The Sinner
Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
What I have treasur’d in my memorie!
Since, if my soul make even with the week,
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.
I finde there quarries of pil’d vanities,
But shreds of holinesse, that dare not venture
To shew their face, since crosse to thy decrees:
There the circumference earth is, heav’n the center.
In so much dregs the quintessence is small:
The spirit and good extract of my heart
Comes to about the many hundred part.
Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call:
And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
Remember that thou once didst write on stone.
The inestimable, and theologically grumpy Professor Donald MacKinnon, once interrupted a paper I was giving in Aberdeen with a loud "Yes!" of approval.
I was offering a critique of Julian of Norwich's view of sin, and how at times she seemed to suggest it was no big deal.
I insisted that the cross only makes sense when sin is seen not as temporary inconvenience, but as a cosmic tragedy reverberating in eternity and requiring resolution. It was that insistent seriousness that raised the affirming growl from Professor MacKinnon.
George Herbert's poetry tells of "the many spiritual conflicts between God and my soul".The two primary conflicting forces throughout his poetry, and his life, were human sin and divine love.
When it came to sin as affront to both holiness and love, Herbert got it! Sin, in essence and outcome is moral tragedy, and a destructive shattering of trust and love.
Herbert's own heart was the arena in which he knew himself a sinner, guilty, convicted, conflicted.
Yet at the same time the deepest places of the heart were where he encountered a Love that bade him welcome even when his soul drew back guilty of dust and sin.
Lent is a waste of time if we minimise our sinfulness. The more we trivialise sin, even our own sin, the more we discount the cross, undercut the cost of redemption, and trivialise divine holiness.
We are then in danger of a Gospel made safe, and a God domesticated for our comfort.
"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross." (H Richard Niebuhr)
Herbert's poem "The Sinner" is packed with clues about the devastating effects of sin on human relatedness to God.
"I am all ague..."; "quarries of pil'd vanities..."; "shreds of holiness..."; "dare not venture to show their face...".
The last three lines are the sinner's prayer.
Repentance, the cry of the heart for renewal yet again, a deep self-knowing of how inarticulate shame sounds more like flinty reluctance than moral brokenness, and the sinner's faith that dares remind the Almighty of his literary skills when confronted by stone.
"Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call:
And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
Remember that thou once didst write on stone."
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