Wednesday, February 16, 2011

5. Being Presbyterian -- Humanity, Sin and Freedom

            It was an afternoon when I watched sin in action – if from afar.  I was sitting in the driver’s seat of our car, waiting in the parking lot outside of a supermarket.  Janet had gone inside to do some shopping and I was waiting in the car, listening to the radio.  And then I saw across the parking lot how one car was driving around the corner of the pharmacy and I could see another car coming in the opposite direction.  They came to a stop facing each other, bumper to bumper.  I just watched.  After a minute in which neither car moved, I could feel the tension mounting.  Two minutes, three minutes.  Neither car would move.  I couldn’t see the faces of the drivers.   I don’t know what hand gestures were being made, if one was shouting at the other, or what.  They squared off for a full five minutes.  Finally, one car violently whipped around the other car and sped away.  I guess the other car “won.” 

            What was it that created this standoff?  Why the hostility?  Why the complete unwillingness to yield to another?  Whatever it was, I have to think that sin was in the middle of it.

            What’s your view of sin, I wonder? 

I think there’s a tendency in the church today to want to avoid the topic of sin.   Life is tough.  We come to church to get recharged, picked up.  Do we really need to talk about sin?   Do we need to say that prayer of confession?   Some churches have dropped the prayer of confession from their liturgy so that their service is more upbeat.   

So what do presbyterians think about sin?  I think people believe that Presbyterians take a pretty severe view of sin.  John Calvin spoke of people being in the grip of sin and in Geneva, he had a court which sought to enforce norms of behavior in society.    So we have a history of taking sin seriously.

As Presbyterians, we lift up three truths about the human condition and sin.  And it’s essential that we hold these three truths together. 

Truth #1 is that we are all made in the image of God.  As Alex read in the Scripture this morning, when God created the world and humanity, God said that it was good.  And on the sixth day, when God created humanity, God said that the creation was ‘very good.’  So that’s our starting point.   John Calvin referred to this good creation as our “original righteousness.”    

Theologian Shirley Guthrie put it this way:  “We must talk with dead seriousness about ourselves as sinners, but we must not suggest that our sinfulness is the basic truth about what we are . . . We are human beings created in God’s image.  Sin distorts, twists, corrupts . . . but it does not change us into something other than what God created us to be.  Sin is not stronger than God . . . even sinful people are still recognized as people in the image of God.”

Truth #2 is that we are all sinners.  That is what the story of Adam and Eve conveys.  “Adam” in Hebrew is the word simply for man.  So the sin of Adam and Eve is the sin of every person.   As Paul says in Romans 3:23 – “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”    

Theologians have long distinguished between the state of sin and individual sinful acts.   As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it,  “Sin, with a capital S if you will, is the state of our distance from God while sins, with a little s, are the willful human choices we make that maintain that distance.”  

            This distance between people was evident when a little girl was talking to her teacher about whales.  The teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it was a very large mammal its throat was very small.    The little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale.   Irritated, the teacher reiterated that a whale could not swallow a human; it was physically impossible.
The little girl said, 'When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah'. The teacher asked, 'What if Jonah went to hell?'    The little girl replied, 'Then you ask him!’
Sinfulness separates us.
Perhaps the largest manifestation of sin is the sin of idolatry – putting something ahead of God.   What do we place before God in our own lives?  Money, possessions, our country, physical obsessions.  What’s on your list?

 Sin can be manifested as a lack of trust.  Remember the people of Israel who got nervous when Moses went up Mt. Sinai.  When Moses was gone too long, they lost their trust and created the golden calf.  

Remembering those Israelites helps us recall that sin isn’t just an individual thing – there’s a corporate dimension to sin.  The theologian Augustine reflected on the fact that on his own, he wouldn’t steal apples from a neighbor’s yard, but he stole them readily when he had the company of friends.  A 20th century theologian Reinhold Neibuhr captured this dynamic for us in our contemporary world when he wrote the book, Moral Man, Immoral Society.
            So sin is real in our world – that’s obvious isn’t it from just looking around.  As Presbyterians we recognize the influence of sin in our lives and in our world.  
But rather than this being a depressing thing, this understanding of sin can actually be a point of hope.     But please don’t misunderstand me.  Sin is awful.  It’s the devastation of a population in Darfur.   It’s millions of people living in shanty towns around the world.  It’s the hidden epidemic of domestic violence in this country.  It causes pain, hurt, rejection, despair, hopelessness. 
But coming to terms with sin can be a point of hope because doing so leads us not to rest confident in our own abilities but to instead turn to God.   To escape sin, we turn to God.  And this leads us to truth #3.
We are forgiven by God through Jesus Christ.  This, friends, is the heart of the Biblical witness.  It’s the Good News.  As John the Baptist exclaimed like a paper boy on the corner:  “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  God acts to close that distance between God and us and among us.   God acts to heal our brokenness.   Or as Paul writes in Romans 5:8, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

In the gospel of John, Jesus speaks of a woman who had been charged with adultery.  She is on the verge of being stoned to death when Jesus confronts the crowd by saying what?  “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
After all the stones drop to the ground, do you remember the two things Jesus says to the woman? First, he asks where her accusers are.  “Has no one condemned you?”  When the woman says no, Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you.”     There is the grace.  Just as Jesus says earlier in the gospel of John:  “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” 
But Jesus says one more thing to the woman.  Jesus instructs the woman:  Do not sin again.  As recipients of grace, we are called to repent, to turn around.
  Now if we have a shallow view of sin, then this forgiveness in Christ isn’t such a big deal.  If we’re unconvinced that we’re sinners, then I’m not sure what we’re celebrating at Easter.  But if we recognize the full extent of our sinfulness, if we see the distance between ourselves and God, and if we recognize the distance that is between one another, then we can see that in God’s forgiving grace we receive new life that draws us closer to God and to one another.
Talking about sin often leads us to talk about freedom.  Generally speaking, as Presbyterians, we believe in free will.  What I do from moment to moment is my choice.  But there is a paradox about our freedom that might seem strange:
 We are less free than we think we are because of sin.   Sin, under the guise of greed, envy, or any other vice, channels, shapes, molds our choices.  Paul expressed this enslavement when he said in Romans 7:15 “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”   We’re not as free as we think.
Here’s the other side of that paradox.  It is only when we respond to God’s grace with full obedience that we experience complete freedom – freedom to love God and freedom to love one another.
God willingly grants us this new life through Jesus Christ.   It’s new life that we celebrate with the sprinkling of water at baptism, and it’s new life we celebrate in the eating of bread and wine.