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St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, February 4, 2007

Speaking of Sin: Inconvenient Truths

Amos 5: 11-14, 21-24 Matthew 25:31-40

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The Academy award nominations were announced last week with a number of sparkling movie stars nominated for their various roles.

One film which received a nomination features a man who is not known for his charisma. His rather wooden demeanour on the political hustings probably contributed to the loss of the presidency of the United States. I’m speaking of former American vice-president Al Gore who introduces himself to audiences as “ . . . Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.” At least he has a sense of humour.

His Oscar nominated film, called an Inconvenient Truth, is about global climate change and our effect as humans on all living things. It is really the film version of a PowerPoint presentation which Gore has made to more than a thousand groups in countries around the world.

It has been argued that Al Gore makes a far better environmental spokesperson than a vice-president – or president-in-waiting. Al Gore was a politician, but he is still a Christian. One writer suggests that Gore is far more engaging as an activist because he has taken the stance of a Baptist preacher, a reference to the faith of his childhood. There are certainly an urgency and a call to repentance in his presentations, a choosing of a different way.

Some have claimed that Al Gore is a prophet for our time, although both Gore and his film have received lots of criticism from those who call him an environmental alarmist and doomsayer. He has also taken some heat from fundamentalist Christians in the States who figure he is preaching a false gospel of environmental catastrophe. The bible does tell us that you can’t please everyone when you are a prophet, especially when you are pointing out the sins of your audience. We could certainly debate whether Al Gore is a prophet for our time and it’s hard to say whether we would come to agreement. The title of his film is brilliant nonetheless. An Inconvenient Truth. The truth we would rather not hear. The truth that challenges our comfort and prosperity.

This is the last Sunday of four in a series of sermons I have called Speaking of Sin, using the title of a book by Barbara Brown Taylor. During the first three weeks we have been invited to get a different perspective on a word and a theological concept we tend to avoid – sin. This morning we will talk about sin in a different way than previous weeks where the emphasis has been on our choices as individuals. To quote Brown Taylor “[Sin] is a word we use to name a wide variety of things, ranging from individual wrongdoing to social injustice to the built-in fallibility of being human.” Another writer, the Reformed Church theologian Cornelius Plantinga, describes sin as the “vandalism of shalom.” It’s an intriguing phrase because shalom means God’s completeness and wholeness and peace. The vandalism of shalom is the defacing of the relationship with God and others, whether individually or collectively.

A few moments ago we listened to the words of an uncontested prophet from another era, an orchard owner and shepherd named Amos who came down from the hills to tell people things they didn’t want to hear. I say “uncontested” because there is a book in our bible named after him but his message must have been a “tough sell” in his day. Amos spoke in a time of unprecedented prosperity for the people of Israel who kept the trappings of worship and religious life. The trouble was that the gap between rich and poor had steadily grown and no one seemed to care.

At the beginning of the fifth chapter Amos begins with “Hear this word” and then declares “thus says the Lord.” How much more presumptuous could he have been? Can you imagine someone walking into worship this morning and rattling our cages by shouting “listen up,” then saying “I speak for God” They didn’t have 911 in the eighth century before Jesus, but today we would probably summon the police in a hurry to get rid of the troublemaker.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone liked Amos! He is challenging the choices of individuals. But he is also putting a spotlight on his society, which has become dulled to the pain of those who live on the margins.

For I know how many are your transgressions,

and how great are your sins–

you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,

and push aside the needy in the gate.

And as you heard, Amos goes on to speak with God’s voice saying, essentially, you have confused worship with justice. I can’t stand your cheerfulness and I don’t want to hear your songs until you – and here is one of the great phrases of the bible -- “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”

Do we really want to want to hear the “inconvenient truths” which call us and our society to account for our transgressions and sins? Our United Church has always been comfortably middle class. At the same time we have addressed issues of societal sin and injustice in ways that other denominations are reluctant to do. We understand that there is something which we could call collective sin or corporate sin.

So we have addressed poverty and inequality as aspects of the Christian imperative for justice. Some of the issues we have addressed have been controversial and polarizing. Over time members in different congregations have expressed frustration and anger that the United Church sticks its nose into everything imaginable. Sadly, some of them have left our denomination because they felt we were headed in the wrong direction. Yet I think of the poster in my study which lists what the Hindu activist, Mohandes Gandhi, identified as the seven deadly social sins, which parallels the seven sins developed by the Christian church in the Middle Ages.

Gandhi's Seven Deadly Social Sins for Today

Mahatma Gandhi challenged our traditional understanding of the seven deadly sins with this additional list for our time.

While these come from a person from another religion, Gandhi was a great admirer of Jesus and felt that too few Christians were willing to follow the radical teaching of the one they called Saviour.

If I have a personal criticism of the United Church it is that while we earnestly pursue the social issues of our day, we fail to “connect the dots” to speak openly enough of the God who calls us to justice and the Christ who healed the poor and the dispossessed. Too often we act as if we are doing this on our own, and we don’t address the reality of sin as both our “missing the mark” and our rebellion against God’s true intention for us as human beings.

We need to remember that every single concern we have, including our concern for the environment, is rooted in our desire for a right relationship with God. If that relationship is vandalized, then we must become partners with God in restoring it. Nearly a decade ago the leader of the Orthodox church, Patriarch Bartholomew spoke of our violation of the natural world as a sin, and he understood the importance of naming God in the plan for restoration.

Human beings and the environment form a seamless garment of existence, a complex fabric that we believe is fashioned by God. It follows that to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands, for humans to contaminate the Earth's waters, its land, its air and its life, with poisonous substances - these are sins…[Earth] is God’’s gift of love to us, and we must return that love by protecting it and all that is in it.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Orthodox Church

Have you had enough sin for a while? As we come to the conclusion of these messages on sin the invitation for all of us is to repent of our wrongdoing, to take a different direction in response to God’s love. And as move toward grace and gospel we can acknowledge that some of the most important people in our lives are the ones who tell us what we don’t want to hear. They will point out the inconvenient and uncomfortable truths of those sins we may be reluctant to identify on our own.

Jesus addressed many of these truths during the course of his ministry. In his first sermon in the gospel of Luke he stood in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth and proclaimed that he had come to preach good news to the poor and the captive and the oppressed . You may recall that the reaction of the locals was surprisingly hostile. They took Jesus to the edge of town and threatened to throw him off a cliff, only to have him mysteriously slip out of harms way. In the end, though, Jesus did not escape the anger of those who heard his challenging message and at the heart of our faith we have the image of the cross which is both the shame and the glory of the gospel. When we choose to follow Jesus, we begin with humility and even remorse as we make our way toward the mysterious and powerful hope that the cross and the resurrection represent.

This is Black History month, so it is appropriate to conclude with the words of the great African–American civil rights leader and prophet for his time, Martin Luther King Jr. While he was incarcerated in a Birmingham jail, King wrote an open letter in which he stated that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

In that same letter King examines his own role as a disciple of Jesus and where that had led him.

... though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God."

Martin Luther King Jr. Letters from a Birmingham Jail 1963

We can listen to the message that Christ overcomes sin in all its forms, and leads us to the light of truth. Thanks be to God.