Grace, mercy, and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
There was an article in The New York Times a few weeks ago that caught my attention. The title is “Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin.” It’s written by a mother who writes, “The notion of sin dominated my girlhood, it was the inflexible yardstick against which I was measured. God was the megaphone bleating in my head: You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad.” She goes on to tell how she slowly wandered away from the church and religion altogether. When she became a mother, she resolved to raise her children differently than she was. She concludes by saying, “I had raised my daughter without sin.”
Immediately, the alarms went off in my head. Not only does this approach raise theological concerns, but the bigger concern is the pastoral one. Without an understanding of sin, how will her daughter understand the reality that we all know as described by St. Paul in Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” Will she end up thinking that her mistakes are simply a lack of willpower? Will she beat herself up for not being perfect? How will she ever experience the beauty and power of grace?
In another article that I read, a theologian writes about teaching introductory religion classes to undergraduates and he notes that “sin” is, by far, the most difficult concept to teach because students are so resistant to it. He writes that “My students get uncomfortable because the doctrine of sin is heard as a violation of their moral values: it encourages judgmentalism, repression, not accepting people as they are, and creepy religious power dynamics.” This professor says that in Christian doctrine, “sin is a load-bearing structure;” so if the students don’t get sin, they won’t understand anything else.
To be fair, I wasn’t raised with the fear of going to Hell, I wasn’t told that I was a sinner in the hands of an angry God. I don’t have any trauma around the word “sin.” Though I wasn’t raised in a family or church that avoided talking about sin the way the mother of New York Times article did, I can’t ever recall sin coming up as a topic of discussion. We might acknowledge a flaw here and there, but overall, we think that we are decent people. And that might even be true, you might be decent. Generally, this is the way that sin is handled in many religious circles. Sure, we might think of sin when it comes to the Holocaust or child abuse, but we tend not to think about sin as a part of our daily lives. But that doesn’t mean that you aren’t infected by sin.
Talk about sin can be very damaging to people. The doctrine of sin can be misrepresented to turn God into a sort of Santa Claus figure – keeping an eye on everyone, making a list of who’s naughty or nice, and then rewarding them with either blessing or damnation. Sadly, that’s the version of God that many people have, but it’s un-Biblical, unfaithful, and unhelpful. Sin has been used to scare people, to control people, to abuse people. But having a Biblical and grace-orientated concept of sin is not only healthy, but necessary if we are going to ever become well-adjusted people. To raise our children, or ourselves, without talking about sin is sort of like not teaching children how to read or write because words can be used to mislead, deceive, and harm people.
One theologian has said that “Church should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest.” The church should always be a safe place, even if it’s not a comfortable place. As we all know though, the Church can be caught up in our culture of “I’m okay, you’re okay,” when that simply isn’t true. You’re not okay, and neither am I. A leading scholar was once a part of a panel discussion that was focusing on some big questions of the faith. When the question was asked “What is wrong with the world,” he responded, “I am.” This is the Gospel proclamation, as St. Paul puts it – “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” I am a sinner, you are a sinner, and on Ash Wednesday we acknowledge that truth.
Before saying a bit about what sin is, I’ll start by saying what sin is not. Sin does not mean that you are bad, or terrible, or undeserving of love or respect. Sin is not something to beat yourself up over, that’s focusing on the wrong thing. Sin is not about a list of dos and don’ts, sin is not about moralism and “doing the right thing.” Sin is nothing that we have any control over.
Instead, the Biblical notion of sin is as a condition under which humanity lives. Sin can be understood in many different ways – as being closed off to God, as rebellion, as separation from God and others, as the misuse of our freedom, as a sickness, as our going astray. Sin is all around us – Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that the doctrine of sin is “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” The way we treat the environment is a sin, racism is a sin, the way we think less of those who disagree with us is a sin, our gossip is a sin, our preoccupation with status and wealth is a sin. Sin is the description of the reality that we are imperfect creatures who have limited knowledge, limited power, and selfish interests – and so we will always mess things up. We might be doing our best, but our best is far from perfect.
Sin is like gravity, it has a pull on everything in our lives. However we want to understand sin, what we must understand about sin is that it is bigger than us. On our own, we will never overcome sin. No amount of resolve or repentance is ever going to free us from sin. It’s simply not a problem that we can solve.
And this is where I think a robust doctrine of sin really is Good News. Sin means that we’re not supposed to be perfect. Acknowledging that I am a sinner puts me in really good company. It means when I mess things up, when I have uncharitable thoughts, when I do and say things that I regret, I’m doing what humans do. I’m not the only one who makes mistakes, and that’s an incredibly liberating message. Regardless of what you want people to think about you, no matter how carefully you curate your wardrobe, and your social media presence, and how you act in public, the truth is that you make mistakes all the time. Embrace that reality, don’t run from it.
I worry about the daughter of that New York Times columnist. In the article, she writes “My daughter does have a moral code – one that she follows not from obligation, but from her own desire to make the world a better place.” What we know is that the world isn’t a better place. Yes, there are many, many inspiring stories of people doing wonderful things. But there are also stories about genocide, and greed, and disaster. What an incredible burden to place on someone – making the world a better place.
What an understanding of sin helps us to see is that there is something wrong in the world, but we are not the source of that wrong. We are corrupted by it, we are complicit in it, but the evil of this world is bigger than us. What acknowledging our sin does is to put us into a proper relationship with God. I was in a meeting recently with Bishop Rodman, and he said something that has really stuck with me. He was speaking about the importance of self-awareness and said that humility is the result of our self-awareness in light of who we are and who God is. In short, humility is about our proximity to God.
As we draw closer to God and come to know a peace that passes all understanding, a love that embraces all, a mercy that restores all things, we come to realize who we are – not terrible or bad creatures, but creatures who stand in need of that peace, love, and mercy. We are rebellious, often looking to our own self-interests before others. We need something outside of us to break into our lives and our world to show an alternative to our sin, to tell us that we do not need to be captive to our sins, to free us from the consequences of our sin.
This is what the Cross of Christ is all about. After God came among us in Jesus, and we rejected and killed him, it seems that it would have been fitting and proper for the Lord of all Creation to blast us into annihilation. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Resurrection followed. And in the Resurrection we see the dawning of the New Creation, of a way other than that of selfish retribution, the way of reconciling love. This is what we mean by grace – the unexpected and unearned love of God towards us. But if we reject the notion that we are flawed, that we are incomplete, that we are sinful, we’ll never encounter the grace of being made whole.
So what is it that we are supposed to do about sin? There are two things that Psalm 51 tell us about living in the state of sin. The first thing we do about sin is to recognize it. Psalm 51 begins with honesty: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness… Wash me through and through from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.” Recognition is the first step in rectification. A problem can only be corrected when it is understood to be a problem.
Starting next week and continuing throughout Lent, I will be in the Chapel every Wednesday from 4-5pm for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, sometimes called “Confession.” You can come by anytime in that window to acknowledge that fact that you are caught in sin.
The second thing that we do about sin is to fully expect that God will take care of it and transform us. You’ll notice that this is exactly how Psalm 51 works, verses 1-9 are about naming the fact that we are stuck in sin, and verses 10-18 anticipate God’s salvation. And this is actually the point of coming to Confession. It’s not because I’m curious and want to know what you’ve been up to. And it’s not even so that you can get things off your chest, as helpful as that may be. No, the real power of Confession is in hearing the words “The Lord has put away all your sins, go in peace.”
As we see in Psalm 51, this is what we do about sin, we trust in God’s abiding love to restore what has been broken. And so we hear, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me… sustain me with your bountiful spirit.” That might be a great prayer for you to adopt this Lent. You might devote verse 11 of Psalm 51 to memory and pray it each morning, afternoon, and evening – Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
This is exactly what God has done for us in Jesus – given us a clean heart and shown us the way that leads to abundant life. If we are to draw close to this redeeming love of God, we must know who we are – we are sinners in need of mercy because we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. But God is merciful and just and delights to forgive us and restore us. So expect a new heart, given to you by God. The truth of the matter is that you can live without talking about sin, but you can’t live without sin any more than you can live without breathing. The Good News is that whether or not you talk about it, you always live with the grace of God.
