St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday, January 14, 2007
Speaking of Sin – Rev. David Mundy
Genesis 3:1-7
John 8:2-11
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An
interesting story developed last Fall on a busy street in Montreal. On one side
of the street is a school for Hasidic Jewish boys and young men. On the other
side is a YMCA. You probably know that the Young Men’s Christian Association
was once a Christian organization but now provides public places for exercise
and activity for both men and women.
The reason
these two institutions made the news is that in the Montreal YMCA, women were shaking the gifts God gave them as
they worked themselves into shape. They did this in front of windows where the
boys and men of the Jewish school could see them. Although they were forbidden
from looking at the women in their supposedly immodest behaviour, it didn’t
always work. So the school frosted its windows to help the boys resist
temptation. But windows can be opened and boys can stand on street corners.
The school
eventually asked the YMCA to frost their windows as well. They were willing to
pay the cost of the alterations, so the “Y” said yes. But when the women found
out the reason for the opaque windows, they objected. What would be next, a
dress code for the women as they entered the building? If the men had a problem,
they should have to deal with it. From there it became national news.
Should the
Jewish school be that worried about what some would say is a natural male
response to attractive members of the opposite sex? The problem the religious
leaders figured they were addressing is the sin called lust, which you may have
heard of before, although oddly you may not have heard about it in church. It
was the Christian church that identified the Seven Deadly Sins in the
Middle Ages, although we inherited our concept of sin from Judaism. In case you
have forgotten, one of those deadly sins is lust.
What would
Jesus have said about this? After all, he was a Jew. If you recall, he did
speak about lust in the teaching we call the Sermon on the Mount. Listen to
this
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I
say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed
adultery with her in her heart. If you right eye causes you to sin, tear it out
and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for
your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Hearing
this suddenly makes frosted windows sound much more reasonable, don’t you
think? Could Jesus really have felt that strongly about sin?
This
morning and for the next few Sundays we are going to examine the subject of sin
and try to come to some conclusions about whether speaking of sin is still
necessary or important in the Christian church. It is actually a subject I
would just as soon avoid, but as with dental care and car repair, avoiding
spiritual maintenance can lead to all sort of problems.
Our first
reading today was the passage from the book of Genesis which is often
associated with what St. Augustine termed “original sin.” At the risk of
oversimplification, this doctrine states that we are born rebellious and sinful
and are returned to a state of grace through Christ’s sacrificial act of love
on the cross.
This is not
what Genesis says. There is a woodcut by the Albrecht Durer which show Adam and
Eve after the Fall. In the foreground we see are a cat and a mouse, which serve
as a reminder that there was a time when the world was good – God said so, over
and over again. God also said to the first couple that to enjoy this world they
had to avoid one thing, the fruit of a tree. So what happens? With a little nudging from a crafty serpent
they eat the fruit.
Although
they don’t die, as God has warned, their trusting relationship and their way of
life dies. Eve asks Adam whether the fig leaf makes her look fat, he lies and
says she looks great, and it all goes
down hill from there. If we had read on in Genesis three we would have been
reminded that Adam and Eve attempt to hide what they have done from God, which
seems silly, except that it the human tendency, to try to bury or mistakes
rather than address them. As well as to deflect blame somewhere else. Adam says
that it is Eve’s fault. Eve says that the snake outsmarted them both. It’s
always out there, rather than in here.
This story
which is about sin, even though it doesn’t name it as such, tells us that we
are given the freedom to make choices which will separates us and alienate us
from God. Have you noticed that sin has gone into hiding in the past couple of
decades? We rarely speak about sin in general terms. Sometimes
we have a prayer of confession in worship which is meant to be a confession of
sin, but we have toned it down a lot. We still repeat the Lord’s Prayer with
its phrases about our trespasses, or sins, but we don’t make a big deal about
it.
Not only do
we avoid speaking of sin as our general state of separation from God, we
wouldn’t think of calling anyone a sinner! Imagine that you arrange to
see me and outline a moral dilemma with which you have been wrestling. And then
picture me listening patiently, pondering appropriately, and finally responding
“I think I see your problem – you are a sinner and you have fallen short of
the glory of God.” Although those are words from scripture and my
assessment might be accurate, I would probably be chasing you out the door
calling “Come back! Come back! Was it something I said?”
One of the
reasons we are so leery of speaking of sin is because there is such a
judgmental feel to the language. There is a tendency for all of us to name
other people’s sins rather than our own and to do so harshly. Often the
identification of individual sins seems trivial. When we first moved to
Newfoundland in 1980, someone noticed the cross-county skis coming off the
moving van and gave us the “heads up” that skiing on Sunday would not be
acceptable because it was a violation of the Sabbath. And God help us if we
were caught playing cards on any day of the week!
This
perception of sin and sins seems so awash in the guilt that we would rather
avoid, and often rightly so. Yet we are probably aware that there many
occasions in life when we must choose and sometimes those choices are
destructive. We hear people huff “The trouble with kids these days is that
they don’t know the difference between right and wrong!” Perhaps you have said it yourself. Why just
say it about young people? It appears that a lot of us forget that difference.
As well as the difference between right and not so right. And wrong and maybe
wrong. And right sometimes but not others. Every day we are faced with moral
and ethical challenges and while we do well in meeting most of them but if we
are honest some of them get the better of us.
We are
bigoted and racist, even if we have learned not to say it out loud. Our anger
and resentment can consume us. We carve up others with our gossip. There is no
frosted glass on our computer and television screens so we lust away.
In her
excellent book Speaking of Sin, from which I took my sermon title today,
Barbara Brown Taylor argues persuasively that we need to rediscover and revive
the language of sin because we really haven’t come up with anything better to
replace it. Just so you, Brown is not some raving fundamentalist
Deep down in human existence there is an experience of reaching for
forbidden fruit, of pushing away loving arms, of breaking something on purpose
just to prove that you can . . . For ages and ages, this experience has been
called sin . . . it is a name for the experience of being cut off from air,
light, sustenance, community, hope, meaning life. It is less concerned with
specific behaviours that with the aftermath of those behaviours.
There is a
chapter in Brown Taylor’s book with the surprising title Sin Is Our Only Hope.
She offers that acknowledging sin is the “fire alarm” which wakes us up and
saves us from peril.
So we do
speak of sin which is the painful distancing from God. We also speak of
repentance, which is the choice to turn away from our wrongdoing because we are
willing to “come clean” and admit it is wrong. When we acknowledge that we are
sinners we are heading back toward God and the best life possible, rather than
second best. And we speak of God’s grace, the acceptance which allows us to
begin again.
We heard
about that grace in our other passage today. The story was from John’s gospel,
the only place where it is found in the New Testament and even there it is
bracketed because it isn’t in the earliest manuscripts.
A woman is
brought to Jesus who has been caught fooling around with someone else’s
husband. In that culture justice was swift and severe. Notice that the
adulterous man isn’t brought to judgement, just the woman. Perhaps the
authorities have dragged her before Jesus because they feel he is “soft on sin”
and won’t observe the religious laws about adultery.
What
happens? Jesus doodles in the dirt while he listens to the arguments from those
who were “holier than her.” One has to
wonder if Jesus wasn’t scrawling the word “hypocrite” over and over again as he
absorbs the anger and judgement in their voices. Jesus does two things. He says
“I know you are itching to stone her to death. Here’s a rock. Heave away if
you have never sinned yourself.” Suddenly
all these judgmental people are saying “Would you look at the time, we
better get going.”
Once everyone
else was gone except for the woman Jesus looks up, probably well aware they the only ones left. He wonders out loud where the
accusers have gone. We can be sure that Jesus looks at her with such compassion
in his eyes that she knows she was accepted, but to make sure she understands
he says “I do not condemn you.” Then he tells her to go her way, which
will not be the destructive way she has been traveling. And he tells her “from
now on, do not sin again.”
The Christ
of compassion and love, the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the
world” invites us to find a new way. This may be the moment when we choose
to end habits which we know are robbing us of life. This may be the moment when
we ask God’s forgiveness and resolve to make amends for the wrongs we have
done.
We can be
sure that while we are sinners who have fallen short of God’s glory, we do have
the hope of beginning again. Thanks be to God!