own interpretation of his
revelation, not ours. He won’t really care who we vote for or whether folks are
murderers or sleaze-balls, gangsters or self-righteous snobs. He’ll reach
down into the lowest circles of our conceptions of hell and pull out overheated
hypocrites. He’ll offer grace hither and yon, broadcast his love throughout the
cosmos. Count on this: He’s much bigger than we are.
The
shocking truth of the scripture is that, even if God almighty creates our
theological coloring books, he never stays within the lines himself. And that’s good news. Not only does God have
a place in his grace for those who the preacher and his people despise, he’s even
got room for the preacher.
He’s
always bigger, always greater than we are, always cleaning up after us, always
gathering the sheep who wander, as all of us do.
"He
gathers the exiles of Israel." That’s us, and that’s the gospel truth.
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