Fourth Sunday Lent 1997

Fourth Sunday of Lent 1997

Sin is..

To use this notion of Lent as a time of deepening as a perspective from which to read these three texts today, I think the thing that emerges most clearly as thematic, and as unifying them, is the notion of sin. So we can talk about a deepening of the notion of sin. There were big complaints from some people in the Vatican not too many years ago about the loss of the sense of sin, some of you may remember that. I think at the time that it was a very ambiguous complaint because to some extent it meant that sin was understood basically as an act of disobedience to some external forum, and there seemed to be a lot more disobedience around than there used to be. The position was argued that the sense of sin was lost. It is certainly true that the church I grew up in basically said that sin was breaking laws and being disobedient, but I think it is possible to read the signs of the times somewhat differently and say that if you change your understanding of what sin is then maybe sin is not disappearing so drastically as those people thought.

To take another run at this thing from a quite different direction, we have the business, especially in this thing that Ian read from Second Chronicles, where sin is understood in terms of punishment. That is, we know we have sinned if bad things happen to us. And there is no question that the whole Book of Deuteronomy, one of the major theological themes in the Hebrew Scripture, argued precisely to that effect. If things don’t work out, then you are obviously bad. The beauty, of course, of the Hebrew Bible is that that precisely was challenged, and rejected, in the latter book of the Biblical canon, which is the Book of Job. And the Book of Ecclesiastics argues that there is no discernible correlation between how your life works out and whether you’re good or not. In fact you could argue, as it comes to the point in the career of Jesus, that the better you are, the worse things are going to be for you. So that understanding, however, of sin has this in common with the Vatican’s complaint: sin is something out there that I am messing around with; sin is some kind of unconformity between me and some external agency, or law, or power... Well I think we are saved from that by the Gospel of John which suggests that judgment consists in that truth is in the world and people have chosen to ignore it. Sin therefore becomes not some violation of somebody’s commands laid on my head, but sin becomes simply me acting against what I know to be the truth. I mean, that is the whole presentation of Jesus as the Light in the fourth Gospel, that’s the beauty and the power of that particular metaphor. How do you avoid being enlightened?--By simply shutting your eyes. Light does not force itself on us, we are all perfectly capable of averting our eyes, we are all perfectly capable of acting against what we know to be the case, and that’s what sin is. In the deepest reaches of the moral theology that I was taught in the seminary, this was buried in some little footnote: the first law in human life is fidelity to one’s conscience. We said that and then quickly spent the rest of the three years filling in the details: well, two ounces of hamburger on Fridays will send you to hell, etc., etc., you can’t have Mass with bread made out of rice, you can’t baptize people with rose-water, and all these other niceties... But that’s basically what sin is about. Sin is me acting against what I know to be so, know to be good, and know to be true, and no force on God’s earth is able to supply for my own understanding... No force on God’s earth is able to substitute for that. So we can therefore, as I’d like to, rehabilitate the notion of sin as disobedience. But what are we disobeying? We are disobeying what we know to be the truth about ourselves, and about our world.

Finally, something else is very useful from the fourth Gospel, which is not unequivocally useful all of the time, but in this instance I think it is very useful... The fourth Gospel has this very dramatic, this almost hyper-dramatic view of reality where everything is either black or white: you are from above, or you are from below; you are in the light, or in the darkness; you are alive, or you’re dead; you love, or you hate. There is no intermediate ground as there is so often, for instance, throughout Paul’s writings. Well, one thing that is useful in that stark view of reality is to illumine what sin is about. The Gospel of John says that sin is darkness, that sin is basically a frustration of creation, of reality. And this, I think, is a very useful way because that is why God had to introduce Jesus into the scene. That’s why you get the Redemption, and Jesus’ life and death as this kind of cosmic-drama. It is a cosmic-drama... To the extent that I sin, I misshape, I distort, and I defeat what is real, according to the Biblical stuff. This is a far cry, therefore, from Friday abstinence, a little sexual waywardness somewhere in my life--the things that we have, it seems to me, focused on in a kind of adolescent fashion in so much of the Church.

So, it’s a , huh? Lent is precisely to deepen our sense of what is real and what is really evil. It is of infinite consequence, this sort of over-heated language that we get so much in the hymns, and in the prayers of the Saints, and in the Scripture itself, where sin is the most corrosive and the most polluting thing... It is..., but you don’t jump to that without first trying to figure out what sin is to begin with. And that’s where we have, in a sense, foreshortened the process. So in these last three weeks of Lent I hope to attend much more carefully to myself, to the world, and to where I fit in. And out of that large, large, ambit of consciousness try to figure out what sin is, and where I am sinning, and where, with all of us, we need to first of all be aware of our responsibility to help each other come to an authentic sense of sin, just as we need to help each other to move beyond an infantile sense of sin. Unfortunately, we don’t mention often enough in the opening announcements that the Church at many of its official levels is not very helpful in this enterprise, but that’s why what we do here is church. This is church, we in fact are the church...

To other sermons