But God…

Growing up and going to school back in the little town of Wyoming, Ontario, I was taught by an older generation of teachers who drilled english grammar into our heads until we could parse and diagram a sentence in our sleep. I have a particular memory of my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Holbrook. She was a fierce grammarian. She had a number of aphorisms which still rattle about in my head, but in particular she had some serious issues with the use of the word ‘but’. I remember her reminding us over and over again that the word ‘but’ negates everything that precedes it, so we had to be very careful in how we used it.

The sixth grade version of me understood the lesson from the perspective of recess politics, so it was not hard to understand. Imagine a teacher breaking up a fight on the playground. The first defence is almost universally “But he hit me first!” The word ‘but’ is meant to excuse the second punch in light of the injustice of the first punch. Mrs. Holbrook simply would not, in writing or in life, let us use the word ‘but’ in a way that tried to weasel out of responsibility or dismiss injury or injustice. I can hear her now in my mind saying: “‘But’ is a word that can cause injury on top of injury because it may dismiss pain while trying to justify it.”

Because the Church is a human institution of divine origin, we can often get things wrong. And when we do, the defense of our injustices or inflicted injuries may begin with a ‘but.’  To those healing from broken hearts, that ‘but’ becomes a further layer of grief added to an already painful burden. When the church responds with a ‘but’ and fails to care properly, no ocean of good works can negate the suffering of the one who has been injured.

On the other side of the coin, when the church acts as an agent of reconciliation and reaches out to those who are thought to be guilty parties in a dispute – part of our responsibility to care for all — the ‘but’ is often employed again, this time in righteous indignation to suggest that we should cut the guilty off and cast them into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

These are the frail and human uses of the word ‘but’.

But there is another way to use the word. That is—the way it is used in scripture by God. The words but God appear repeatedly in scripture to remind us of the true mercy, love and compassion on offer. The sentence structures are often the exact same as Mrs. Holbrook deplored, but the things that are being negated are all the failures we lay down.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”  – Psalm 73:26 

“When they had carried out all that the scriptures said about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead;”  – Acts 13:29-30

“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”  – Romans 5:6-8

I think Mrs. Holbrook would accept and applaud all these uses of the ‘but’ because they are all instances of how grace interrupts the cycle of death, or pain, or sin. This is the essential message we have to offer people that are deep in their own troubles or pain as they live them out. We can pour out before him all the reasons that we are unworthy, unready, unhappy, unloveable and unreachable. But God tells that inner storm “peace, be still” and we are made one with him again. We can all rejoice that we are living our daily lives after the but God. We can share this message with everyone who feels unworthy, unready, unhappy, unloveable and unreachable. We can become the living, breathing, incarnate but God to them.