Readings
for Lent III/A:
Ex.17:1-7; John 4:5-42, Today's Collect
February 27, 2005
The Rev. Karen Siegfriedt
St. Jude the Apostle Episcopal Church, Cupertino,
CA
In all of our biblical readings today, we see grace coming from totally unexpected sources. In the book of Exodus, water is provided to the thirsty Israelites in the desert. In Paul's letter to the Romans, God's love has been poured into the human heart through the Holy Spirit. In the gospel of John, the life of a marginalized woman is turned around by a conversation with Jesus. Grace abounds; ignorance is banished; deep human needs are met; and the possibility of new life is offered everywhere. "Behold, I am making all things new."[Rev. 21] It is this grace-filled offer of new life that is at the core of Christian hope.
Grace comes from the Greek word charis, which means kindness, goodwill, favor, delight, beauty, and gift. This understanding of grace can be bestowed upon us by other people and through our experiences in nature. However, from a purely Christian perspective, grace is defined as a free gift from God: a loving, transformative power which enlightens, facilitates, and perfects the human person to act and to become the kind of person that God longs for each one of us to be. "The glory of God is the human person fully alive!" And while God's grace abounds and is available to all of us, we have set up internal and external obstacles which prevent the gift of grace from transforming our lives. We call theses obstacles sin. It is sin that keeps us from being "fully alive." It is this subject of sin that I would like to preach on today.
Sin has two faces. First there is Sin with a capital S which is the state of "being distant from God." This is the hardest obstacle to overcome. I call this kind of Sin, a state of alienation, caused by a distorted perspective of the truth. We are born into a world of alienation; a place where the misuse of power and resources are the way of the world. We learn this way of existing at a very young age. We continue the legacy of misusing power and resources in order to satisfy our own bodily desires and passions. We focus on ourselves at the expense of others and the well being of creation. We pass on this legacy of corruption from one generation to another. Unfortunately, this legacy destroys relationships and saps the joy out of life. No wonder life is so hard!
On a personal level, we experience this alienation though ingrained patterns of behavior that keep us in bondage from experiencing a life of the Spirit. Psychologists call these ingrained patterns of behavior, Ego Defense Mechanisms. While on the one hand, these defense mechanisms relieve psychic tensions by allowing us to make compromises, they are at the foundation of a false life. They are the cause of many wrecked relationships. These mechanisms include denial, rationalization, projection, intellectualization, displacement, regression, repression, sublimation, reaction formation, and suppression of the truth, etc.
The second face of sin is, sin with a small s. These are willful choices that wreck relationships (with God, with others, & with ourselves). Most of us engage in these kinds of sins, not because we are inherently bad, but because we want something and we fear that goodness will not get it for us. These kinds of sins include but are not limited to uncharitable speech, exploitation of others, stealing, lying, cheating, negligence, cruelty, prejudice, our waste and pollution of creation, and expressions of our self-indulgent appetites.
I remember the first time that I made a conscious, willful choice that caused a wreckage of relationships. I was in the 11th grade, trying to make a decision about what college to attend. I had first asked my geometry teacher about her college and then proceeded to ask my physics teacher about his. He had gone to MIT and began to expound on its virtues. I asked him what he thought about my geometry teacher's college. He didn't have anything good to say about it. The next day, I reported his opinion to my geometry teacher. I don't know why I did that but I do know that it was willful choice and it caused a painful rift in their relationship. There are consequences to every action. Sin causes great suffering in the human condition.
The word sin is being lost from our vocabulary, even in main-line denominations. Since sin has a bad reputation (similar to PCBs, asbestos, or radioactive wastes), many liberal preachers avoid the topic altogether. Instead, we hear a lot about church growth, outreach, and diocesan politics. Many main-line denominations are losing members and they cannot afford to focus on the language of sin that might put people off. In general, people do not want to hear about sin and repentance. They want to hear about grace and forgiveness (although grace and forgiveness have little meaning apart from the language of sin). Many parishioners want to hear: "I'm O.K., you're O.K." They want to be comforted and affirmed, rather than challenged and transformed.
As a result, we are beginning to lose a vital word which describes a darker realm. In this darker realm of existence, power is a problem and not an asset. A couple of years ago, a young man came into my office and described a childhood of physical and sexual abuse. He was struggling in life to overcome the adversities which he faced throughout his early life. I was moved with empathy and offered him some words of compassion and encouragement. I told him that I was so sorry that he was a victim of such sin. He replied, "I don't believe in sin." I responded, "Then what do you call those terrible things that happened to you?"
Whatever Became of Sin? In 1973, Karl Menninger, a well-known psychiatrist, wrote a book by this title.* His interest grew from his work with prisoners as well as psychiatric patients. He wanted to understand why some people engage in destructive behavior as well as how other people try to control that behavior. He suggested that one of the reasons for the de-emphasis on sin, has been a growing public awareness that sin can turn out to be whatever the dominant religious culture disapproves of, making it one more tool of oppression. For instance, in the pre-Civil War era of the South, a slave's rebellion against the master was regarded as sin. Today, in some religious circles, a woman's right to choose or to preach from the pulpit is considered sin, while the death penalty and a country's right to police other nations without their consent are considered acts of justice. Because of such subjective judgments, large numbers of people have simply stopped calling some things sin. The really awful things are turned over to the courts as crimes, while the more self-destructive things are turned over to the medical establishment as mental illness.
Criminals are charged with "full fault" blame. They are managed by the police and prison guards, and are punished for their wrong doings. Mental illness on the other had is a "no-fault" posture. What sense would it make to punish someone who is mentally ill, or to ask someone to repent of a symptom? Unlike crime or sin, illness does not carry the onus of choice. The responsibility of wrong doing is shifted elsewhere- to biochemistry, to abusive parents, to birth defects, to head injuries. In our legal system, wrongdoers who can demonstrate illness receive treatment instead of punishment.
So, how do we address the ingrained patterns of behavior that prevent us from experiencing grace, new life, and the fruit of the Spirit? According to Barbara Brown Taylor, a famous preacher in the Anglican tradition, neither the language of law nor the language of medicine is fully adequate to describe the prevalence and destructiveness of sin. "In the theological model, the basic human problem is not sickness or lawlessness, but sin. It is something we experience both as a species and as individuals. However we run into it, we run into it as wrecked relationship: with God, with one another, with the whole created order. Sometimes we cause the wreckage and sometimes we are simply trapped in it. But either way we are not doomed."* The good news is, there is a way out.
"Contrary to the medical model, we are not entirely at the mercy of our maladies. We still have pockets of God-given freedom. However impoverished our circumstances, however badly we may have been used, we may still choose-for good or ill-how we will respond to what has happened to us. We may learn how to live with our tragedies or we may spend all of our time dying from them. We may decide to forgive our enemies or we may allow them to run our lives by continuing to hate them. In theological language, the choice to remain in wrecked relationship with God and other human beings is called sin." The choice to enter into the process of repair is called repentance: a change of mind, a turning toward the light.
There are thousands of ways to turn away from the light. The point is to know the difference between the light and the darkness and to recognize the pull of darkness when it comes. In order for new life to emerge, in order to overcome the obstacles to grace, we need to know and name the darkness. Sin is not simply about a set of behaviors. Sin is a way of life that needs to be exposed. The recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again. This is why sin is a hopeful word.
"Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. [BCP 218]
* Many of the insights in this sermon were taken from Barbara Brown Taylor's Speaking of Sin, Cowley Pub., 2000.
| Updated 3/14/05 |
|