A Reformation Eve Rant

These days, I’ve been thinking a lot abut penance, and what a good thing it is. Luther didn’t like it, and I guess, as a Lutheran I shouldn’t, either. Yet, I suppose that, if you cut me deep enough, you’ll find a Romantic Catholic – one who can claim the best of the Roman Catholic Church and let go of the rest. One of my students once took a class at Catholic Theological Union and the professor asked him what Lutherans think about a particular subject. “Professor Satterlee says,” the student began, and the professor cut him off. “I want to know what Lutherans think,” the professor said. “For all practical purposes, Craig’s a Catholic.” Perhaps that professor is right.

Luther didn’t like penance. If I recall The Babylonian Captivity of the Church correctly (and this is a blog entry or Face Book post so I am not doing footnotes), dear Martin was concerned with demands for humility, contrition, and acts of repentance (36 Our Father’s) in place of trust in the promise of the Gospel. So, we pretty good Lutherans threw out penance and replaced it with an evil of our own.

The good news of penance is that, when it is accomplished, the penitent, the Church, and the community of faith all know that relationships are (or need to be) restored.
So, for example, when one who grievously sinned was sent on a pilgrimage for several years as penance, the sinner who was sent out of town and the community knew that if/when he returned, it was time to forgive.

We do it differently. We speak of grace, the foot of the cross, forgiveness, Christ. Then someone sins in a way that is known to us, and we don’t act out of grace, cross, forgiveness, and Christ. Even worse, we don’t tell the penitents what they can do or need to do to be restored to the community. We passively yet aggressively watch and judge them and whether they have sufficiently demonstrated humility, contrition, and repentance. If they look too sad, we chastise them for not trusting the Gospel; if they look too happy, we shame them for not taking their sin seriously. We don’t tell those who have sinned what they can do or how long it will take for them to be restored to the community. We shame and shun, punish and humiliate until we decide it’s time to stop. The problem, of course, is that faith communities are rarely of one mind -- so the penitent never feels safe in church. Just when everything seems okay, someone announces that the sinner is either too happy or too sad. The bigger problem is that this is not the example or command of Christ. Grace does not mean, Jesus forgives but we don’t have to.

I am hearing lots of concern about preaching cheap grace – as if those who have sinned will somehow get off the hook. I think that, if anyone needs to hear about costly grace, it’s our church and those who consider themselves righteous. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,” we pray every Sunday. So how are we doing with that when it comes to the sinners in our midst? Perhaps it’s time for us to stop counting the cost that others ought to bear and, instead, swallow the cost ourselves and forgive. Or, if we cannot be Lutheran, we should at least hand out some “Hail Mary’s” or other acts of contrition (social justice or recycling, perhaps) so that penitents will know that, if they say and do them, there is at least a chance that, someday, we will forgive them.