My
grandpa died last Sunday in a hospice bed in Topeka. Clara and I were
out in Kansas at the time. Grandpa Leon had battled throat cancer for
over 7 years and in the last month it had turned hopelessly bad. We
rounded up the family and were to assemble in Kansas to say our
goodbyes. The doctor was ambiguous, as is their custom, unable to tell
us with any specificity when death might come. So we flew out from El
Paso on the Friday before the Sunday and made it to the care center just
in time, as the storybook dictates. He hugged and kissed us and smiled
at us and surely knew that we were there. That night his entire family
stood around his bed and we cried and told him goodbye and told him as
well that it was alright to let go. He held on for another 36 hours or
so after that point. Sunday morning, sometime while my mom was in the
shower and Clara and I were out on a run and my dad was having a cup of
coffee and enjoying a crisp Kansas morning on the cusp of fall, my uncle
left the room at the hospice so that the attending nurses could rotate
my grandpa in his bed and when they let him back into the room his and
my mom’s father and Tyler and me’s grandpa was dead. Just like that; in
the blink of an eye.
For
those of you unfamiliar I have had a complicated relationship with my
maternal grandfather. It is not that he wasn’t a good grandpa; matter of
fact that may have been what he was best at. But it is not an
altogether uncommon human experience to revere and love someone in your
childhood and then to find out at some later point that they are a
sinner beyond what you imagined; beyond what your own goodness and
righteousness can tolerate. Such was my experience with my grandpa, and
though I won’t belabor you with his sins (which is something akin to
gossip in this setting), allow me to say that there was partial
justification for the disdain I held him in for the past 10-12 years.
Partial, mind you.
The
last post in this blog was on the doctrine of total depravity, the much
maligned tenet of Calvinistic Christianity which says, in layman’s
terms, we all suck. This is similar to the doctrine of original sin
which says that when Adam fell he dragged down all of creation with him
and to this day we are born into sin and not with a blank slate.
Augustine popularized the doctrine and Chesterton quipped that it was
the single doctrine backed with modern day empirical proof. I myself did
not witness the virgin birth or the resurrection, but I do witness
human depravity and sin every day. Empirical provability aside, there is
nothing more contrarian to the modern mind than this idea that we begin
life already dead. This world and its afternoon talk shows are full of
people telling us we have an inner goodness and if we follow the six,
seven, or eight simple steps outlined in their book we can tap into our
own goodness and live at peace with all people. And also get rich. And
this is an understandable impulse for the world, but it is bad for the
Church and, my goodness, how this has infected the Church as well. Here I
refer not only to the simple punching bag of a guy like Joel Osteen
whose prosperity gospel is more full of holes than the term paper of an
undergraduate philosophy student, but to the more benign form that we
find in most Christian churches. There is everywhere a tendency to
downplay sin. In order to make Christianity more palatable to the masses
we can’t be condemning them with guilt for their sins and then
telling them the good news about Jesus. Let’s skip instead straight to
the good news: Hey, Jesus died for you. OK, well why? Umm, because you,
well, you know, you broke some of the Ten Commandments and lied to your
parents when you were a kid. So Jesus had to die for that? Yeah, it is
kind of weird, but when you are a Christian you will feel peace that
passes all understanding and get to live forever with God. And if I
don’t become a Christian? Umm, well, the Bible talks about this place
called hell. God will send me to hell for breaking commandments and
lying to my parents? Yes, but he doesn’t want to so pray this prayer and
you’re in!
I
often digress into silly conversations in order to prove a point. In
that rendering of the gospel there is nothing to be saved from, really.
There is shuddered mention of sin and hell, but it makes God seem like
an angry, moody teenager for condemning sin and sending people to hell.
There is no notion of righteous wrath and vindication, of man’s
deplorable condition in relation to God, of our utter inability to do
anything on our own, or of God’s glory and grace in sending Jesus as our
propitiation.
And
this was my functional gospel for much of my life. Sure I was a sinner,
but I wasn’t a bad sinner and now I am pretty good. I was mature for my
age, responsible, kept jobs, and impressed adults; I mostly avoided
illicit substances and was a good friend to people that I liked. Sure I
swore and lusted and didn’t hang out with people who I thought weren’t
cool, but I never did anything bad. I surely wasn’t bad in my
core, or dead in my sins and transgressions. I was presented the
opportunity to be good and for the most part took it and therefore I was
better than people who chose otherwise. Now in a convoluted and limited
sense this is true. We ought to choose Lincoln’s “better angels” over
our inner devils more often than not, but the mistake we make is to
attribute this to internal righteousness; it is no such thing.
Consciousness of sin, and right and wrong; yes. But right-standing in
front of God; not even close.
It
is not until we accept our own badness, our own deadness, our own
inability to do anything apart from grace received by the gift of faith
that we will ever view our fellow man in the proper context and with the
proper amount of humility and grace. And this truth hit me like a
ten-pound hammer a few weeks ago, in the shower of all places. My mom
had booked our plane tickets back to Kansas and I was imagining what I
would say to my grandpa, the man I reviled above all other men in my
life. The force of my own sin and ugliness was laid on me in that moment
and the disrespect and evilness which existed in my heart was exposed
as the indulgent self-righteousness of a punk kid. I was disgusted and
heartbroken and cried as I stood there and began speaking the words that
I wanted to say to him; words for once of grace and truth.
But
life, as I have found, is not always as poetic as I wish it would be. I
mentioned earlier when we got to grandpa’s room at the hospice house he
smiled and kissed and hugged and knew we were there, but those were the
limits of his power for his remaining time on earth. He died without
having another conversation, the one I intended to have with him
included. And I knew as I stood and cried at the foot of his bed later
that night that I would never get that chance; that the imagined
conversation in all of its beauty and grace would remain as so many
other beautiful things in my life- merely a good intention.
And
so it fell for me to say them for the first time, and on a one-way
street, as I gave the eulogy at his funeral last week. I told the
audience assembled that God’s grace had been ever-present in my
grandpa’s life and even though he felt like he had a hard lot God had
given him many wonderful things. He had given him a wife who remained
faithful, despite hardships, for 48 years; a daughter who turned out to
be a saint and whose life was spared by her Redeemer two years before; a
son who had wrestled his own demons and become quite the man and quite
the son; grandkids who grew up strong and happy and loved. He had a
horrendous battle with cancer, but alongside of it the entire time was
very uncommon grace.
And
then I told the audience that I had hated my grandpa in my heart for a
lot of my life. I told them I was far harder on him than I had the right
to be; far harder than was fair. I told them that my goodness and my
grandpa’s sins both landed us in the same place apart from the grace of
God. I told them that I didn’t know whether or not my grandpa was in
heaven, but that he was just the type of person my God loves to save; a
man who has seen the face of his own evil and can lay no claims to his
own goodness. I told them; but I never told him.
No comments:
Post a Comment