Series: Confession of Faith

Sermon: Sin Sunday

tl;dr: A sermon about everybody's favourite topic: sin.

Text

Confession of Faith, article 7

Romans 7:15-20

Transcript

Welcome to Sin Sunday. If you saw the sermon title in the bulletin before today and decided to still come, good for you, thank you. If you did not see the sermon title and are now worrying about what you got yourself into, I'm sorry, but you're already here so you may as well stick around and give me a chance?

We started doing this off and on series through the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective way back in the winter. Part of the reasoning for doing this series was to specifically say some of the big theological ideas in the confession. It's a bit of a Mennonite Theology 101, which can often go simply assumed as we happily preach about other things. I think that motivation is especially true for the less comfortable topics like today's, sin.

Let's dive into the awkwardness with the most obvious question: what is sin?

If you ask the average person what they think sin is, you'll probably get something like what Ted Danson explains in the TV show The Good Place. A group of people have died and arrived in "the good place." They are given an orientation video that explains why they are in the Good Place.

Essentially, it says that sins are bad things. There's a scale of these bad things as well as a scale of good things. Commit genocide is a negative 433,373 points. Makes sense. Telling a woman to "smile" is negative 53 points. Being the commissioner of a professional football league (American) is negative 824 points, but on the other hand for football fans, you can get positive 53 points if you manage to stay loyal to the Cleveland Browns. Then at the end of your life you get judged based on how all the good things you did and the bad things you did balance out. The people with the highest scores end up in The Good Place, everybody else in The Bad Place.

Missing the Mark

That's not really the definition of sin that we see in the Bible, though.

The Greek word in the New Testament which we most commonly translate as sin is hamartia, which means missing the mark. It started as an archery term.

That begs the question "what is the mark that we're missing, what is the bullseye?" In a lot of the Western Christian tradition, the answer might be something to do with God's Law. The Western Church really loves a legal framework. It's basically the framework of The Good Place: break a rule, build up some negative points.

The confession's definition is that sin is turning away from God and making gods of creation and of ourselves. I read that and had a harder time grasping what it practically means when framed as a negative like that, so let's spin that around and say that if sin is turning away from God, then the target is God.

Ok, that makes more sense to me, and gets us much closer to a framework that is more Hebraic and biblical: discipleship. The goal of a disciple is to become like their teacher, to have living like their teacher as their bullseye. In our case, that is Jesus.

Sin By Commission or Omission

This makes it easier to understand another point which the confession does a good job of handling: sins of commission and sins of omission. Failing to love is also missing the mark, not just actively harming. Just saying that I'm going to try to get through life without directly choosing to harm somebody is a pretty tempting approach in our individualistic Western world. It runs into some trouble with Jesus' teaching, though, if we stopped there. Jesus' harshest criticisms were to those who had the resources to actively love people and yet did nothing. Take for example, a well-known story. A man identified as a rich young ruler comes to Jesus asking what else he needs to do, asserting that he follows all the commandments. No sins of commission for him. Jesus tells him to give up everything he has and give it to the poor. The guy went away sad. Most of us can at least in theory get behind the idea of not directly harming other people, but to actively sacrifice from our own privileges for the sake of others is a lot tougher to swallow.

There's a scene in the movie Batman Begins which illustrates this distinction. I'm not going to show it because it annoys me too much every time I see it. In the final big fight scene, Batman has effectively defeated Ra's Al Ghul on a train that is hurtling at full speed about to blow up. Ra's is pinned down by Batman holding a weapon to his head and says, "you finally learned to do what is necessary," which is referencing Batman's one rule that he never kills anybody. Batman responds, "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you either." Then Batman jumps off the train and leaves Ra's to his death.

Excuse me, but that's a really stupid loophole. You won't kill but you'll beat somebody up and hold him in a place where you know he will be killed? That is not a moral high ground. In that moment, Batman doesn't actively harm Ra's, he just chooses not to help. This is an extreme overdramatic example, I know, but a lot of people would subscribe to this idea that my conscience is clean as long as I don't actively hurt other people.

Individual and Communal

That idea extends into another major point: individual and communal sin. This is important especially as we get into heated "political" topics. Left wing politicians and voters tend to focus heavily on the systemic sins which are causing widespread harm. Right wing politicians and voters tend to focus heavily on the individual's free will. We act like these are two radically contradictory sentiments when both can be true at the same time.

Take our environmental destruction for example. Last week we saw yet another report, even more dramatic than previous ones, about how little time we have left to make massive changes before this planet stops supporting human life. I saw two different responses. Some focused on what individuals can do to lower our carbon footprint. Eat less meat, or at least less factory-farmed meat. Use a smart thermostat like the one we have here at the front of the church. And so on.

Then I saw others mocking that response, pointing out for example that we know 71% of worldwide pollution comes from just 100 companies. Without a significant change in our economic system that encourages these companies to create so much damage, our individual changes might feel like a drop in the bucket.

What I would want to say is that both are true. You can make lifestyle changes that will make a difference, especially as more and more people make the same changes. And we can use our voice to encourage stronger environmental actions from our governments and companies who we might buy from. One of them does not cancel out the other, and realistically at least in this case, we probably need a lot of both.

Or maybe I should say that I saw three different responses, because often we start with one of those two and then conclude that we can't actually do anything, so we're off the hook.

If we only talk about racism, for example, as systemic and subconscious, we – speaking to white people here - might conclude that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it because we are too small and insignificant in the grand scheme. We end up continuing to benefit from and perpetuate the system.

On the other hand, if it's only a heart issue isolated to a select group of people, then it's again out of our control. To quote Samantha Field, one of my favourite bloggers: "if Jim is a racist turd," there's nothing for me to do about it – that's for the Holy Spirit to convict. It also lets us off the hook from working together at an institutional level to change things which might have contributed to Jim being a racist turd.

Either way, we've successfully dodged responsibility for anything other than the obviously conscious sins we commit.

Conviction and Shame

Well, you might be feeling guilty right now. You might be feeling convicted. Or you might be feeling ashamed. There's a difference between those ideas, although we might not always use the language the same way so it is important to be clear about what we mean by each.

If you remember nothing else from today, I would focus on this: sin is about the things we do or we fail to do. You are not a sin. You are not "just a sinner." Sin is real and should be acknowledged, but it does not subtract from your value in any way.

Brene Brown is one of the most well-known researchers of shame and vulnerability, and has had a few TED talks on the topic. Originally I had the video here and showed it, but I don't remember all these years later exactly which video I used and which part of it. So I'll go from the context to add the key points:

• Guilt, or conviction, is a healthy feeling that you have done something wrong or failed to do something good. That's for you to learn from and try to do better.
• Shame is unhealthy, feeling like you are worth less.

This is where the Scripture text for today from Romans comes in. I love this text in part because it's kind of confusing the first time, which I think helps prove the point that it is making. Paul says that even when he has a pretty good idea of what is right, he still sometimes messes it up. Which I think is great to say in a way that presumably tries to be clear but fails. Paul simultaneously acknowledges that the real him is somebody who is good. He's aiming for the right bullseye of following Jesus, but sometimes he misses.

I think this is a healthy way to think about ourselves. At the core of our being is what was talked about in the last article of the confession: we are image bearers of God, infinitely loved by God. No matter how much you mess up, that never goes away.

It also doesn't make sin any less real. We do truly mess up. There are some people who think they have never done anything wrong, particularly socially important people who can more easily get away with not seeing consequences for their actions. Sometimes people just need you to help them recognize that they are causing harm. Jesus tells a parable about an unjust judge who finally gives in and grants justice because a woman kept yelling at him. Given what dominated the news for a couple of weeks recently, I don't think I need to expand on that parable too much except to say that sometimes sin needs to be pointed out.

This is not just for the benefit of the victims, but for the perpetrator, too. 10 years ago I had far less awareness of things like white supremacy and patriarchy and how I benefit from them, let alone my personal failings. Sure, I needed to be somewhat responsive when people tried to explain issues to me. But I wouldn't be where I am today if people didn't sometimes find a way to help me see that the thing I'm doing is hurting people. And I'm sure I'm not done, so I hope people can find loving ways to keep calling me in when necessary.

Repentance

This realizing that we've done harm is the first step in repentance, and why Brene Brown can talk about guilt being adaptive, unlike shame. To give you another Greek word for the day, the Bible uses metanoia which is often translated as repent. It literally means to turn around. It has nothing to do with sitting and wailing about how much I suck, nothing to do with shame as Brene Brown put it.

I like how the Common English Bible translates it: "change your hearts and lives." It's a very practical translation and an accurate one. You were going in one direction that was causing harm to yourself and others. Stop doing that and go in a different direction. Jesus talks about this in hyperbolic language: cutting out your eye if it causes you to sin. The apostle Paul gave a less hyperbolic version in one of his letters: if you are stealing, stop and go get honest work instead.

I've been thinking a lot lately about whether we've lost the concept of repentance as a culture. When somebody has done something bad, I usually see two responses:

1. It doesn't really matter. We need to forgive him (usually a him) and pretend it didn't happen. Or,
2. He's a terrible human being who should be permanently exiled from public life because of the thing he did years ago.

Neither really have any suggestion of what it takes to make things right when you've done something harmful. One rushes to forgiveness regardless of repentance and one rushes to judgement regardless of repentance.

If we do talk about repentance, we often boil it down to just saying you're sorry. We can end up with concepts like white guilt. Maybe using Brene Brown's terminology it would be better to call it white shame. We may sincerely be sorry about residential schools, or slavery, or racially-biased police brutality still today. But we just wallow in that shame, feeling bad about ourselves and never get to the hard repentance part, which means the harm is still there, sometimes for hundreds of years.

What does repentance look like? Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, described the Jewish view of repentance this way, specifically discussing in the context of celebrities returning to public life after being called out in the MeToo movement:

There are specific steps to repentance work:

1. owning the harm perpetrated (ideally publicly);
2. do the work to become the kind of person who doesn't do harm (which requires a ton of inner work)
3. Make restitution for harm done, in whatever way possible
4. THEN apologize for the harm caused in whatever way that will make it as right as possible with the victim
5. when faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, make a better choice.

That is not easy – much tougher than simply saying I'm sorry or hoping that it will blow over – but if we are willing to do it, we can at least partly heal the harm done as well as to learn how to avoid making the same mistakes again.

Conclusion

Sin is a heavy topic, but it's one that we need to be able to confront so we can turn around – or repent - away from it and make things better. I wanted to end with some hope, so I requested we sing "My Soul Cries Out", titled in most hymn books as Canticle of the Turning. This is probably my favourite hymn because it so clearly names systemic sin, for one, and calls for a turning or a repentance to something better. But it is so hopeful in how it does it. The world is about to turn. The last 2 or 3 years the news has really dragged down my optimism about humanity. It does not feel like the world is about to turn, at least not toward anything better. And yet I choose to continue to hope that God is at work in the world and invites us to partner in that turning.