The Church's Failures: A Necessary Confession

Today's Scripture

Today's readings are uncomfortable on purpose. Read them slowly.

James 2:1 — "My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory."

James 2:8-9 — "If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors."

John 8:7 — "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

The Big Idea

Before the church can say anything believable about sexuality, it has to tell the truth about itself. Christians have often treated gay and lesbian people not as neighbors to love but as outsiders to keep away — and the Bible has a name for that. It is called partiality, which means playing favorites with welcome, and Scripture calls it sin. Today is not about winning an argument. It is about making a confession.

Reflection

The sorted lobby

Picture a Sunday morning. Two visitors walk into the same church lobby. One is a young married couple with a baby carrier and a diaper bag. The other is a man who mentions, in his first conversation, that his boyfriend just broke up with him. Now watch the room. Who gets the warm handshake and the lunch invitation? Who gets the careful smile and the sudden silence?

James watched this exact sorting happen with rich and poor visitors, and he refused to call it a personality quirk. He called it sin. James 2:1 — "My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory." Partiality is an old word for sorting people — deciding in the first ten seconds who deserves honor and who deserves distance.

Then James turns up the heat. James 2:8-9 — "If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors." Notice the word he chooses. Not awkwardness. Not bad manners. Sin — the same heavy word we have used so loudly about other people.

Tim Keller spent decades pastoring in the middle of New York City, and he noticed something strange about modern churches:

"Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect." — Tim Keller, The Prodigal God

Sit with that for a minute. The people who felt safest around Jesus — the morally messy, the sexually broken, the outsiders — are often the people who feel least safe around us. If our communities repel the very people Jesus attracted, something has gone wrong that no amount of correct doctrine can cover. Somewhere along the way, we kept his words and lost his welcome.

The log in our own eye

Confession that stays vague is not really confession, so let us be specific. Gay and lesbian people have been mocked from pulpits and in youth rooms. Teenagers absorbed the message — even when no one quite said it — that same-sex attraction sits at the top of some ranking of sins, a ranking the Bible never wrote. Parents have cut off their own children. Programs promised to change people's attractions through enough prayer and effort, and when change did not come, the wounded were blamed and shamed. Many walked away convinced that God himself had slammed the door.

Jesus has a picture for how this happens. Matthew 7:3 — "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" The church aimed a floodlight at one kind of brokenness and a nightlight at its own. Greed, gossip, pride, lust that stayed respectably heterosexual — those somehow got a pass. C.S. Lewis saw through this trick a long time ago:

"If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins… A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

A prig is a smug person who looks down on everyone else. Lewis is not saying the body does not matter — he held the historic Christian sexual ethic firmly. He is saying that pride, the cold sin of respectable people, is deadlier than the sins we love to condemn, precisely because it feels so much like righteousness from the inside.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains what all this judging actually does to the judge:

"Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Judging blinds. Love illuminates — it turns the lights on. Every stone the church has thrown has made it a little blinder to its own heart. Matthew 7:5 — "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." Notice that Jesus does not say specks never matter. He says you cannot see one, much less help with one, while a log is sticking out of your face.

Learning the tax collector's prayer

Jesus once told a story aimed at people "who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt" (Luke 18:9). Two men go up to pray. The religious expert thanks God that he is not like other men. The tax collector — a man everyone agreed was a genuine sinner — "standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'" (Luke 18:13). Jesus' verdict is stunning: "this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted" (Luke 18:14).

The church's greatest teachers learned to pray like the tax collector — starting with their own sin, including their own sexual sin. Augustine, perhaps the most influential theologian in Christian history, told the whole world that as a young man he had prayed:

"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." — Augustine, Confessions

Chastity and continence are old words for sexual self-control. The man who shaped a thousand years of Christian teaching introduced himself to the world as a sexual sinner who, for years, did not even want to be rescued. He understood something we keep forgetting: the church is not a club of the clean lecturing the dirty. It is a fellowship of the forgiven. 1 John 1:8-9 — "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

John Newton — a slave trader turned pastor, the man who wrote "Amazing Grace" — kept that posture to the end of his life:

"I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am." — John Newton

That is the only honest voice the church has ever had. Not "we, the righteous, have some concerns about you people," but "we, the forgiven, can show you where mercy is found."

Grace and truth in the same breath

Now watch Jesus do what we have failed to do. In John 8:1-11, religious leaders drag a woman caught in adultery into the temple courts. They are not grieved by her sin; they are using her — a real, terrified human being — as a prop in a theological trap. Jesus bends down, writes in the dust, then straightens up: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7). One by one, the stones drop. The oldest men leave first.

Then comes the conversation that should define every church on earth. John 8:10-11 — "Jesus stood up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' She said, 'No one, Lord.' And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.'" Hear the order. Grace comes first: "neither do I condemn you." The call to a new life comes second: "sin no more." He does not cancel either sentence, and he does not reverse them. Romans 2:4 asks why we ever thought it should work the other way: "Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" Kindness leads. It does not trail behind.

This is exactly what John says Jesus was made of. John 1:14 — "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth." Not half grace and half truth, carefully balanced. Full of both, at the same moment, toward the same person.

And here the gospel turns its light on us. The only person in that circle with the right to throw a stone — the only one without sin — did not throw it. Instead, months later, he stretched out his arms on a cross and let the judgment fall on himself. He stood where she stood, and where we stand. That is why James 2:13 can say, "Mercy triumphs over judgment." It is not a slogan. It is a report from Calvary.

Corrie ten Boom, who survived a Nazi concentration camp and spent the rest of her life preaching forgiveness, put it this way:

"There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

No pit — including the pit the church itself has dug for people — goes deeper than this love. A church that believes that can finally stop defending itself. As Keller wrote:

"The essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less." — Tim Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

A community soaked in that kind of humility can at last do what Micah 6:8 has always asked: "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Walking humbly is not a strategy for winning back the culture. It is plain obedience — and it is long overdue.

Going Deeper

Write a short confession today — yours, not the church's in general. One or two sentences about a time you treated a person as an issue: a joke you laughed at, a silence you kept, a welcome you withheld. Read 1 John 1:9 over what you wrote. Then pray for one specific person who has been hurt by Christians — by name, if you can. You do not have to fix anything today. Confession is not a strategy. It is telling God the truth, and it is where every real change begins.