Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part III

Sins of Identity

At one point in her Augustinianesque "Confessions" about her conversion Rosaria Butterfield has this to say:

Slowly but steadily, my feelings did start to change--feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't.  I--like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian--felt really comfortable, very at home in my body, in my lesbianism.  One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session.  Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of sin--how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness.  I have walking this journey with help.  There is no other way to do it.  I still walk this journey with help.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.23.]

One of the implicit challenges in Butterfield's book is for the church is to learn to walk with saints converting out of what she calls "sins of identity".  These are conditions where a sinner has told himself that he is a certain kind of person and has built a lifestyle accordingly.  The sins have become institutionalised within and without.  Sexual sins, when translated into full throated expressions of self-identity, are always like this. Involvement in false religions, when it has touched and conformed the heart and soul of a sinner, is also like this.  

We marvel at the power and grace of God to deliver people from such sins of identity.  There is no power upon earth that can do this.  Only God can so reconstruct such a human being thus wound up in sin and error.  But, and here is the challenge, as Butterfield says, such a person can only walk this journey with help. Are we, as God's people, willing to do this?  We have to be.  It is our calling.  We dare not be, lest we provoke our great King to anger.