MORAL COPS
When I was a boy, our pastor lived behind us. There was an alley, a chicken house, and a barn between us, but it was always on my mind that “the preacher” lived nearby. He could see what I did wrong.
I guess I thought he was always on the lookout for anyone sinning and doing wrong stuff. (Our church had a long list of wrong stuff.) In my mind, he was kind of The Moral Police. He had a lot of help in that. There were a lot of gossips in our church. If someone saw you doing something on the wrong stuff list, it was immediately spread all over our town of 3000.
You were careful about what you did and where you did it. It taught us to hide our sin.
I am afraid that there are churchgoers today who feel as if their job is to “call out sin and sinners”. They want their pastor to “preach on sin,” especially the sin of others who often are not there listening to the sermon anyway.
Those who say that want to hear a sermon on sin They often think of passages like Romans 1:26 – 28 (a passage that many feel condemns homosexual practices), but not the next verse that says “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.” Romans 1:29-31 NIV
A sermon on that passage should be unsettling for many of us. It lists many of my sins. Our pastor preached on this passage a few weeks ago. It made me think and confess.
Jesus was not a Moral Policeman. He accepted people who were “living in sin”. He spoke against religious people who were the Moral Police and who felt as if they were morally superior to “sinners”.
My understanding of our job as followers of Jesus is not to be the Moral Police pointing out sin and wrongdoing in others, but to examine ourselves and then to reflect Jesus to the world in a way that draws people to him. Not by making people hide from him. Most people know they are sinners already.
I just read that passage again. It reminded me that I am a sinner in need of Grace both to receive and give.