July 3, 2005   North Park Presbyterian Church

Gospel Basics:  Sin

Patricia K. Townsend
 

Zechariah 9:9-12        Psalm 145:8-14        Romans 7:15-25a

When we traveled to Michigan two weeks ago to spend Father’s Day with Bill’s father, we took a little side trip to my childhood hometown, Decatur, Michigan, near Kalamazoo. There we visited the minister from the Decatur Bible Church who had married us 43 years ago, Charlie Carson. Charlie has retired but continued to do occasional supply preaching at almost all the churches in town. Last time he preached at the Presbyterian Church he got them giggling, saying that before he retired the church paid him to be good, but now he is good for nothing.

The double meaning of Charlie’s phrase “good for nothing” captures quite nicely the language difficulties that we get into when we try to talk about good and bad, righteousness and sin. In slang, to describe something as “bad” now means that it is excellent. The thing most likely to be described as “sinful” is a hot fudge brownie sundae.

Indeed the language problem is so serious that some preachers have given up speaking of sin at all. Among the wonderful speakers at the National Presbyterian Pastor’s Retreat, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann said he’d rather not talk about “sin,” but instead about “anxiety.”  (cf. Kierkegaard, Niebuhr) The word anxiety helps to get people to thinking about the serious collective sins. Sins generate fear and destruction on a large scale throughout the whole of society and all of creation. He implied that saying the word “sinful” gets people to thinking too narrowly about individual moral acts, particularly someone else’s sensual sins. He thinks that sin has been so privatized and trivialized that it is not useful to talk about it.

Another of the conference speakers, Barbara Brown Taylor, hasn’t given up on the word “sin” but she felt she had to write a whole book to try to bring it back into use, titling her book Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation (Cowley, 2000). She agrees that the language of “sin” has lost its ability to communicate to today’s audiences. Why? Partly because of secularism, partly disillusionment with traditional institutions like government and church. And we hear a pluralism of voices, including those of other world religions that do not emphasize sin.

Nowadays when confronted with violations of social norms that once would have been called sins, we are more likely to speak of “crime” or “sickness,” using the language of law or medicine. With the diagnosis comes the prescription, for crime, a punishment, for sickness, some form of therapy. With the loss of the ability to name sin, comes also the loss of the significance of repentance, confession, forgiveness, and restitution. Theology has become irrelevant to transgression. The Psalmist’s lament, “Against Thee only have I sinned,” seems quaint (Ps 51:4).

It is not only preachers who lament the lost language of sin. After a long career as a psychiatrist, Karl Menninger wrote a book asking, “Whatever became of sin?”  He was convinced that much of modern depression and unease comes from not being able to call sin, sin. After crime is punished and neurosis treated, there is still “vague, amorphous evil” all about us, for which no one is responsible. No moral questions are asked because we have abandoned the concept of sin. Menninger thought, “If the concept of personal responsibility and answerability for ourselves and for others were to return to common acceptance, hope would return to the world with it!” (1973:188) Sin is, ultimately, a hopeful idea.

Lost language or not, we cannot avoid the including the term “sin” in this series of sermons on Gospel Basics from Romans. In just the four chapters of Romans that we are reading this summer (chapters 5 through 8) the word “sin” is used 36 times (RSV). The words sin and sinner are used barely half that many times in all of the synoptic gospels combined--Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And many of those examples are the Pharisees accusing Jesus of hanging out with sinners and tax collectors. Since those gospels taken together represent our most complete account of what Jesus said and did, we can fairly conclude that Jesus didn’t have much to say about sin, compared to Paul.

Of course, if Jesus was hanging out with tax collectors and other folks who knew they were sinners, he didn’t need to remind them of that, he only needed to tell them that they were loved and forgiven. That gives us a clue why we good Presbyterians, who are religious folks like the Apostle Paul was, need the concept of sin so badly--because if we cannot name our problem we cannot see our way to a solution. So bear with me while we explore the topic of sin for a while, even though it may not seem very contemporary or sophisticated.

In today’s familiar passage from Romans 7 Paul talks frankly about his inner struggle. He knows what the right thing is to do but he cannot do it. He knows what is wrong, but he slips into that sinful pattern so easily. Now, Paul is not talking about what it was like when he was a young man, before he had a life-changing encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. He’s talking about the mature Paul—apostle, church founder and leader, shaper of Christian theology. No one has accused him of blatantly sinful sexual liaisons or dipping into the church collection or drinking a bit too much wine. The worst anyone has said of him that caused him to become defensive is that he might be a bit of a wimp. So the sin Paul speaks of must be something more subtle, something that his best friends can’t see, an inner struggle against attitudes that fall short of his highest ideals—perhaps a momentary lust for power, an unloving thought, a fleeting envy of an elder’s settled home life. Whatever it was, it reminded Paul that sin is a powerful adversary. He knows that Jesus is Lord, that Christ has finally defeated sin and death, the ultimate victory is assured, but for now sin is still on the prowl.

What is this thing called sin? “The wages of sin is death,” Paul had written earlier (Romans 6:23). Sin is everything that is death dealing, all those things that kill our relationships with God, with others, with the creation that surrounds us. Sin is alienation from God, from the source of life. Sin is the rejection of grace, the refusal of God’s free gift of forgiveness, our personal declaration of independence, which when looked at more closely, turns out to be slavery to sin and idolatry of self.

And how do we respond to the power of sin in our lives? Sadly, we are likely to respond by living with a vague free-floating sense of guilt and remorse, rather than doing the hard work of identifying and confessing our sins, repenting and asking God to change us. It seems easier just to accept the way we are than to face the prospect of change, especially when the whole of society seems bent on protecting our right, even obligation, to sin.

Where would our economy be without the sins of greed and covetousness? The entertainment industry depends on lust and anger. The vaunted American standard of living that we enjoy depends on violence and destruction to the rest of creation, practiced collectively rather than individually. Anyone who has looked at toxic dumps and third world slums can easily see the damage done by these corporate sins, for which it is so difficult to assign individual responsibility.

And one sin leads to another—the act to the lie to cover up. I saw a thought-provoking bumper sticker the other day. “We are making enemies faster than we can kill them.” Whether or not you accept this as an assessment of American foreign policy, it is spot-on as an assessment of the web woven by sin in human life.

Even some of our own best impulses to serve the church are all too often bent by anger, pride, and the lust for power, or undercut by “sloth,” that one of the seven deadly sins which is not the same as laziness but is the absence of zeal and passion. That, too, is a refusal of grace, through our unwillingness to become all that God intends for us.

The good news, the gospel, is that it doesn’t need to be this way. Confession, repentance, and transformation are made possible through God’s grace. Our weekly unison prayer of confession and assurance of pardon are reminders that this is a continuing process. To omit it for any length of time would be like taking the garbage out to the curb only once. After a few weeks it would pile up and stink.

The passage in Romans ends with Paul’s passionate statement of the final victory he expects over our powerful adversary, sin. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Both of our Old Testament readings today resonate with Paul’s shout of victory. Neither one specifically talks about sin but both picture the Lord as a victorious warrior, a conqueror who is at the same time a compassionate peace-bringer. The psalmist sings of the Lord’s mercy and grace, “The Lord upholds all who are falling, and raises up all who are bowed down.” Zechariah says, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion…I will set your captives free from the waterless pit.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Amen.