Is His Mercy Clean Gone?

 At the College of Preachers maybe twenty-five years ago, Fred Craddock was opening our eyes to the power of the language of the Bible. He mentioned a friend who was now a pastor somewhere in the South, who told him she was coming to love an antique Bible translation. Why? Not out of preciousness, nor any phony pretense of living in a past that no longer exists. Rather, she said she found that her people—rural southern people—spoke with expressions that one finds in the King James Version.
    It happened to me last Sunday. I was reading the Psalms for the morning of the fifteenth day in the 1928 Prayer Book (which is modified from something even older than the KJV, namely the Coverdale Bible of 1535). In Psalm 77, the Psalmist is in a place of trouble and he is crying to the Lord. But the Lord has not replied! So in obvious agony he says:
    Will the Lord absent himself for ever? * and will he be no more intreated?
    Is his mercy clean gone for ever? * and is his promise come utterly to an end for evermore?
    There it was: “clean gone.” If that ain’t southern speech, I don’t know what is.
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    It’s a strange use of “clean.” It suggests absence or emptiness, a tidiness perhaps, but only in the sense of a tidiness which has taken stuff away. It’s not a positive condition, a cleanness that is a presence. It’s not the cleanliness that is said to be next to godliness.
    It’s clean gone. It ain’t here.
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    But is the Lord clean gone? The Psalmist entertains the possibility that he is: that his absence will extend into the future, that it will not be possible to intreat him, that his promises have come to an end. Nonetheless, he says, even if it were the case that the Lord’s mercy is clean gone for ever, still he will think upon the Lord, remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest (the many things the Lord has done over years); I will remember the words of the Lord, and call to mind thy wonders of old time. He will think also of all thy works and he will speak of thy doings.
    And when the Psalmist stops trying to understand the present silence of the Lord, but turns his thoughts and his speech to the things the Lord has already done, the good things, the blessings, the wonders and works and doings over a long time: then the Psalmist remembers that God is the God that doest wonders, whose power has been declared among the peoples.
    He remembers finally the Exodus: the power of God that led them from slavery to freedom.
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    If you feel God is far away, that his mercy is clean gone from your life, think of his past mercies. And most particularly, call to remembrance the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We cannot see the future, but we can remember the past. And the past gives us ground to hope that his mercies are not clean gone for ever.
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    Out & About. I am to preach at the traditional morning services at Incarnation in Dallas on Sunday, August 5.

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

Is Sin Real?

 “The first thing is for you to decide whether you believe there is such a thing as sin.”
    It was a few decades ago, and I was meeting for the first time with this priest for spiritual direction. And his question confounded me. Of course, I thought, there is such a thing as sin!
    But he went on to say that, in effect, many clergy act as if there is no sin. There are misunderstandings, perhaps; missed opportunities; and various actions carried out in ignorance. But there is nothing that is simply wrong, and there is no one who would choose the wrong just because it is wrong.
    “So, Victor, do you think sin is real?”
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    When I first read Augustine’s Confessions—it was at St. John’s College—I was excited to discover his argument that evil is a lack of being, an absence where there ought to be a something. Evil isn’t a thing in itself, but is parasitic upon good.
    You might think that if evil is an absence, then it is unreal. But there can be awfully real absences. Think of a bridge that has a hole in it. If you drive into that hole, you have driven right into the absence of the bridge—an absence that will have very real consequences for you.
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    Sin is the deliberate turning away from a good that one ought to choose. It will be the choice of something else that is also good but a lesser good, chosen only by turning one’s back on a greater good. In a robbery, a thief chooses money (a good thing) rather than choosing to have peaceful relations with other people (a better thing than money). My spiritual director wanted to know if I thought this was possible. Could one deliberately choose to do something harmful to another person? Or would any such choice be, at bottom, a mistake, a misapprehension of what is really good?
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    I’m being too abstract. The question of sin is this: Can people choose to do bad things, to bring about harm to others,deliberately?
    And the question is: Am I capable of choosing to harm others deliberately? Not merely out of tiredness, or weariness, or a misunderstanding of a situation, but deliberately, knowingly: Is it possible for me to do the things I ought not to do, and not to do the things I ought to do?
    It strikes me as very hard to own up to this, to say that sin is real and indeed is a reality in my own life. And at the same time, it seems that Christian faith calls us to say precisely this. Although all sin is parasitic upon good, sin is nonetheless real.
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    If sin is real, it must be opposed. Augustine saw that war, and forceful police action, is sometimes something we must do out of our love for the victims of evil deeds. Sin, if it is real, really hurts people. So in response we may need to stand up, to name it truthfully, and to oppose it.
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    Around the same time I first read Augustine, I also read C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra. It is a story of new, intelligent, and thus far innocent life, coming to be on the planet Venus. An evil man has gone there to corrupt the first person. Another man from earth has been sent there, it turns out, to thwart him. He gradually realizes that there are no arguments that will be sufficient; that the evil man will not stop for anything, will twist words interminably, and so forth. Finally, the second man comes to the dread realization that he will have to use force to oppose the wicked man, lest this pristine, new creation fall into the same corruption of earth.
    Here is another difficult corollary, and yet also true: If sin is real, then there are times when it must be opposed, and there is no guarantee that any of us will be exempt from that exterior struggle (any more than we are exempt from the interior struggle).
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    Out & About. This Sunday, July 8, I’m to preach at the Episcopal Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, 6525 Inwood Rd., Dallas. The services are at 8 and 10 a.m. Then at 11:30 I’ll speak on “Love, Caring, Death, and God.”

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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