Title: “First Came Love”
Scripture: Luke 24:36b-48 and I John 3:1-7
4/30/06 Easter 3 Yr. B
Rev. Joy R. Haertig
In those six little verses I read from I John the word sin was used 6 times.
Did you hear it?
And in hearing it, did you hear anything else after that?
That is so often the problem when we talk about sin. The word has a strange power over us. When we talked about it in Bible study last week people said that it often connotes condemnation, judgment and punishment. None of these are on the top ten-list of fun experiences!
But I am going to try to talk about sin today - and I am hoping you might go with me. (A huge topic of course so I will barely cover the tip of the iceberg.)
First I want to ask you to ponder the following:
Were you raised in the church or in your home or anywhere else to believe that you were “born in sin”, that you are intrinsically a sinner and only with God's help can you even begin to try to do better? Were you raised in such a way that your religious upbringing promoted a sense of personal shame and guilt rather than a deep sense of being loved?
If your answer is “yes” to this, if you are comfortable doing so - I would like to invite you to raise your hand.
I humbly stand here this morning as a pastor and as a representative of the Church and say: I am sincerely sorry that you were taught that, whether through words or insinuation.
It just is not true. That is false teaching.
It is a lie that we have somehow bought into at a very early stage in our lives.
You are first and foremost, a beloved child of God. That is the bottom line. That's your base coat. That's your foundation. You are beloved… and so is EVERYONE else. (It's an even playing field)
No one here was born “bad”. All of us are “of God” with the power to choose how we will love, how we will act and what kind of “trail we will leave behind us”.
I suppose we could blame our Christian forefathers who created the Doctrine of Original Sin out of the story of Adam and Eve. Like every religion in the world, we have our creation story - our creation myth. It is religious poetry and out of that poetry a doctrine was created that made humans a truly ugly part of creation.
Adam and Eve sinned/rebelled in the garden of Eden and passed it on intrinsically to each generation since and only through believing in Jesus Christ are we forgiven of that sinfulness.
I've never understood that doctrine and have been glad that I have not been in a denomination that promotes it.
Why did they do this, perhaps for control and dominance. Some people believe that you control people better through the negative rather than positive reinforcement. A simple example of this is how I remember my parents worrying about affirming me too much because they did not want me to get a “big head”.
Perhaps our forefathers interpreted the story of Adam and Eve in this way to try and identify themselves as different from our parent faith, Judaism.
Judaism does not interpret Adam and Eve in this way instead it symbolizes our birth into beauty and love (Eden) and our God-given ability to make choices. Sometimes those choices (the rebellious ones) separate us from “the Good” and their consequences can be painful and destructive, but nevertheless, humanity is not intrinsically bad.
We can be helped in our understanding of the word sin in Christian scripture by knowing what the Greek word for “sin” is - “[h]armartia” which is an archery concept referring to “missing the target”. Missing the target! Wouldn't it have been more encouraging to teach sin as missing the target?
Sin is not proof of human depravity; it is not a way of saying that we don't deserve to take up space in God's world.
The word sin in scripture is a way of saying that it is possible as human beings to miss the target that God wants us to aim for. We miss it for all kinds of reasons and yes it can impact us as individuals and it can impact the entire planet.
The original intent of the concept of sin was NOT about human depravity but about human responsibility. We are capable of destructive choices as much as we are capable of making loving ones. The talk of sin in the Bible is to help us recognize that there are choices before us that will lead to the enhancement of human relationships and care for the earth and there are choices that will not. Scripture also recognizes that it is not always easy to distinguish the good from the bad either! There is a lot of gray in the world and that makes choice making difficult. (Not to mention that there are choices available to us in the 21st century that they could never have imagined 2000 years ago.)
Sin is talked about in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures because we must recognize the power we have to make choices for good or ill. Most of the conversations around sin by the Hebrew prophets and by Jesus did not just focus on the individual but on groups/societies/organizations. The concept of “original sin” has often been used to focus on individual “badness” and has missed the power of societal sins that can impact thousands.
When the two different classes that studied Marcus Borg's book on Christianity came to the chapter on sin and salvation there was a lot of grumbling! No one was anxious to read that one.
Borg believes that the use of the word sin can be very limiting in addressing the various human predicaments we confront. He believes that other words can provide more meaningful metaphors for understanding and transformation such as captivity, exile, being lost, blindness, hunger, thirst, having a closed heart, separation from God, living a false self and infirmity.
Again, these metaphors are not strictly individual predicaments but societal as well.
Remember the hymn “Amazing Grace”? Some people struggle with the words “Amazing grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”
Some people change the word “wretch” because they feel it reflects that “original sin” concept of humanity.
The author of that hymn, John Newton, had been a slave trader. The story goes that he had a conversion experience on his ship one night when he was in his room and he came to realize that it was a sin to be a slave trader. He changed his life, his work and his purpose - he made different choices.
Did John Newton believe that he was literally a wretch or that he had been making wretched choices and participating in a wretched business called slavery?
We will never know for sure, but I sing the word “wretch” because when I imagine myself in John Newton's shoes I know that the word wretch is exactly how I would feel after the light finally dawned upon me and I saw the truth of my behavior.
I know that we human beings are capable of making wretched choices that impact our own single life or the lives of thousands of innocent people and I know that we are capable of making them again. This is a song about social sin as much as it is about an individual's.
In the reading from the Gospel of Luke that Gloria read this morning, remember that when the Risen Christ appeared to a group of fearful disciples that had run away when he was about to meet his death, he did not say:
“You wretched people! You are worthless! You were born in sin and are never going to amount to anything! What ever made me think I could count on you to help spread love and justice?”
Instead he said, “Peace be with you.”
He ate with them.
He more or less said, “Okay, things are pretty tough in the world right now, I know that you are each capable of going back out there and making a difference.”
We do sin.
We do miss the target and we need to take responsibility for that and seek transformation.
But we are not born in sin, no one is - Each of you is beloved and we are able to hit the target.
We are able to choose to live within the ethics of God's love in our relationships and in our institutions.
Prayer in bulletin for us to pray together written by Soren Kierkegaard,
“You have loved us first, help us never to forget that you are love so that this sure conviction might triumph in our hearts over the seduction of the world, over the inquietude of the soul, over the anxiety for the future, over the fright of the past, over the distress of the moment. But grant also that this conviction might discipline our soul so that our heart might remain faithful and sincere in the love which we bear to all those whom you have commanded us to love as we love ourselves. Amen.”