Sunday, March 10 - Sin

This sermon was preached for the fourth Sunday in Lent, Sunday, March 10 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21, and Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22.

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s one you know. I’m not changing it - it’s still true to scripture. But it might have a different emphasis than you’re used to hearing.

In the beginning, God created a beautiful garden and filled it with wondrous creatures, including two human beings made from the earth in God’s own image (Genesis 1:27). God spoke with the human beings often, walked with them, cared for them. They knew themselves to be God's creation, and that God saw them as very good (Genesis 1:31). The human beings were naked and they felt no shame (Genesis 2:25).

But when the two human beings ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were opened, suddenly when they looked around they didn't see only goodness anymore. Even when they looked at their own bodies, the ones God had made in the divine image, they felt not love but shame (Genesis 3:7). For the first time they wanted to cover their nakedness up.

And when they heard God out walking in the garden in the cool of the day, the two human beings hid themselves from God (Genesis 3:8). When God asked one of them why, the human being said to God, “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”

“Who told you you were naked?” God asked them (Genesis 3:11). Or as David Hayward, pastor turned artist, puts it in his cartoon, “Who told you you were broken?”

There are many legitimate and scripturally supported ways of thinking about sin in Christian theology. In Christian tradition, the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is understood to be the origin story of sin, so how we tell it matters. Sometimes it's told with an emphasis on the act of disobedience - Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit they were told not to - and on the punishment - banishment from the garden, labor pains, the supremacy of husbands. That retelling supports what Episcopal priest and lawyer Father Patrick Cheng* calls “the crime model of sin.” Sins are crimes against God’s will, which require retribution. In this model, the solution, the grace of God, is that someone else takes the punishment for us: Jesus Christ. 

But sin can also be understood as a state of separation from God. Sometimes when we tell the story of the Garden of Eden, particularly if we get caught up in the gendered relationship between the two people, we can miss what the story has to say about what the human relationship with our creator used to be, was intended to be. When we tell sin’s origin story with an emphasis on the way the humans hid themselves from God, and God’s own despair at the humans’ newfound sense of shame, we begin to see how our closeness and intimacy with God was lost. 

Sin is estrangement from God, from God’s creation, from one another, and ourselves. Sins (plural) are all the thoughts, words, and deeds that result from the distortion of our relationships. Because we feel alienated from God, nature, each other, and even our own bodies, we act in ways that do not reflect or respect their and our essential goodness. We seek to dominate, control, possess - we push away, hide, suppress. 

The solution in this model, the grace of God here, is that God finds us worthy of love and connection anyway. Grace is God continually reaching toward us, over and over throughout all of human history, and ultimately as a human being in the person of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus, who taught us that abiding in him is abiding in God. Jesus, who grafts the withering, dying branches back onto the life-giving vine. 

The goal, then, is not avoiding committing crimes nor perfection in our thoughts and behaviors. We can’t “works” our way out of this, as the writer of Ephesians notes. It’s about God’s gracious love not our own doings. The answer lies in trusting that love - believing in God’s love for the world - opening ourselves to that love, sharing that love, letting that love spill out from us onto everyone we meet. Connecting again to the goodness in which we were created - and good works and the way of life will follow. 

Which model of sin is most Episcopalian? Probably depends on which Episcopalian you ask. But for this Episcopalian at least, the Book of Common Prayer sets out that the mission of the church is “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”** Restoration of unity. Ending the separation and finding right relationship once more. 

In seminary, we studied how the Puritan ministers, our early American Christian forebears, believed that there was only one basic path to salvation that every person followed. The first step of authentic conversion was becoming aware of one’s own wretchedness - realizing that one is not only destined for damnation but also deserves it. The greater the sense of one’s complete and total depravity, the thinking goes, the more miraculous the grace of God will seem and the more wondrous the revelation that God would give God’s only son to save us. It makes sense in a way - and I have met people who really did follow this path to Christianity. The flaw in this approach, however, was that the most zealous of evangelist voices became really, really good at that first step - at getting people to feel complete and utter shame for everything they have ever done, or even for just being who they are. The church also got really good at leaving them there, hiding in the bushes from God, from everyone. 

If you ask me, though, the church does not need to amplify the voices of shame and wretchedness in our own heads. They are already far too loud. 

So why talk about sin at all? Why not just focus on the love, all the time? 

In her conversation with Father Lizzie McManus-Dail*** on the legacy of puritanism in American ways of thinking, KC Davis opened up about how she found her way to Jesus Christ as a teenager. To hear KC tell it, by the time she was sixteen, she had already screwed her life up pretty badly. She was in and out of rehab for drug addiction. She had mistreated people she really cared about, done things that she was really ashamed of, she was in a lot of pain. She says, “I felt broken and unworthy but I thought that I was unique in that, I was uniquely broken.” When people would come to her to try to say, “No, KC you are not broken, you are not unworthy, you are worthy of love,” she couldn’t hear it. “It never fixed or penetrated that because I just thought, ‘that’s a lie.’” So for KC, learning for the first time that everyone is a sinner - that sin is just something you have because the world is broken - was actually a great comfort. She wasn’t so much worse than everyone else - all humans are selfish and have made choices to put themselves over other people. What the New Testament told her, reading it that first time in rehab, was that her being messed up and selfish was not only not unique - it had never been a barrier to God loving her or anyone else. “And if God loves you, that love makes you worthy.” 

And you know? Sometimes when I feel like a particularly crappy mom or wife or priest, it’s not necessarily the folks rushing in with “No, no, you’re so great!” that helps as much as the ones who plop down next to me, exhausted, and say, “yup, me too.” And tell me their own stories of falling short. And you know those cute little post-it notes that people leave on public restroom mirrors that insist “you’re beautiful” with a little smiley face? Sometimes they aren’t what I need, either, because that feels like a lie, too. What I need is a post-it note that says, “your hair’s a mess, you’ve got oatmeal on your sweater and bags under your eyes and that’s okay because you don’t owe it to the world to be beautiful right now - all you’ve got to do is love others the way you were created to love and God’s got the rest.” Love, God’s love, makes you beautiful. 

We are all messed up. We all struggle. We all need help. And God loves us all the same.

If we think of sin as estrangement, and the church as all of us working together to restore our unity with God, then confession is less about enumerating our crimes so we can be properly punished. Confession is saying, okay God, here I am. I'm taking off my fig leaf and stepping out from behind this bush, into the light. I will walk with you again, in the cool of the evening in the garden, and I will choose to see again the beauty that you see in me and in all of your creation. 

* the Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ, 2012

** Catechism, Book of Common Prayer, p. 855

*** KC Davis, Struggle Care: Episode 76 "The Plague of Puritanism," interview with the Rev. Lizzie McManus Dail, February 5, 2024