If loving Grace is wrong, I don't want to be right ...

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right

Sister Margaret McBride can probably speak to this issue better than I.

A member of the ethics committee of St Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, she consented along with other Doctors and professionals to allow an abortion because a patient’s life was endangered by continuing the pregnancy.

For that she has received the harshest of penalties – excommunication from her church - because of that choice. Only someone who has “married” themself to the church can fully appreciate what this has cost her.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said that "the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral." He is absolutely right of course. Sister Margaret did something wrong, and the church is unquestionably right to reprove her.

I myself cannot imagine the horror of facing such a choice – trading a woman’s life for her child’s (assuming that the baby could have been saved, which is not certain). It is an appropriate outcome in such cases, according to Bishop Olmsted, that the mother should die. To which there is also a certain horrible but inescapable logic.

Doing the right thing is not always easy. And this is what should happen in a world ruled by anyt sense of what is right, undeniably, irrevocably, and always right.

Who cannot appreciate the desire, even the need to live in such a world, with clear-cut rules and orders and categories. It is our constant search, our constant debate. And as long as we never face such choices as Sister Margaret, it seems an appropriate and fine way to live.

But then again.

Consider the ranging battles in the church today, the driving desire for the right, to erase wrong, to stand clearly on the side of God and His Word and stem the rising liberal erosion of value, of rightness. Is it not true that the Bible clearly tells us homosexuality is sinful, and if so, are we not obligated to stand firmly against it, in defense of marriage and pulpit? Churches are bleeding members and congregations for the lack of this simple rule: there is no place in the church for tolerating gay and lesbian marriage or ministry. None.

And shouldn’t then this always be our modus operandi? If we are called to the place about right and wrong then we will stand with integrity and power over and against all manner of sinfulness, wherever it is clearly proclaimed by Scripture and Tradition. We shall eradicate our pews of adulterers and fornicators, of liars and cheaters, of the irreligious and the intemperate.

People who forsake the speed limit on the freeway. Students who cheat on tests at school. Employees who take pens or post-it notes home from the office. Pastors who look at their Facebook page during office hours.

Do you know where this ends? I do. With Sister Margaret McBride and her awful, unimaginable, choice. Divorced from the church we love and the God we need.

Though it seems at first blush not to be, the fact is that Bishop Olmsted surely had a choice, too. What he did in excommunicating Sister Margaret was affirm the Law of God, the primacy of righteousness, and the authority of the church. What he did was turn his back of Jesus Christ.

For the sake of being right he forsook grace.

And we live daily in danger of doing so, too.

Someone recently reminded me that there are many, many people in the church who are angry and frustrated, who fear the direction of the church in its unwillingness to stand correctly against things that must be wrong. Someone recently reminded me that to many people this doesn’t seem like their church anymore.

Which it is not. Nor has it ever been. This is the church of Jesus Christ, who rules his kingdom in a very different way.

Being right is a powerful anchor, a steady foundation in the stormy seas of a difficult and confusing world. But like all weights, it is also the force that holds us down, turns us against one another, keeps us from rising above the real powers of sin, death and the devil, restrains us from the very Grace of God. Being right is the power to drown our church, each other, ourselves. Being right is very death.

It was Luther, finally, who reminded us, that the gift of Grace is a more wonderful “daily drowning” in baptism, the collapse of our search for righteousness until all that remains is a healthy dependence of the Grace of God. This God reminds us daily that we do not actually know the difference between right and wrong, not matter how powerfully we assert it, that we are not good, ever, not matter how certain we feel, that we must have a faith which knows only one good, only one God.

Sister Margaret faced a truth that we must face every day, though hopefully in not such a dramatic way. Life is full of choices too large for human beings.

We cannot depend on them. We must only depend on Him.

For our own safety, for the sake of our mortal souls, maybe we should stop trying to be right so much, and be thankful for the God who saves us in spite of them, from them, and through them.

Sister Margaret, our prayers are with you, and our pews are open for you.