Summary

Honest to God! That’s the title of a 1963 book by then pretty radical Bishop JAT Robinson… He was encouraging church folks back then to stop all their religious posturing to ‘get real!’ with God! The Church of 1960s Britain was full of all sorts of religiosity: traditional rules and & traditions! …and we’re not so different. While lots has changed, it’s still as if we can’t help ourselves. We have the beautiful and profound simplicity of the Gospel which is all about us being released to know who we are in Christ and what that means… but we can’t just leave it at that! And so we embellish it! We add on so much to who and what Christ does, that we risk losing our Gospel selves, allowing ourselves to be all tied up in what we’ve embellished!

And so, that’s what JAT Robinson wrote his book, calling the church back to a place of deepest honesty. Willing to appear unmasked! Vulnerable![i] And THAT (Psalm 25 models for us) is the only truly authentic posture for us to take before Our God! But that’s difficult for us! We don’t like being empty-handed – we avoid that degree of vulnerability! We like to have some sense of entitlement before we receive anything from anyone – we like to feel we earn stuff. ‘You shouldn’t have’, we may say, if we receive anything we don’t really believe we deserve!

And so, coming before God, being the recipient of unlimited eternal grace it’s like we want to know how we can better earn it/deserve it. Is that partly why we develop all these elaborate religious systems – to help us feel at least a little more entitled to be in the presence of God’s holiness! I mean, seriously? As if we could ever actually earn any of this!!!

But what does God actually want of us? Surely, it’s just to be real![ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke about the need for us only ever to approach the Holiness of God with ‘the view from underneath’ describing the fear and trembling of us knowing our weaknesses and yet prepared to go there, because we know that it’s not ourselves but on GOD that we rely! It’s GOD’S strength! GOD’S faithfulness! NOT OURS! There’s nothing that I can do to earn any of this!

There is SUCH a liberation here: for all of us! It means that we can all actually just stop pretending to be anything other than what we truly actually are! The Gospel of Christ urges us just to let it go falling upwards into who Christ has made us to be!

All of ‘this’, then, to be pared back to the necessary vulnerability to which we are all called. This is the attitude, the posture, the liberating, but profound humility with which we are to come! It’s not about the defensive productivity that the world insists from us so much as honest, open-hearted/open-handed receptivity …vulnerability! This is the honesty we must bring – every time we gather – no pretending, just allowing God’s own Holiness free to investigate and convict and release and train and empower.

Yet, what most of us like to project, is actually not real! We’ve learnt not to be too real! We’ve learnt to be masked/ guarded, careful… Always to pretend to be better than we actually are…

It’s not that we are fake exactly, just that we believe it’s not safe for us to be as honest as we could be! Seriously. Most of us live with fear: for some it’s deep down, for others it’s more obviously! Or with bitterness. Or resentment! Disappointment. Sadness. Grief. Regrets. Guilt. Perhaps it’s because we’ve hurt others, or been hurt. Or overlooked. Or disrespected. Perhaps we’ve had relationship breakdowns… Perhaps we’ve been disillusioned, even by loved ones.

The point is that all of us are carrying stuff that we may be quite unable to let go. Psalm 25 models how we are given to respond to it all! Beginning with the outward praising of God!

This is us as we want to be, and to be seen by others – happy, counting our blessings… To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.  O my God, in you I trust; but then, it’s almost as if that psalmists can’t help themselves, becoming very real! Hear as the