Are you brave enough to be right?

Recently there was an article in the Straits Times stating that my church was told by the authorities to compensate one of its employees after she was fired for committing adultery with another church employee.  According to the article, the church was willing to allow the woman to keep her job, but only if she attended counseling and broke off her adulterous relationship.  But this didn't work out, so the church terminated her employment.  The newspaper headline was essentially "Church told to compensate employee for adultery".

If I had read that anywhere else, I'd have thought it to be a silly parody.  Sadly, it's not.  The world has gone mad.

Remember, an employee's right to employment is not absolute merely on the grounds that she is pregnant.  Take a simple example.  If an employee in your company breaks the company's policy and steals from the company, it's justifiable to sack that employee, even if that employee is pregnant.  Yet what the law is saying, in the case of the church, is that it is not justifiable for a church to sack an employee for breaking the church's policy.  This in turn means that the law thinks that it is unjustifiable for a church's policy to say that adultery is wrong.  May be perfectly legal, but mad!

I've read some of the comments on the internet.  Many of them are on the theme of "don't cast the first stone" or "who is the pastor to judge" or "isn't the church full of sinners, so sacking the employee is hypocritical".  Natural reactions.

But these all miss the point.  We accept that we are all sinners.  Pastor is a sinner. I am a sinner. But that doesn't make it OK.  Simply because everyone sins, doesn't make it acceptable.  Unfortunately, this truth seems to be lost these days.  More and more people believe that as long as enough people think it's OK, then it's OK.  Whatever is popular is true.

Jesus teaches us to hate the sin, but love the sinner.  If your children disobey you or are naughty, do you say, "it's OK"?  Does that make all parents hypocrites, since we ourselves disobey and are naughty at times?  No.  In fact, it is love that makes us discipline our children.  We do our children no favours when we tell them it's OK to misbehave.

"We have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it... They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness.  No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."  Hebrews 12:9-11

So, let's be clear that exercising discipline doesn't mean that there's no forgiveness, or that it constitutes "casting the first stone".  We absolutely love and forgive our children even when they do wrong, and even while we punish them.  I also don't believe any sensible person could say that parental discipline is "judgmental", "casting the first stone", or "hypocritical".  Even your boss at work isn't perfect either, but most of us are happy to accept that he's entitled to tell you where you're going wrong and sack you if you don't agree.

So why is it that a church leader is castigated for exercising that discipline over his people?  It doesn't mean the leader's perfect.  In fact it's one of the central tenets of our faith that he is a sinner, just like the rest of us.  But leading is a leader's job.  He wouldn't be doing his job if he turned a blind eye.  The church leader who says it's OK to remain in an adulterous relationship is a hypocrite.  But people who don't want to accept that discipline don't have to.  Nobody forces anyone to attend church or work at a church or accept a particular pastor as your spiritual leader.

So really, why do people (even Christians) react badly to the church taking a strong moral stance?  The truth is, most of us want to lower the standards as much as we can, because we know we don't match up and we don't want to be judged ourselves.  So we shoot down anyone who tries to set the standard high.  We say he is a hypocrite.  We are particularly gleeful if that person later fails.  Let's face it - many's the time when I've been afraid to make it clear that I am a Christian in my office, because it puts me up on a moral pedestal to be embarrassingly shot down if I slip up.  Even now I'm tempted to delete this blog post, for fear of setting myself up.

But you know what?  My ambition is to be that person who is brave enough to set the standard high for myself, and yes, for others.  If I fail, and I certainly will from time to time, and everyone laughs and sneers at me, so be it.  But I will continue to cheer on everyone who aims high.  Better to aim high and miss, than spend my life heckling those who want to try. 

On the other hand, if I hide the fact that I'm a Christian, or if I take the path of least resistance, the popular non-judgmental path, then that makes me a hypocrite.  God, give me courage to dare to fail, to dare to be righteous!

Cowardice asks the question "is it safe?"
Expediency asks the question "is it politic?"
But conscience asks the question "is it right?"
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one that it is right.

Martin Luther King Jr.