On sin.
Sin is an avoided topic—not quite taboo as one can usually hear it on the periphery of many a Sunday sermon—but, at least during my time in the Anglican church, it was rarely mentioned outside of the liturgy. The idea of reminding people of their sinful nature has become distasteful not because it is not true but because people want to go to church to feel good about themselves, not to be reminded of all of the rotten things they’ve done, the good they have not done and that there is no health in them (to paraphrase one of the myriad confessional prayers).
My object in this post is twofold: I want to outline my own understanding of what sin is. Through this I hope to achieve my second aim, which is to write against the Pope’s recent statements about abortion and gays as reported in the news (a very badly written example can be found in the Telegraph, but just Google ‘pope gay marriage’ and you’ll come up with more stuff than you can shake a stick at. Gays and abortion are his favourite…whipping boys? Probably a bad metaphor…). That said, sin is an avoided topic also because it is extremely complicated and raises more questions than you can shake a stick at: who actually says what a sin is? How does atonement come into play, if at all? What happens when we sin? I could go on… One further caveat should be thrown in here: Our concept of sin should be allowed to evolve as much as our concept of God. When either become fixed, our theologies grow stale, outmoded and potentially dangerous.
So, to begin with, let’s trot out two well known Bible verses on the topic and see what we can do with them. (As an aside, a search for ‘sin’ in the NIV Bible on BibleGateway.com reveals 433 hits, ‘sinner’ 21, ‘sinned’ 88, ‘love’ 508, ‘forgive’ 63, ‘forgiveness’ 15.)
Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This verse is regularly plucked from the middle of a sentence, which says so much more: Rom. 3:22-24 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. Falling short is exactly it: sin is really ‘missing the mark’. And this is where Martin Luther picks up and says that we are justified by faith alone in the death and resurrection of Christ. While I may struggle with faith in the idea of Jesus as an offering of atonement, I can accept that his teachings offer us a path of love. Living what he says helps us to move beyond where we are as we experience our relationship with God. Kenneth Barnes (QFP 21.07) put it nicely when he wrote, ‘It is by our ‘imperfections’ that we move towards each other, towards wholeness of relationship. It is our oddities, our grittiness, the occasions when we hurt or are hurt, that challenge us to a deeper knowledge of each other. Our sins have been said to be stepping-stones to God.’
John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. I remember having to memorise this verse as part of my Baptist Sunday schooling. I asked what was meant by ‘perish’—we all die, after all. Why would this happen? It seems because I’m a sinner and damned unless I accept that Jesus died on the cross for my sins and was raised from the dead (exactly as it says it happened in the KJV Bible!) and if I didn’t, I would perish, i.e. spend forever in hell and fiery damnation. I suppose that it was around this time, at the tender age of 7, that I started to become a Universalist. I couldn’t deal with this idea and thought that if Jesus loves me and everyone else as we were taught, then he couldn’t possibly want any of us in hell. Why would you want that for someone you love? It was just nonsensical but my questions were silenced.
At that time, what was sin? Disobeying my mother, father, teacher, etc. was sin. Hating someone else, telling a lie, using God’s name in vain, being jealous, nearly all decalogical…all sins. For my age, I suppose that was rightly pitched; I recently listened to a sermon given in a Unity church where the minister referred to the 10 Commandments as ‘grade school’ level behaviour codes. As I got older, other bits got flung in: sex before marriage—or of any sort for that matter, being a Democrat, not believing in creation, abortion, drinking… I was confused and terrified. To sin became to drive another nail into Christ’s hands and feet, to commit the vile murder again, to mar the image of God inside of me and the worst image of all: God would turn his back on me until I asked for forgiveness and meant it. My sins not only do this nightmarish act but serve to keep me separate from God and I am to believe in order perhaps to go to Heaven.
But again—I struggle. God is not somewhere out there. God is in here. God is now-here, in me, giving me my every breath, heartbeat, feeling, dream…allowing me to co-create every moment. ‘This is the truth which we know and try to live: that every person is capable of response to the divine Spirit; that this Spirit, or Light, or God reaches out to each one directly and freely; that if we follow the leadings of this Spirit faithfully we are led out of sin into unity with the divine will; that this unity leads us into love of and care for all humankind, who are our kin; that what the Spirit shows us is living truth which cannot be fettered by words’ (Scott 1980).
Based on Spong, I suggest that it’s when we fail to live our transcendent selves, falling short of the potential of humanity’s divinity. It’s living in the past or the future instead of the now. It’s preventing other people from living their divine lives. It’s failing to love, because what can we offer except that? And if sin is failing to be transcendent, maybe forgiveness is re-membering the person as (w)holy, bowing to the divine in them.
Turning again to the Pope, I find myself at a difficulty. He is the leader of the Roman Catholics, believed by some to be on God’s speed dial; I cannot accept this because I cannot accept that the Pope is closer to God than anyone else. The Catholic church may have a policy against homosexuality but, I ask, did Jesus? Can a church which claims ancestry back to his hands really be so bigoted against not only gays but women? It was, after all, a woman who first discovered the empty tomb and first announced the resurrection. Jesus often went against social convention and conversed openly with women he did not know. The further we move away from the crucifixion in human linear time, the more backwards the church seems to become. This is not in an effort to become more like the ‘original’ Christians because if they really wanted this, they’d have to rip down the power structures and buildings, thrust the silver and gold into the hands of the poor, and hand in the fine garments in order to wait at the tables of the local homeless shelter. They’d have to say, ‘Christ is risen!’ but take comfort in that they don’t know how he was risen or make any claim to such knowledge.
This post has taken several weeks to write, as I had exams during the period. As I opened the papers this morning, I saw an article saying that the RC church hopes that child abusers will suffer more in hell than other people. As I don’t believe in hell, that is a strange thing to read, but it strikes me that the problem lies with forgiveness. I don’t mean that people who abuse children should just be given a platitude and sent on their way but the Church is perfectly capable of selling indulgences, creating ridiculous non-Biblical doctrines about soul purification in purgatory, giving penances to be performed and grabbing money from those who don’t have golden ceilings. As an institution that has lost its heart and lost its soul (and here I don’t speak only to the Roman Catholics. The Anglicans and other churches need to think about this too) perhaps it has lost the ability to forgive. It’s impossible to learn to forgive others if you cannot learn to note your own errors and forgive yourself.
I close with the words of William Penn: ‘A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it… It is as great presumption to send our passions upon God’s errands, as it is to palliate them with God’s name… We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: for if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.’
