It's complicated. . .

Every time someone begins a conversation with the words It's complicated... I get nervous.  It could be a couple coming to talk with the pastor about the problems in their marriage.  It could be a teenager trying to figure out the path between their erupting hormones and confused desires.  It could be a parishioner uneasily reporting on discontent in the pews.  It could be a church council meeting trying to figure out where the leak in the roof is coming from and how to fix it.  It could be a vaccine that promises everything to a people living for more than a year under COVID but with some history of aborted fetal tissue or cells.  It could be a congregation talking to their Circuit Visitor or District President about why they think their pastor needs to leave.  It could be a doctor trying to tell the bad news to a patient who is expecting none of it.  It's complicated.  Well, of course it is.  No one is saying it is not.  But that is not usually what the phrase It's complicated means.  Usually it means that there is not right or wrong, no black or white, and no moral authority requisite in the situation.  Only feelings.

Of course life is complicated.  The pandemic did not create this complication.  It merely added to it.  All the technology in the world has not made the world simpler -- only increased the speed and complexity of everything that is going on around us.  Sin is not a more toward order but disorder -- not toward the increasing improvement of all things God made or even the preservation of the status quo.  Instead, sin has moved more and more toward the deterioration and decay in which the things of God are more and more out of sync with the world around us and with the desires of our sinful flesh.  God is not making things more complicated.  We are.  And the declining nature of all that is around us.  And the devil and his minions working more and more to increase the shadows in which evil is most at home.

That is not to say that the Gospel is simplistic.  It is not.  There are few easy sayings of Jesus.  There are few oblique words of Christ that have become clearer in our progress.  Just the opposite.  As we drift further and further from the world into which Christ was born and the values and purposes of the world in which we live are more and more at odds with the values and purposes of God and His kingdom, things cannot be made easier or clearer.  We depend less and less upon the grand advances of knowledge and more and more upon the heritage of the fathers, the wisdom of the saints, and the legacy of the living and rich tradition of the faithful.  Thus the Church finds herself more and more out of step with the world around us, more easily relegated to the fringes of a world not interested in voices that do not mouth back what it says, and more and more misunderstood by that same world.  It is complicated.  It is not simplistic.  But the Gospel is so plain that any child can hear and believe it and so deep that we can ponder it a life time and still not cross the great expanse of its wonder and mystery.

As time goes on, I get tired of people reminding me how complicated things are.  I have found that this judgment is seldom followed by the desire to understand and more and more the permission to disregard and write off the truth.  Science has rendered us great service and yet contributed little to the clarity of who we are and why we are here.  Sex was from Eden the first place where sin's disorder caused its problems and we have not made any headway by opening sexual feelings, desire, and gender up to the control of desire.  Churches have great resources for resolving conflict the Biblical way of confession and absolution and yet there is more and more conflict and antagonism in our parishes today.  The long awaited vaccines have not quite eased all our angst over a pandemic that has ruled our hearts, minds, and lives for more than a year.  Doctors still have trouble answering our basic questions when bad news comes.  Parishes and pastors caught up in a spiral of decline find it easier to blame each other than to trust the Lord.  Marriage and family are not made easier by easing the constraints of gender and turning moms and dads, husbands and wives, into generic pieces of a puzzle.  I know it is complicated.  What I fear our people do not know is that feelings and offense and hurt do little to sort out these complications and everything to make them more difficult both to unravel and to live with.

Life is complicated.  So what?  Live with it.  And if you are a Christian, rest your frustrations and fears upon the gracious heart and merciful deliverance of the God who has saved you with His love.  Instead of trying to make sense of or control the world around you, grasp hold of the world to which you belong since your baptism.  Live not by bread alone but by the Word and Table of the Lord.  Confess, repent, and believe the forgiveness which is yours not because you deserve it but only because God is good.  Christ did not some to make life less complicated but to shine the light of His goodness and love in the darkness of our world.  Rejoice in this.  And maybe the complications will seem less complicated and the truth that endures forever more clear.  And stop trying to make the complications of this life into a smokescreen designed to let you do what you want with impunity.