What is Sin Rom 7:15-25, Luke 15: 11-24.

Every week when I grew up we used to go to church. Invariably after the first hymn there was a prayer of confession. Usually it would go something like this –

“Almighty God, Our Maker and Redeemer, we acknowledge and confess in Thy presence the sinfulness of our nature, and our shortcomings and offences against Thee. Thou alone knowest how often we have sinned, in wandering from your ways, in wasting Thy gifts, in forgetting Thy love. Have mercy, O Lord, upon us, who are ashamed and sorry for all wherein we have displeased Thee. Forgive our sins through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Saviour, and cleanse us from our faults”.

As a youngster some of the words were a bit big for me, but the message still got through. Part of coming to church was telling God that we had been bad in the past week and that we needed to say sorry. Usually there would also be a short sentence about being forgiven, but somehow this never really rang true for me and the message I was left with was not that I was free and forgiven, but that I wasn’t good enough. It was only the failures that mattered in my life. I suspect, like most worshippers, I hadn’t committed any particularly heinous deeds in the past week. I tried to be a good boy, who was eager to please my parents. I wasn’t in the habit of deliberately being wicked to others, or calling my sister’s names. I did resent doing the dishes sometimes, and I sneaked the odd biscuit out of the biscuit tin, but I didn’t see that as a great offence against God. It wasn’t the sort of thing that God’s son died for.
As I grew up it seemed that the church taught that as human beings we were a pretty hopeless lot, particularly when it came to selfishness, shortcomings, and sexuality. We were sinful beings who despite how hard we might try we would fail. We were good at committing sins and we needed to be forgiven. We were supposed to feel guilty because of things we did or didn’t do. We gloried in the negatives. For many people I believe this has led to a crippling sense of lack of self worth. It has led to some people saying that the whole idea of sin is an abusive doctrine that simply demeans us as human beings.

I have some sympathy for that view. I’m concerned that many Christians seem to carry around with them a view that “I’m not good enough”. There is a sense in many faithful church goers that they fail and don’t measure up, which often translates as a critical voice when they look at others. What disturbs me about this is that as I look at Jesus I don’t see this ‘put down of self’ in operation. Jesus went about affirming people and sharing with them a message of hope and encouragement. He didn’t go around pointing out their sins all the time, but seemed to focus much more on the positives. He rejoiced in humanity and affirmed our humanity, in his actions and in his being. He was one of us. The people he mixed with certainly weren’t perfect, but that didn’t seem to matter. He loved them anyway. People felt good about themselves in his company rather than feeling they weren’t good enough.
It’s really interesting to look at the story of what we call the ‘Prodigal Son’. When I was young I remember being told at Sunday School that the wayward son was a real waster. He was terribly rude to his father, he took off and lived a bad life doing all sorts of things he shouldn’t have. The message was clear. You didn’t want to be like that Prodigal Son, because that is what the story was called and he was the key character. I wasn’t too sure what prodigal meant, but it was obviously pretty bad. He partied, wasted his money, and led a very questionable life. This was not what good Christians would do. He was a particularly sinful person. It was only later that I read the story with a different emphasis and renamed it the story of the Crazy Father. The father became the key character with his amazing welcome of the lost son. It was the crazy father who is the star of the story with his unconditional love that runs to meet the returning son, and which hugs him and puts the family robe on him to signify his acceptance into the family. The son who is struggling to get out his little speech about sinfulness is not listened to. The amazing thing is that the father never dwells on the bad things his son has done. They simply aren’t important. The story isn’t really about doing bad things, and it’s not about confessing and receiving forgiveness. It’s about a broken relationship and the happiness of the father when the relationship is restored.
Sin – and I think it is a story about sin – is something deeper than doing some bad things. One of the helpful ways of looking at sin I think is to see that this word sin appears in both the singular and plural form in our scriptures. There is sin and there are sins. When used in the plural it most often means particular failures such as being unkind, walking by on the other side, and so on. Some Christians understand this as missing the mark with the mark understood as God’s commands. But this is only part of the picture. In our scriptures I think there are many different images of sin. Blindness, bondage, hard heartedness, being lost, infirmity, alienation – are some of those images and with these images there are various cures that are quite different to the traditional forgiveness.
The blind need to have their eyes opened.
Those caught in slavery and bondage need to be freed.
The ‘hard hearted’ need to learn graciousness.
The lost need to find the way.
The sick need healing.
The alienated need to find a sense of belonging.
Sin is something much more than committing sins, feeling guilty, and seeking forgiveness. Paul I think is alluding to this in the passage from Romans. “It’s no longer I who do it but sin that dwells in me”, is not meant as an excuse as if we are genetically programmed to delight in forgetting God, but it’s simply stating a common human experience. We are incomplete in some way. We are not our true selves. We constantly make bad choices. We are alienated from the deep peace of God. Sin in the singular is at work within us and around us leading us from the life God desires, and we need to constantly work to transform something deep inside us. The sins if you like are the tip of the iceberg which we can see above the water but underneath there is something more. The hidden part of the iceberg is where the real problem lies, if we are to beat sin in our lives we need to understand and deal with that deeper reality called sin (singular).
The nature of sin in the singular has been described by wise Christians in different ways. One influential stream of Christian wisdom understands the root of sin, from which sins emerge, as hubris, a Greek word often translated as pride. Pride of course can bee a good thing and we should take pride in ourselves and what we do, but hubris means more than this. It means making one’s self the centre of the universe and the centre of one’s concern. Pride loves power, pride loves to hold the floor, pride loves to show off and parade the successes, pride likes others to look up to it. C.S. Lewis tells us that pride is, “the essential vice, the utmost evil. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” He points out that pride is essentially competitive because pride drives us to want more, to have more. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.” In this sense hubris destroys community between people and community with God. A proud person is always looking down on things and people and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. Hubris focuses all our energy on ourselves and our well being. It says that others, the environment, even God are there to serve us. Hubris not only affects individuals but also groups. Groups often overestimate their own importance, causing problems because they think they are all that matters. Countries do too. Hubris accounts for many many sins in the plural, but there are other roots as well.
At the other end of the spectrum is another image for the root of sin and that is sloth. When Adam and Eve were in the garden of Eden, Eve listened to the snake and Adam listened to Eve. Sin as sloth is letting others decide your life for you. We can be so whimpy and slothful that we take no responsibility for anything.
Our scriptures also refer often to a third root sin and that is idolatry. Unfortunately we often think of this as worshipping little idols, and Protestants have often looked sideways at Catholics and their statues. Fear not I’m not suggesting statues at St Mark’s, but idolatry refers to what we make the centre of our lives. For many in our community the centre is money, or family, or as we’ll see plenty of in the next month, sport. Idolatry occurs when we make anything less than God the centre of our lives. Idolatry occurs when something other than God’s passion shapes our lives. From a false centering of our lives in things other than God sins (plural) flow.
When hubris – the centering on self – is the problem, when sloth is the problem, when idolatry is problem, forgiveness isn’t really the appropriate remedy. What is required with the root sin that infects us all hubris, sloth, idolatry is a re-centering of our lives in God. I think sin is a reality we need to name often in our faith, and when we gather Sunday by Sunday we need to remember that we have lost our way, become alienated, and have allowed our love for God and the things that concern God to become luke warm. We need to focus our lives on God again and put God back in the centre. What we don’t need in relation to sin are words and actions that make us feel deep inside that we are unworthy or that we can never celebrate our goodness too.

Dugald Wilson 21 August 2011