Reading Francis

Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope.

Pope Francis, speaking to young people in Paraguay, 2015

In sports, you usually don’t win if you’re playing not to lose.

In life, you usually don’t learn, or create, or connect if you’re petrified of making a mistake.

In our moral life, you usually don’t love if you’re obsessively focused on not sinning.

I listen to podcasts a lot when I drive, and lately most of them have either been in Italian or are about learning Italian or both. And this week as I was driving, one of the podcasters was saying (in English) that in order to really learn Italian, you have to speak it. What keeps Italian students from getting better is the fear that they will say the wrong thing. 

“Like speaking Italian, you can’t learn the guitar by reading books about music theory and practicing chords once a week. You have to play the guitar,” she said. “And you can’t wait until you have everything perfect before you start, because you never will. You have to be willing to make mistakes or you’ll never start. You learn more from your mistakes than from anything you study anyway.”

And I thought, “This is not just about Italian and guitar, is it?”

When I am too tired for podcasts, I like listening to Scott Bradlee’s music. Bradlee is the founder of Postmodern Jukebox, which takes pop songs and recasts them into different genres in ways that, virtually every time, improve on the original. Bradlee is a ragtime jazz pianist, and the constantly changing collection of musicians around him are all remarkable, but every once in a while Bradlee gets to show what he can do on the piano, and if you can listen past the vocals to hear it, it is magical. 

I can’t believe there is sheet music for what he does. Bradlee doesn’t play the “right notes.” His playing is all over the map and literally all over the keyboard. But it fits the song perfectly and takes it to another level. Listen to his cover of “Call Me Maybe”. Or “Stacy’s Mom”. (I know.) Or listen to the piano on Jason Robert Brown’s “King of the World” from his Broadway show “Songs for a New World.” The ability to play all around the “right notes” in a way that is both utterly chaotic and yet still spot on just astounds me.

In order to be that creative, a musician has to have been okay making a LOT of mistakes along the way. They have to have been willing to sound really foolish while they figured out what worked and what very much did not. 

I think this is what Pope Francis was getting at when he told a group of young people to go “make a mess,” early in his pontificate. (Which is a radical thing for a pope to say.)

I am struck by the way that Christians have taken a message proclaimed as Good News because of its offer of divine forgiveness and grace, looked past Jesus’ clear moral direction to love whole-heartedly, everybody, always (to borrow from Bob Goff), and instead build a morality around the imperative for individuals to avoid sin. Sin is bad, yes. We should avoid it, yes. But if we focus all our energies on avoiding sin, we can handicap our ability to love.

Let me try another analogy. I have tried to lose weight over the years (some days I try harder than others). When I have been successful, it is not because I focused on what NOT to eat. The only diet that has ever worked for me is one that focuses on what healthy foods TO eat, which has the effect of leaving less room and interest for the other, less healthy stuff.

You can make a moral system the same way. You can focus on finding new and powerful ways to live love – of God and neighbor – until you find you have less time and inclination to focus on yourself (and self-absorption is where sin tends to come from anyway). But we, who were commanded to love, focus on building a system of not messing up instead.

It’s funny that this has been on my mind this week. The readings coming up Sunday in the lectionary set up for a lot of “Stand up against sin” sermons. Ezekiel (33:7-9) has God telling Ezekiel that if he gets the message that God is going to smite someone, but he doesn’t pass that message along, God will hold Ezekiel as accountable as the smited. Matthew (18:15-20) has Jesus telling his followers how to discipline members of the group who sin against each other. Even the response from Psalm 95 is “Harden not your heart,” presumably if you get confronted by Ezekiel or fellow church members for doing something wrong.

But the theme of the psalm really isn’t about scowling at sin. It’s about joy, which doesn’t stem from a scowl. And then Paul, in Romans 13:8-10, underscores the point:

Brothers and sisters: Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has filled the law.

I am not one of those progressives who doesn’t believe sin is real. I know my own brokenness well enough to see it reflected around me. We are not OK. But there are a couple of reasons I think centering a morality on stamping out sin is the wrong way to pursue holiness.

First, it puts the light of the Good News under a basket. If the message we’re supposed to spread is one of God’s grace, we can’t use all of our breaths to tell people how to make themselves less awful. If we do, we end up misleading people into thinking Christianity is defined by a moral legalism that sounds a lot more like what Jesus yelled at the Pharisees for teaching than it does His own message.

Second, it’s not successful, at least not as a centerpiece for sanctification. Have I changed some of the ways I live because I’ve tried to sin less? I have, at least to a degree. But only as a downstream effect of being touched by Love and wanting to reciprocate. If reducing sin was my main strategy, I would never find my way to Love; I’d just keep playing ethical whack-a-mole. The best way to avoid hell is to focus on pursuing heaven.

Third, to the extent anyone is paying attention to the message, it actually exacerbates what is emerging as the biggest challenge of the next generation: paralysis by fear. Look at the data around youth and young adults today, and the sins our parents harangued us to avoid – sex and drinking and even dancing are in decline (Loved Footloose as a teen, ngl). 

And yet isolation, loneliness, self-harm and suicide are on the rise among those same generations. At least some researchers point to the smartphone and social media as the culprits here, because they have created a fear of being ridiculed or even “canceled” that is so strong that many young people shrink from the world around them.

This is a secularized, high-tech version of centering morality on fear of sin over pursuit of love. The sins that get you ridiculed (awkwardness) or canceled (speaking your mind) might be different, but the focus on avoiding the bad is the same. And this secularized version lacks any assurance of grace, forgiveness, or redemption. A sin-centered Christian morality feeds into the same ethos that creates the despair from which today’s youth need saving.

None of the kids who are afraid of being imperfect are going to play piano like Scott Bradlee. They will never take the chance it requires to start speaking Italian poorly. Nor will they love like the saints. Even if Gen X kids like me grew up making messes and needed some reining in, the world has changed. Pope Francis was right, and radical. We need to encourage young people to make a mess (and then tidy it up). 

If Love is anything, it is messy.