The sins of others…

The further away a sin is from me, the easier it is for me to judge it in a way that’s biblical, ethical, uncompromising… and entirely hypocritical.

You probably find this, too—it’s part of human nature.

So, those FIFA executives, that Sepp Blatter. The media and everyone in the UK Football Association, is falling over themselves to declare him guilty of what he hasn’t (yet) been charged with—using his power to serve his own bank balance and reputation, having convinced himself that his interests and FIFA’s interests were in fact the same thing.

The FA may not have won the race to host a World Cup, but it’s been quick out of the blocks in the contest to occupy the moral high ground.

BROWN ENVELOPES AND HANDBAGS
But the moral high ground is a slippery place to be. It appears that when the FA bid for two World Cups, it bought luxury Mulberry handbags for the wives of the 24 FIFA executives whose votes they wanted. It then also staged lucrative "friendly" matches in each of their countries. At what point do you cross the line from legitimate promotion to bribery? When it involves a nice handbag, it’s a gift; but when it involves a brown envelope, it’s corruption.

When challenged about this on the radio, Richard Caborn, the politician who was at the heart of England’s failed World Cup 2018 bid, responded that criticising such “gifts” was just talking about “fluff”. “I want to talk about the symptoms, about FIFA,” he said.

And that's the strange thing about wrongdoing; about sin. Often, it only looks clear once you’re a long way away from it. What is clearly black and white from a safe distance seems much greyer, much easier to ignore, much more justifiable to excuse when it's close up. And the closer it is to you—and especially when it’s in you—the more fluffy it becomes.

THE CORINTHIAN MISTAKE
But to look at the world in this way is to do the exact opposite of how the Bible calls me to live, and how the Bible tells me to contribute to my church. I am making what we might call “the Corinthian mistake” (or rather, one of the Corinthian mistakes—that particular church seemed to be very gifted at finding things to get wrong).

In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul rebukes them for failing to judge sin within their own congregation. And at the end of the chapter, he writes something that turns our natural outlook back to front:
“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside” (v 12-13)

If Sepp Blatter has done wrong (and currently it’s only alleged, not proven) then God will judge him, possibly partly through the agency of the FBI. But that’s actually not really my business—or yours. But if we’re church members, the sin within our congregations and our hearts that masquerades as “fluff” but is in fact darkest dirt is to be very much our concern. In other words, we need to learn to see sin more clearly, the closer we are to it.

A HIGHER PLACE
It’s always easy to judge the world. There’s no cost to it. There’s no humility required in it. There’s no repentance resulting from it.

The cross humbles us because it brings our sin into sharp focus—and then the cross exalts us because it holds out salvation.

It’s judging our own hearts, and helping our Christian friends to judge theirs, that is harder, more costly, more humiliating, and requiring repentance. It involves clambering down from the moral high ground, leaving our excuses behind us as we go. It requiring saying, and meaning, what Paul did of himself:
“Christ Jesus came to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1 v 15).

But it leaves us able to end up far higher than the moral high ground—which turns out to be a mere foothill in a swamp. It leaves us sinners, walking to Calvary to find a Saviour—and at the foot of the cross, the ground is level. The cross humbles us because it brings our sin into sharp focus—and then the cross exalts us because it holds out salvation. And so, James says:
“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up” (James 4 v 10).

Next time I find myself tutting at someone “out there”, I need to focus a lot more closely on the not-so-fluffy-sin that is “in here”.

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