According to the website areavibes.com, the crime rate in San Francisco, CA, is “151% higher than the national average. For every 100,000 people, there are 18.86 daily crimes that occur in San Francisco. . . .In San Francisco you have a 1 in 15 chance of becoming a victim of any crime.”
Yet, in August city officials decided to sanitize language referring to criminals. The Board of Supervisors is purging the city’s vocabulary of words such as “offender” and “addict” and changing designations such as “convicted felon” to nicer phrases, like “justice-involved person.” And an offender released from custody will be known as a “formerly incarcerated person,” or just a “returning resident.”
A juvenile “delinquent” will now be called a “young person with justice system involvement,” or a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system.” And drug addicts or substance abusers, meanwhile, will become “a person with a history of substance use.”
And, if criminals are no longer “criminals,” then victims cannot be called “victims,” either. The San Francisco Chronicle noted an individual whose car has been broken into could be known to police as “a person who has come in contact with a returning resident who was involved with the justice system and who is currently under supervision with a history of substance use.”
Because, you know, that makes sense.
Officials say these re-designations arise from their concern for the offender’s future. “We don’t want people to be forever labeled for the worst things that they have done,” Matt Haney told the Chronicle. “We want them ultimately to become contributing citizens and referring to them as felons is like a scarlet letter that they can never get away from.”
That’s nice of them–misguided and unrealistic—but nice. See, the problem here is simple. People do not change because someone is nice to them. They change because someone calls them a criminal and yet chooses to help them change.
Denial changes nothing.
And sanitizing the language that ties us to the past doesn’t help us move forward. True, being labeled for life can anchor us to the past. Nobody wants that. But ignoring the past makes it impossible to change. It’s a fundamental truth of human nature that we must admit our problem before we can embrace a solution. You can’t fix a problem by renaming it. And you can’t be cleansed from sin by denying it. People who refuse to admit they are in the dark never come out to the light, and people who call a grave a comfortable cave never rise to new life.
To put it another way—grace is not denial. Grace is redemption. And redemption requires that a sinner admit he, or she, is a sinner.
The apostle Paul would not have been popular in California (to put it mildly). He was adamantly opposed to the notion that a person could be changed while at the same time denying they needed to be changed.
When Paul recalled his redemption, he didn’t deny his past or sanitize the language. He reviewed it as the reason he knew he was saved in Christ. Decades after he had been forgiven of his sin, he wrote, “This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’—and I am the worst of them” (1 Tim. 1:15).
And knowing this produced two essential outcomes. First, he marveled in what Christ had done for him. And second, it motivated him to serve Christ out of gratitude for God’s grace. “For I am the least of the apostles, not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Cor. 15:9-10).
Before we can grasp what we are saved for, we need to know what we are saved from. We must admit it, point at it, confess it. And then we experience what only God can do—redeem us and change us.
Then, God does not rename sin. He renames you. He makes you a new creation with a new beginning (2 Cor. 5:17).
Jesus didn’t come to be nice to you. He came to give you eternal life. He came to make dead people live (Eph. 2:1, Rom. 6:8). And that requires a radical change that begins with your confession of sin.
Sin by any other name is still sin. And a sinner by any other name still needs a Savior.
Come to Christ and find out who you were meant to be.