One of the things that helps make up a Christian community are the misfits, the people who don’t quite fit in community. If everyone fit perfectly, we would have a jigsaw puzzle of a Thomas Kinkaide painting, and not a gathering of real people. Real community has real problems.
But there is a difference between people who are kind of angular, on the one hand, and people who have declared war on the very idea of community on the other. These are those who have declared war on the central bonds that hold us together. The former sort of problem is the kind of thing that love is designed to cover a multitude of, and can frequently do so without even thinking. But the latter is the sort of thing that every healthy community must view with a divinely-given hostility.
What sorts of things are found in the latter category? I am talking about the treachery of adultery, or the pursuit of sexual perversions. I am talking about outbursts of wrath, the kind that hold wives and children hostage. I am talking about those who lie, speaking and using the devil’s native language. Then there are those who break their word whenever keeping their word would inconvenience them.
Of course, such sins can be forgiven, and the one who is guilty of such can be received back into full fellowship and complete communion. But this cannot happen apart from complete and total honesty with regard to the sin. Dishonesty is one of the other things that destroys community.
I began by saying that we need our misfits. But let us also never forget that, in various ways, and in various settings, all of us are misfits. True community lets love cover it, but all of us must do the covering, and all of us have things that must be covered. Heaven will be filled with people who used to be misfits.
Amen!
You say, “I am talking about outbursts of wrath, the kind that hold wives and children hostage.” Perhaps because we live in slightly different cultural areas, i find that the hostages are just as frequently husbands whose wives are like Krakatoa-in-waiting. When Mama ain’t happy, the household result is like Jeremiah’s vision of ruin: I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. Or something like that. Just saying that scowls and atomic fireballs aren’t the exclusive domain of the dudes.
Bro. Steve, you are quite right.
https://youtu.be/FwlOUAAyPQE
I always liked The Isle of Misfit Toys in Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer; they just seem so much more interesting.
As I read this I was reminded of the phrase I heard several years ago and that passed through the churches with some humor, namely that some people are EGR, meaning “Extra Grace Required”. I have always found that to be so proud and offensive, as if the rest of us are somehow better than that. Thanks, Doug, for reminding us that we are all misfits in some way.
People can have degrees of weirdness without having degrees of worth.