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Philip Spiess
While we're still close to the topics of sin and atonement, I'd like to offer the following little story of rural America:
It seems that well south of where my wife and I live here in northern Virginia -- to wit, in southern Virginia -- in a very rural community quite near to the West Virginia border, there is a small, born-again evangelical Christian church located well up an isolated valley and submerged deep among the darkling pines, with a congregation that dates its establishment back to several years before the first McKinley administration. The actual structure of the church itself, severely Gothic Revival in style and all wooden fretwork in fabric, is nearly as old, and thus it recently was in serious need of having its coat of paint replenished.
The church fathers (no, there are no church mothers -- it is strictly a patriarchal church government down there) deemed it prudent to raise funds to purchase the necessary paint, and thus church bake sales, rummage sales, and pleas for donations of a fiduciary nature made to the pious and holy ensued, and in due course enough funds were subscribed to buy the necessary paint. Or so it was thought.
On a fine spring morning the elders, trustees, deacons, and lowly lay persons of said church assembled on the ridge behind the church with buckets of paint, brushes large and small, rollers, ladders, paint stirs, drop-cloths, and rags -- in short, all the accoutrements necessary to successfully accomplish a major church painting project. While the painting was going on, the ladies of the church served their menfolk and themselves with ample draughts of coffee, homemade rolls, and spicy Brunswick stew (the kids got cider and doughnuts, much to their satisfaction). All was going well: the front of the church, featuring its historic stained-glass doors purchased abroad, was painted first, then the long east and west sides, with their rows of Gothic clerestory windows, came under the stroke of the brush, and finally the rather plain back side of the church --
But here the paint they had acquired at such effort began to run out! Desperate, the most knowledgeable among them studied the labels on the paint cans and determined that, with a little bit of water and a little bit of luck, they could stretch that paint just far enough to finish the job. And so they did! They conquered that sucker and were standing back admiring a job well done when -- a sudden spring rain came on and drenched that back wall of the church with a mighty downpour . . . and all of the paint on said back wall washed right off and left it as bare as before!
As this unexpected and melancholy surprise, the congregation looked at one another in less than mild surmise and more than sad dismay, and at last, in the quiet gloaming of an evening in the woods, someone uttered the words that were on everybody's mind, if not their lips: "Oh, God! What are we going to do now?" And immediately a ray of sun broke forth from the dark clouds above them and burst down among them, shining immaculate from the blessed heavens, and a mighty voice spoke to them as from the deep: "Repaint -- and thin no more!"
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