day no. 15,612: putting piety in its place

“Confess your faults one to another” (Jas. 5:16).  He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone.  It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness.  The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners.  The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner.  So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship.  We dare not be sinners.  Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous.  So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.  The fact is that we are sinners!" -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Christians are first and foremost sinners. Their bonds are at the deepest rooted in their acknowledgement of their fallenness. In other words, our brokenness binds us. But Christians are not simply sinners. While they are above all sinners in the first degree, this fact alone does not make them Christians or a community. It is a prerequisite of coursre, but like all prerequisites, it implies it is intended to end somewhere else.

Piety is not a stumbling block to community, but neither is it, as Bonhoeffer points out, a foundation for community. In other words, Christians aren't less united in the bond of peace by pursuing righteousness, but they aren't Christians merely because they are righteous in their own right. Churches are not mass gatherings of the pious among us. They are congregations filled with those who have fallen short, but those who are striving to take hold of that which has taken hold of them.

Christians confess that they fall short while striving to hit the target. It is a both/and proposition. Christianity doesn't highlight the perfection of the target only to point out how bad our aim or execution is. It doesn't point out the bullseye only to abandon it once everyone's in agreement that they've missed it. It points the broken arrows back to their intended destination and cheers them on in their attempts to now hit it.

As C.R. Wiley once said, "I miss piety."

Christians do not think they've achieved it, but they try nevertheless their best to get as close to it as they can. We acknowledge we fall short while continuing to strive for it. We recognize we have missed while continuing to aim dead center.

Philippians 3:12-16
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.