‘What God Does With Sinners’ – A Theological Reflection by Rev. Dr. RobertKolb

Garbage is garbage, and it is best treated as garbage. Garbage is made up of good things, blessings of God. But they no longer serve their purpose. In one way or another garbage has used up its usefulness, and there is no point in keeping it in the kitchen. Its stench issues its own warning that it will not be of any use anymore, no matter how well it has served in the past, no matter how valuable it has been for some part of our lives. Get rid of it—send it on its way to the collection agency that will burn it.

Human beings caught in sin still serve some useful purposes in spite of the fact that they often tend to foul up their own lives and the lives of those around them. The design of the human being was perfect, but after Eden the production line went awry. It produced creatures of God who exhibit many good characteristics. But at our heart we blocked the truly human use of any and all of his gifts, for their proper use presumed that all would be done in trusting our Maker, in fearing, loving, and trusting in him above all the good things he has made.

God did not make junk, and it insults our Creator to regard ourselves as garbage, even if once upon a time somewhat useful, worth nothing but being thrown away today. We are vulnerable to this feeling at times when we look at how we have fouled up our lives, that our lives are worth nothing, of no use to anyone, and especially displeasing to God. The weight of my shame—not just guilt that I did some specific way that harms someone else and insults God—but shame, the conviction that in my very person I am unworthy, flawed, a failure, garbage. I take my shameful person into the shadows whenever I can, and I lose any hope of God’s being interested in me. I try to hide in the mist and fog or find refuge in the darkness, where I can only grope my way through life. I am sure that if God is looking at me at all, he is severely disappointed, and he wants only to throw me away.

But God has spotted us. He knows the number of hairs on our head, and his statistics are up to date each year. And instead of saying, “to the garbage dump,” he says, “you are holy. I have made you holy through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Because he views in the light of our confidence that the Holy Spirit has given us forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation through Jesus’s death and resurrection, he sees us as cleaned from sin, purified from our every rejection of his presence and place in our lives, set apart to be his child and in our lives represent his holy family. God has refitted the cross, an instrument of shaming and giving the garbage of Roman society its last processing, to be his way of bringing us and our shame into death—burying them—and raising us up to the new life he has shaped for us as his holy people.

And instead of saying, “to the garbage dump,” he says, “you are holy. I have made you holy through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

No one likes to make mistakes. As we fall asleep and awake in the morning, we hope that our lives will be without flaw. The weight of that idea is a heavy load to carry, and it tires us out. Like Sisyphus, the stone of this ideal for our lives keeps rolling back on top of us. Its crushing weight brings exhaustion from our efforts and blame from our failures. Our ideal demands from us the performance of God’s law. When we are thinking in this mode, there is no room for mercy. But our own righteous performance never can meet those standards, to say nothing of the higher standard of fear, loving, and trusting God above all that he has made. The path of human performance does not enable us to climb toward God. The path of human performance is the path he has laid out for us once we have become his children through the gift of the Holy Spirit that creates our life-filling trust in our Lord. For he made us holy on his cross.

Marked by his cross, sharing in his resurrection we have found a new identity freed from the shadows of shame, the flaws of our hearts. We may have thought that they were what determines our identity, but they do so no more than does the law to which we cling. Our old identity as people who have wandered from our Creator has been ended on the cross, and we have a new identity in Christ’s righteousness, the righteousness he won for us by dying to sin and every identity created by sin, the righteousness he bestows upon us through his coming back to life after leaving our sinful identities in his tomb. For the sake of Christ and his sacrificial death, our sins have been forgiven, taken away for everlasting deposit in his tomb. From the cross Jesus came back to life, redeeming us—delivering us, loosing the bonds of our shame and sin at its base—to give us our new identity as God’s own children. That eliminates any thought we might have about trying to earn grace—a contradiction in terms in any case—since Christ comes to the lost and broken, those who live in shadows and darkness, and he stays with us as we fight the battles with the darkness that rise from time to time in our lives.

So, our crippling fears of insufficiency and uselessness have no basis anymore. We should never think that we have grounds to believe that God cannot use us and that we are not worthy of his love. No matter how much shame we have collected with our failures and flaws, we are still worthy of his love. For his love springs from him, not from the way we act. We do wrestle with regrets that suggest that at least part of our lives have been wasted, and we realize that there is no re-doing and improving yesterday.

But God is the Lord of the past, and he buried our sinful identities in Christ’s tomb and does not look there any more.

He is with the people whom he has made holy through Christ’s cross in our present, and he will remain with us in the unending future he has planned for us.