church of the losers

Last night I drove past the coffeeshops and the 40-story corporate buildings into the heart of town. The paint on the buildings peeled and the graffiti grew like rapidly spreading mildew the deeper I got into west Greenville. I don’t often come to this side of town. White middle-class churches and ghettoes don’t mix well.

If I closed my eyes I could almost imagine Creation groaning in a town where multi-million dollar church buildings get built as far away as possible from the sinners whose scars are a bit more obvious to us all. In a town where where Christians feebly attempted to cover their deep-rooted racism with sanctified fig leaves, fig leaves that hindsight revealed to be horribly incapable at covering the nakedness of their wearers. I am, after all, in the South, where the name of the Prince of Peace has been dragged through the mud by Christians who didn’t equate “there is neither Jew nor Greek” with “there is neither black nor white.”

I pulled into the parking lot of the United Ministries headquarters where a small group of believers would be gathering. After doublechecking the locks I headed inside. Walking in I interrupted a huge black man delivering a sermon. He and the congregation welcomed me before he turned back to his sermon. As I scurried to the back of the room I eyed the congregation, an even mix of black and white.

When he finished he called woman from the congregation to the front of the room. She studied the floor as she walked quietly to the front of the room. The pastor introduced us all to Joy, a new Christian. We knew her past before he told us. We knew from the tears streaming down her face, from her bedraggled appearance, from the premature aging caused by years of drug abuse, from the side of town we were in, from the long sleeves she wore in an inadequate attempt to hide the track marks on her arms. We burst into thunderous applause when the pastor told us that her past was now forgiven. Joy wanted to leave her sin behind her to follow a man named Jesus. She had been clean for several days now. She was living with a couple from the church, someone who had dispensed with the usual “be ye warmed and filled” advice and had tackled the rather dirty task of proactivley loving a Fall-wrecked sinner.

“Let’s pray,” the pastor whispered, and slowly we rose. We all stood very still and very quietly, a roomful of recovering sin addicts, each confessing his lifelong love affair with sin. And amidst much praying and singing and crying we confessed to doing what we were best at doing, at covering our scars with a few inadequate fig leaves. We each knew that Creation groans under the burden of a sinful race. We each knew that the sin we held so dear, our racism and our snootiness and our lust and our addictions and our self-aggrandizement and our pride, was the cause of it all. A collective sigh from a handful of home-bound prodigal sons and daughters rose to the foot of the throne of God. To the throne of a God who doesn’t leave us to the effects of our sin, who didn’t crush mutinous mankind the moment a rebel flag was raised, who doesn’t give up on drug addicts or sex addicts or pride addicts. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is unity. The kind of unity that makes Pharisees, crackheads, perverts, and rebels gather to pray and repent and love.