April 6, 2010: Do You Know Your Worst Sins? (Part 2)

Dr. Helen Roseveare is a living saint, a medical missionary whose selfless devotion to Christ and his kingdom rivals that of Mother Teresa. She is my hero and inspiration, and I often invoke her example when preaching to others or rebuking myself.

Dr. Roseveare was managing a hospital in the Belgian Congo when it was overrun by rebels in the early 1960s. She was not martyred like many of her missionary colleagues ("the lucky ones who got to go home!" she called them); instead she was beaten, raped, psychologically tortured, and made to watch as her African friends were brutally killed. After the carnage she went back to work at the hospital.

When she spoke to a group of us college students in 1982, she told us how grateful she was to God that he had enabled her, as a rape victim, to minister to others who had been similarly violated. Then she revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a double masectomy. But that was just another cause for rejoicing - now she had a whole new group of people to sympathize with and encourage.

Tell me - what sins could so magnificent a saint ever commit? I imagine that someone as selfless, devout, honest, generous, pure, industrious and grateful as Helen Roseveare would never need to preface her daily confessions with words that I feel I should attach to mine: "Oh Lord, how much time do you have?"

But among the riveting stories Roseveare told us was this. One day, quite by accident, she overheard an administrator telling a nurse that he was assigning her to work under Dr. Roseveare. The poor young woman burst into tears. "No, no! Please, I couldn't bear it! I'll do anything, I'll work anywhere - but don't make me work with her!" The administrator sympathized, knowing that Roseveare was an impossible person, but somebody had to do the nasty job of assisting her. Thus Roseveare learned - to her shock, dismay and humiliation - that her colleagues all considered her an emotionally cruel tyrant.

Presumably she took the lesson to heart and repented. At least she was able to tell that embarrassing story on herself, which is a good sign.

Roseveare's confession puts me in mind of many other cases I could cite of people who, conceivably, could examine themselves spiritually all day and all night and never once catch a glimpse of the outrageous character flaw, the howling iniquity, that discerning people spot within five minutes of making their acquaintance. It is one of those things that makes me so suspect of spiritual self-examination. We're bad at it. Even Dr. Roseveare was bad at it, and needed to have somebody else point out what a jerk she was. Others must rebuke the sins we cannot self-diagnose; we're too busy avoiding the sins that pose no danger to us.

Last week I mentioned a radio minister who seemed to obsess over ways to keep himself and others from committing sexual sin. But I frankly doubt that he has ever cheated on his wife or ever would. I wish someone would tell him his real sin, or that, when they tell him, he would listen and repent.

His real problem is that he is a shallow materialist. For example, a while ago he regaled his congregation with the story about how he got tickets to a Miami Dolphins game. He's a Dolphins fanatic. When the Dolphins were scheduled to play a Monday night game at sold-out Lambeau Field in Green Bay, he instructed his son to go online and bid whatever was necessary to get the hard-to-obtain tickets. He spent an admittedly exorbitant sum, got 12 tickets, and then (by God's grace) got another 6 tickets free as a gift from a wealthy patron. The free tickets, he explained, were the ones that God wanted him to have.

Oh no, no, no. I'm reminded of the aristocrat Marquis de Condorcet, who, during the French Revolution, attempted to disguise himself (the story goes) among common folk in order to avoid getting his head chopped off. He was exposed when he ordered an omelet: when asked how many eggs he wanted in it, he said "A dozen." A dozen! What a greedy glutton! Shows what kind of selfish indulgence he's used to.

Would you cut back your own breakfast from two eggs to one so that your guest could eat 12? Or - to put it another way - would you who have never been able to afford a regular-price ticket to a professional football game tithe sacrificially so that your pastor could outbid everybody to land a dozen?

This same pastor bought a house a few years ago for 1.9 million dollars. That is an unnecessary, extravagant, shameful, worldly expenditure which reveals a heart far removed from the spirit of Christ. We worship a Lord who was homeless (Mt. 8:20), who dismissed a rich man unwilling to part with his things (Mt. 19:21), who said it was hard for rich people to get into heaven (Mt. 19:23), who insisted that you could not serve both God and money (Mt. 6:24), and who disparaged the contributions of those who maintained an abundance after all their tithing was done (Mark 12:44). I do not know how such a pastor could preach from any of these texts - or from 1 Timothy 6:6-10 - with a straight face and an unstricken conscience. Nor can I understand the audacity with which he daily begs radio listeners to support his ministry. Sell your home first, Reverend! Let us see if you can make do with an eight-egg omelet before you ask the rest of us to cut back to one.

C. S. Lewis gave us the rule for determining whether we are greedy or biblically generous. If you can still afford "comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc" on par with your peers, then you are not giving enough. Your house should be smaller, your car shabbier, your food humbler, your vacations less extravagant than what anyone would expect them to be. You must be unable to afford them because you have already given so much away. Lewis wrote, "If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our charitable expenditure excludes them." Exactly.

As Roseveare was devout but cruel, and this radio minister is sexually pure but financially profligate, so might all of us, at times, manifest sins that are obvious to others but utterly concealed from our own conscience. King David understood this, and wrote, "Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults." (Psalm 19:12). We must plead mercy for the sins we commit but never lament because we haven't the faintest idea we've done anything wrong. And we must listen with humility to those irritating holier-than-thous who dare to reveal such sins to us.

What is my hidden fault, you ask? I suppose I do not, could not know. More than once I have been accused of being graceless and judgmental - and that may well be true. But even if it is, I feel certain that it renders false not a single word of what I have written above.