Give up being a saint.  It'll be a lot better for everyone.  

We have all known that person who is always right on moral matters and leaves no room in their mind for the possibility of error.  If we buy into their charade we too might begin to believe that true life is a matter of wearing the right things, saying the right things, making sure we do all the do's and don't all the don'ts.  This is the person who sucks all the joy out of a party because there was a curse word in a song playing in the background.  I know this person well because I use to be a person like this and still find myself creeping backwards into thinking that I can pull myself up by my moral bootstraps and make myself acceptible to God... until my bootstraps snap and the clothes i've worked so hard to get the stains out of get soiled with my own filth (there's an image for you).  

The beautiful thing is that the right way, the way that Jesus called us to has nothing to do with our adherence to rules, or our capacity to keep a clean track record.  It has everything to do with humility, something which many a Christian have long forgotten.  But we find humility's high calling throughout all of scripture.  David said it in Psalm 51, 'God you will not turn a broken and contrite spirit away'.  Micah said it when he wrote, "What does God require?  To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk... humbly with your God".  Peter said, "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble".   We look at Mary Magdalene, the thief on the cross, the syro-phoenecian woman, and see that Jesus could not resist the humble.  So, it's time to count all our super-spiritual, ego-inflating, moralistic, ecclesial jerking around for what it is... poo.  Yep, i would probably use another word for it if there wasn't a permanent record on this blog.  In Philippians 3 Paul says all the junk he thought made a good person should be counted as, in the KJV, rubbish... that's greek for poo - exegete that Bible scholar.  

It's time we realize the depth of the cross in our own lives... it's not that we made Christ die on the cross - we didn't even care.  We were oblivious, and yet he loves us still.  And so when we begin trying to pretty ourselves up we are pretty much saying, "wow, a cross, that's great Jesus... but i got it covered - thanks, but no thanks."  And so we take the greatest gift of grace and freedom and ask God if he saved the receipt because we want to take it back and get what we think we need... some decorations for our poo.  

So to really become humble is a gift directly tied to accepting the magnitude of grace given freely by God.  It is that grace that lets us see those we once despised and avoided through the eyes of Jesus and offer them grace, love, and acceptance as well.  It is that grace that lets us willingly without compulsion take last place.  And the benefit?  Well when we get in last place like Jesus asked us to, we won't be surprised when others put us there.   

-This post was inspired by Brennan Manning's 'The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus'