Good people

"We are...inherently good people, caught in an imperfect world."  So announces a recent Washington Post guest column.  What a relief!  I've spent 58 years trying to figure out what our fundamental natures are—good, bad or just ugly—and THE ANSWER appears.  We're good.  I'm good.  You're good.  Definitively.  Unreservedly.  It's the world that's flawed. 

Fractured world, inhabited by good people.  Got it!

Color me relieved.  Here I've been thinking that I'm flawed.  Created in God's image, yes, but still broken.  Superman comic fans, remember Bizarro Superman, the imperfect Superman double?  He would fly into buildings, wreak collateral damage left and right, all the while thinking he had it together.  That's my mental picture of our fallen nature...God's fingerprints still visible in our DNA, yet with some pretty horrible mutations also manifest in our human genome.  All the result of our separation from God.

But here's this alternative view, meant to reassure me:  "We are, it seems, inherently good people, caught in an imperfect world.  And in this imperfection, we are often challenged to maintain our goodness.  The challenge is to seek the knowledge that perhaps a higher being who put us here did not do so for us to ask Him to take care of us—but so that we would take care of each other."

So it's the world that's flawed and—unsaid but implied—God.  After all, He's the one that set us good people down on this imperfect planet.  Then He (apparently) just dropped us and moved on to the next galaxy, leaving us to save each other.  Thanks a lot, God...

And what I really need is to tap into that deep reservoir of native goodness in me—and in you—so we can collectively overcome the imperfectness of this world.

Anybody else feeling less than reassured by this message?  I'm trapped in an imperfect world, challenged to maintain my goodness, and can only depend on horizontal (homo sapien, that is) assistance.  No vertical relationship exists, thank you very much—no hope for divine intervention, no access to God's grace, no savior—just us lab rats.

Thanks, but no thanks.  I need better news than that.  I'll take the gospel.  Listen to the words of Walter Brueggemann:

Our right names

You God toward whom we pray and

     about whom we sing, and

     from whom we claim our very life.

In your presence, in our season of ache and yearning and honest,

     we know our right names.

     In your presence we know ourselves to be aliens and strangers.

     we grasp in recognition, taken by surprise at this disclosure,

            because we had nearly settled in

             and taken up residence in the wrong place.

     For all of that, we turn out to be

     we strangers, unfamiliar with your covenant,

             remote from your people,

             at odds too much with sisters and brothers,

     we aliens, with no hope

              without promise

              with very little sense of belonging or knowing

                      or risking or trusting,

     It is in your presence that we come face to face with our beset,

     beleaguered existence in the world.

BUT

      You are the one who by your odd power

             calls us by new names that we can

                     receive only from you and

                     relish only in your company.

              You call us now,

                    citizens…with all the rights and privileges and

                     responsibilities pertaining to life in your commonwealth.

       You call us now saints, not because we are good or gentle

                     or perfect,

                           but because you have spotted us and marked us

                            claimed us for yourself and your purposes.

       You call us members…and we dare imagine that we belong

                           and may finally come home.

       So with daring and freedom,

                            We move from our old names known too well

                                     to the new names you speak over us,

                             and in the very utterance we are transformed.

In the moment of utterance and transformation, we look past

       ourselves and past our sisters and brothers here present.  And

       we notice so many other siblings broken, estranged, consumed

       in rage and shame and loneliness, much born of wretched

       economics.  We bid powerfully that you name afresh all your

       creatures this day, even as you name us afresh.  We pray for

       nothing more and nothing less than your name for us all,

       utterly new, restored heaven and earth.

And we will take our new names with us when we leave this place,

       treasuring them all day long,

                          citizen,

                          saint,

                          member,

even as we take with us the odd name of Jesus.  Amen

That's comforting.  Reassuring.  Hopeful. 

Thank you, Walter.  Thank you, Lord. 

Comments

[david swinson]

Excellent blog, Chris. This worldly view of our "human condition" is yet another attempt to reassure a Dr. Phil audience that despite all the evil in the world they can find comfort in the knowledge that we are inherently "good creatures".

This is far easier to digest than the truth that God offers and what it really means to be a follower of Christ.