As you may know, we’re going to be spending the next several months reflecting on the concept of integrity in light of the Scriptures, and vice versa—a concept which eludes easy definition. We don’t want to abandon the effort, like Justice Potter Stewart, and say, “OK, I can’t completely define it, but I know it when I see it”; but moving from “I know it when I see it” to being able to articulate what exactly it is that we know is a challenge because integrity can’t be defined with a checklist. As Emily highlighted last week, it is an attribute of God, and like all such, it is too large a thing for us to pin down and dissect. We have to watch it fly, so to speak, to understand it.
Fortunately, for those of us who were here before the service last week for the Opening, Frank Benyousky gave us a little help when he started a parallel conversation about the nature of truth. Like integrity, truth is an attribute of God, and thus when we ask, “What is truth?” we are diving into a sea of which we will never see the bottom in this life; but for all that, I believe there is an answer that can guide us in that dive. It dates back over 2300 years to the Greek philosopher Aristotle: if I say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, I speak the truth. If I say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, I do not speak the truth.
It’s a simple enough definition, and can play out just that simply with regard to matters of scientific or historical fact; but of course, when you start dealing with the human heart, figuring out “what is” gets much, much harder. All the same, if we understand that each person is an objective reality—each of you exists, and each of you are who you are, whether I perceive and understand you accurately or not—and ultimately God are an objective reality who determine himselves who he are, not a concept we can define however it suits us, then I think there’s a principle here we can use. If we can say truth is alignment with what is real, I believe we can understand integrity in the same way.
To lay out where I’m going here, there’s an analogy to the structural integrity of a building or machine, which will work properly only and precisely as far as it’s in harmony with the laws of physics. For one, it must be well-built: made with materials which are sufficient to the purpose, parts made with sufficient precision, within design tolerances, and all joints of whatever type meeting specifications. For another, it must be well-designed. The specifications and design tolerances must be correct to begin with, and the design as a whole must be obedient to the laws of physics. If any of these elements are lacking—well, one of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, captured it well in her novel Falling Free, which is dedicated to her engineer father; this is her protagonist, the engineer Leo Graf:
“You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.” That has been a touchpoint for me for years now, for as with a building or a machine, so too with the human soul: whatever is not true in us will ultimately fail, and be exposed by its failure. As a building must be well-built to maintain its integrity, so integrity of character depends on a consistent internal reality—an undivided heart, or wholeheartedness, to use Emily’s term from last week. As well, a machine can only maintain its integrity if it operates in a way consistent with external reality, and the same is true for integrity of character. For a machine, that means the laws of physics—any machine which is not designed to take into account the law of gravity, for instance, will never work. For the human soul, we might call that external reality the moral universe, but ultimately it’s the character of God, who made all that is, including each and every one of us.
If our integrity depends on living in a way that is consistent with the character of God, obviously it’s a journey we’ll never complete in this life; but how do we even start? The answer, I think, is in our passage from this morning, 1 John 2:28-3:10. Hear the word of the Lord:
John here is talking about our union with Christ. This is a doctrine which is largely unknown across the church—and I don’t just mean the modern American church—because it’s hard to wrap our minds around, and nearly impossible to reduce to three bullet points and a story about a cat. It’s a mystical reality, and mysticism doesn’t tend to leave congregations walking out the door feeling they’ve learned something useful to apply to their lives that week. Jesus didn’t try to define it, he gave us an image, telling his disciples in John 15 that he is the vine and we are the branches. Even Paul didn’t try to define it; instead, he described the church as the body of Christ, who is our head, and talked about being crucified with Christ and united with Christ in his death and resurrection. John doesn’t try to explain it here either, he signposts it: live into this reality, experience it, know it from the inside.
This is why John talks about sin the way he does in this letter. It’s something which drives a lot of people buggy: one minute, he tells us we all sin and anyone who denies that is a liar, and the next he seems to be insisting that if you sin, it means you’re a child of the Devil. The key here is twofold—two aspects of a common reality. One, John is talking about abiding—what do you live in, what do you walk in, what’s your pattern of life? It’s not whether or not you sin—he’s already answered that: yes, you do—but whether sin characterizes your life, powers your life, and gives your life its shape and form.
That’s one reason I used the Message this morning, because Eugene got this. That’s why where other translations read, for instance, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin”—that’s the NIV, from 3:9—his translation reads, “People conceived and brought into life by God don’t make a practice of sin.” I’ve spent many hours listening to my children practice their instruments, and in those hours I heard lots of wrong notes, wrong rhythms, wrong everything. But they didn’t practice the wrong notes or the wrong rhythms; and so, over time, they grew.
So, one, when John talks about sin, he’s talking about abiding; and two, when he talks about its opposite, righteousness, he makes clear it’s not the cause of our union with Christ but an effect of it. That fits with what we see elsewhere in John’s writings. Look up the page a ways to chapter 1, for instance: righteousness is the result of walking in the light. If you’re walking through an unfamiliar room in absolute darkness, it doesn’t matter how determined, how dedicated, or how sincere you are—none of those things are going to get you out of there unwounded. Blind stupid luck might, but that won’t hold for long. You can only walk in the right way when you have the light to see where you’re going.
Or consider John 15, which I referenced a moment ago: branches bear fruit because they’re part of the vine. That’s just what healthy branches on a healthy grapevine do. That’s why Jesus told his disciples, “You will know them by their fruit.” A tree doesn’t grow up, decide it wants to be an apple tree, and then start working as hard as it can to squeeze apples out of its limbs; that sounds like a Shel Silverstein poem, which means it wouldn’t end well for the tree. If it’s an apple tree, apples are simply a natural part of its life.
In the same way, if we are in Christ, that is now the fundamental reality of our life. Our challenge is not to strive as hard as we can to produce fruit, our challenge is to stop striving to live out of something else instead. The standard is not that we not sin, but that we not make sin the pattern of our lives. The flip side to this is that being really good at being really good doesn’t make you a Christian, it makes you a Pharisee.
The reason it’s so hard to live with integrity is that we are dis-integrated beings. Sin has broken us, and the world is doing its best to shatter us further. It tempts us to sin, drawing us away from the only One who can integrate us, and then it pushes and pulls us in different directions, trying to spread the shards of our souls across the widest landscape possible. When Emily used Voldemort to exemplify her point that internal consistency alone does not constitute integrity—to put it in the terms I used a few minutes ago, there must also be alignment with the external reality of the moral universe, of good and evil, right and wrong—my wife leaned over and pointed out that no one could have less integrity than a man who had deliberately and of his own volition torn his soul into seven pieces. (I started to say seven equal pieces, but you would think his soul probably tore in half each time, which would mean he only had of it left. Which . . . wow.) His universe is fictional, of course, but I think what he did literally according to the rules of that universe represents, metaphorically, what our world tries to get us to do.
Unfortunately, where the church should be a place and a community where we are built up in integrity, sometimes it’s anything but. A few weeks ago, on Palm Sunday, I noted that legalism is a powerful and ever-present temptation for the church; when the church succumbs to that temptation, it only strengthens the world’s efforts to fragment us. Legalism is the antithesis of abiding in Christ, because it gets cause and effect exactly backwards. Rules and checklists and “principles for Christian living” and seven keys to a better whatever may improve our behavior, but they do not deepen our union with Christ—they are just yet more voices calling us to battle, not with the sin in our hearts, but with ourselves. As Andrew Peterson poignantly asked in his song “Be Kind to Yourself,” “How does it end when the war that you’re in is just you against you against you?”
To make explicit something I’ve been saying implicitly to this point, the lack of moral integrity in behavior is the product of a lack of structural integrity of the self. To illustrate this, I want to go back to the sailing analogy Emily used last week. She talked about the importance of integrity in the sails, and was absolutely right; but the integrity of the sails depends on the integrity of the masts, and the integrity of both depends on the integrity of the lines—ropes, to us landlubbers. This is a conversation from another sci-fi novel, March to the Stars by David Weber and John Ringo, between two human characters, one of whom is a sailor and one of whom is very much not. (Why they’re on a sailing ship on an alien planet is another conversation.)
Just so we’re clear, the masts are the vertical poles, with spars—the cross-pieces—attached to them. The sails are connected to the spars with ropes. When the sails catch the wind, the stresses on the masts can be tremendous, so to keep them from falling over, they are anchored to the deck of the ship with stays. If the stays fail, the masts will fall. If the masts fall, or the spars begin to fail, the sails will go with them. If the ropes attached to the sails break, the sails will flap themselves to rags in the wind.
Integrity in our behavior, then, as important as it is, cannot be achieved by focusing on our behavior; that would be like putting all new sails on a sailing ship and ignoring the fact that the stays were badly frayed. That’s why God doesn’t change us at the behavior level first. That’s frustrating for me, and I know I’m not the only one. It’s great to sing praise to God “who is able to do more than we can ask or imagine,” but is there any reason he can’t also do what I can ask or imagine? That raises the question, though: if he did, if God cleaned out all the sinful thoughts and behaviors that drive me to my knees, what then? As I suggested a few weeks ago, that would create fertile soil in my heart for spiritual pride; removing my surface flaws would also mean there would be nothing to remind me of the deeper ones which are the real problem.
God is not on about making our behavior respectable, or appropriate, or even godly. He certainly wants us to be godly in our behavior, but his aims in each of us are much higher: where our sin has dis-integrated us and this world is worsening our dis-integration, he is re-integrating us. He is uniting us with his Son, Jesus Christ, and by this he is unifying us as ourselves. Thus we can say with Edward Mote in his great hymn “Christ the Solid Rock” that even when the storm of life is wrecking everything around us, Jesus is our hope, because he is our stay—he keeps us standing, even through the storm.
As we are being united with the Lord, he is healing and repairing our divided hearts and our doublemindedness. In so doing, he is purifying us, for as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “purity of heart is to will one thing.” More, he is giving us his peace, for the peace of God is not the mere absence of conflict, it is shalom—wholeness. Specifically, shalom is the wholeness which comes from being in harmony with God and his will, and thus in harmony within yourself, so that God’s harmony flows outward from you into your relationships with others and the world around you more generally. As we are being made one with Christ, we are being made one within ourselves, and we are being made one with one another.
This reality is embodied at the Lord’s table. As the bread and wine are to us by the Spirit of God the visible, tangible representation of the body and blood of Christ, so too we by the Spirit are lifted up into the presence of Christ gathered with his whole body, the church through every place and time. This is why, going back at least to the third century, the body of Christ has been invited to his table through a simple, brief little dialogue known as the Sursum corda (which means “Lift up your hearts” in Latin). Let us join with our scattered brothers and sisters this morning and do the same.
Photo © 2023 Wikipedia user Almanta; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
