Being Perfect Isn’t the Christian Story

Our world is not as it should be. Any of us looking around us these days can find many examples. What’s crossed your path this week? Cancer. The political divide. Sorrow. Injustice. 

Back in the day, at the beginning of my Calvin University days when they still called it Calvin College, we used to talk theology. It often began (but didn’t end) with five point Calvinism and the acronym TULIP. You know this? T – total depravity, U – Unconditional election, L – limited atonement, I – irresistible grace, and P - perseverance of the saints. This does not happen to be a five point Calvinism sermon – I really only wanted to think about total depravity.

Total depravity is the idea that humans are born corrupt and unable to save themselves, that we humans need God’s grace in order to choose the good. Now there are moments where this resonates with me completely and absolutely, but I find myself pretty much always agreeing with the popular theologian of the 50’s and 60’s, Reinhold Niebuhr, who famously said “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” 

Yet in polite circles, like the PTA, neighborhood associations, the Chamber of Commerce, or even Episcopal churches, sin is not the sort of thing to bring up during small talk. But it’s all around us, we know it, we see it. All of us know. All of us know that we are very capable of sin and often it feels like we are more capable of sin than we are of goodness. 

Evil is always at our heels, at the tips of our tongues, at our fingers, at our feet, if we’re honest. It’s all too easy to assign evil to “the other,” hapless politicians, our neighbor who doesn’t recycle, our enemy, whichever person is annoying us, yet this Lent. It is the time when we must look to ourselves, when we must remember again the relentless nature of evil and the devil, when we must seek to live anew for the one who resisted evil, the one who was born, who died, and who rose again for us.  

We are preparing for the great feast of Easter. And every year, the first Sunday of Lent gives us the gift of the three wilderness temptations of Jesus. 

And this is also our story. This narrative is for us and it is us. 

The wilderness is both a landscape and a place of our souls. The wilderness is the landscape of New Mexico, a hike with no or little water, winter in West Michigan, the season that follows loss, the time when you’re at odds with yourself or a loved one. We all know wilderness. We know it for its sparseness; there’s never enough resources in wilderness. We know it the loneliness; it wouldn’t be the wilderness if there was enough community all around. We know it for the desolation; living in the wilderness is the opposite of being a well-watered tree, planted by the water. We know it for the hard times. We know it for seasons we would have never made it through but for the grace of God. We know it for the sorrow. We know it for fatigue, the banality, the annoyance, and the inconvenience. 

Belden Lane’s spiritual memoir, The Solace of Desolate Landscapes, describes these spaces. Lane writes of New Mexico; he writes of hikes almost gone bad because the water is gone or because of unexpected rain. He writes of the dry, relentless climate, where the sun scorches during the day and the lack of atmosphere freezes by night. He writes of Ghost Ranch, that lovely and otherworldly place where Georgia O’Keefe painted, in the middle of nowhere, on the way to nowhere. He writes of our Christian Spiritual giants, the ones in those first centuries who, like Jesus, went out into the wilderness to escape their demons only to have their demons follow them even more closely. He writes of St. Anthony, whose demons followed him and tormented him and all of those Christian mystics who found their place in the middle of the desert. And then he writes about his own desolation, about his mother’s long death and his even longer depression that happened because of it. He writes about the desolation after his father’s death, and the desolation of being human.

But for Lane, “desolation” is only the beginning. Because there are other parts of desolation. Whether it be winter or the dark night of the soul or sorrow or whatever, desolation can also be a time of particular resonance. You notice every thing. Weakness is so very visible. It’s all so very much, and none of us can pretend anymore. 

Maybe we’re left with God. 

I don’t want to give the wrong idea. Sometimes in the darkest season of my life I knew God was with me in my very being. And honestly, sometimes I didn’t. I both struggle and I rage against this. But this is ultimately the story that we’re living, this story of Christianity in 2025. Sometimes we just don’t know. Yet our story, this story of St. Andrew’s that’s gone on for more than 70 years, this story that we find ourselves part of, the one that began way way way before our time, the story we hear bits of in Deuteronomy as the people of Israel were trying to figure out who they were, this story is often not roses and sunshine. Sure, there are resources within our tradition, but sometimes like Jesus we are hungry and we’re convinced by the devil to turn those stones into bread. Sometimes we’re willing to worship at the foot of the wrong god so that we can have whatever it is that we want at that moment as our glory. And sometimes we just want to have the angels catch us because we’ve jumped, instead of doing the long, slow work of transforming ourselves. 

This is what I mean when I say that I am capable of anything. I know that I could easily be the poster child for the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. 

But this doesn’t make me or you unfit for the kin-dom of God. This doesn’t mean that I am a worm and not human, although sometimes it feels like it and sometimes I give into it. No. This is only one the parts of being human, one of the places that we all trip, all of us. 

Because being perfect isn’t the Christian story. If you look through all of our scriptures, there was only one who managed to pull through without sinning and that’s Jesus. The rest of us, the rest of the heroes of the Bible, the rest of the saints, every single one comes off as not the sharpest knife in the drawer, full of shadow and sin. Every single one. 

And the people of God? The ones whose ancestor was a wandering Aramean? They fell down too. The Hebrew Bible is that story, the story of a people who, as much as they try to do the right thing, fail. Not once, not twice, not just hundreds of times, but every time. Indeed, we know this to be true because we know it ourselves. We know this. 

And this is why Lent is so important, so much so that the Christian Church has developed a whole season of repentance, a whole season devoted to getting back on the right track, a whole season dedicated to taking things on and fasting. This is the time when we too are invited to the wilderness. We’re invited to examine our lives. We’re asked to look at habits. We’re asked to do this honestly and openly, praying that God’s Spirit works in us, to soften our hearts. We’re asked to confront what keeps us from God. We’re asked to look at our sin. We’re asked to spend this season in the wilderness. 

But lest we get overwhelmed with the enormity of the task, let’s remember. We are all in this together, not only our St. Andrew’s family, but the full spectrum of the saints. They’ve walked this walk like we are and our tradition reminds us that God is with us, even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

We’re asked to find that solace in this season of desolation, so that we can be strengthened and made ready for what is next, the continued inbreaking of God’s kin-dom, the work that we’re called to do in the world. And like the work of the devil, this work is also relentless and  it can’t wait. We can do this. Let’s get ready. 

Image: All Saints | Wassily Kandinsky