Friend Sin?
“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her....When they heard it, they went away one by one... Jesus looked up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go and do not sin again.”
July 26, 1981
Once, a man came across a strange want-ad in the newspaper. It said: "For sale – 1981 Cadillac Seville $50." The man thought there must be some mistake, so he called the number listed in the ad. The woman who answered assured him that it was no mistake. Not able to believe that anyone would sell so cheaply a car worth well over 12 thousand dollars, he kept asking if there was anything wrong with the car, had it been wrecked, did it still have a motor in it, etc. Finally, the woman told him to come see the car for himself. He did, and he found the car to be in excellent shape with only a few thousand miles on it. Fearing she would change her mind, the man quickly gave the woman the $50. As she handed him the keys, the man said, "Would you mind telling me why you sold this car for $50?" The woman explained with a sly smile: "My husband bought this car shortly before his unexpected death. In his will, he specified that the proceeds from the sale of his car should go to his secretary. So, now, I am going to call that little blond hussy and tell her to come get her fifty dollars!"
In a semi-funny way, the story about the car does what the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery does in a profoundly deeper way. The stories tell us something about the human condition, the way we people are and act, particularly our selfishness, our unfaithfulness, our lust to get even and then some, our blindness to our own faults, our unflinching devotion to wanting what we want more than anything else. The Bible has a word for it. Yet, if you are like me, we don't like to use it. It sounds a little fanatic, a little old fashioned, and harsh. The word, of course, is SIN. That word, SIN, I am afraid is used too much for the wrong reasons: letting other people have it. And it is used too little in dealing with ourselves and our complicity in the problems at our house and on our globe. Excuses and rationalizations are so much more pleasant.
The main word for sin in the Bible is "hamartia". "Hamartia" originally meant missing a target, like shooting an arrow and missing the mark. In the New Testament, sin hamartia came to mean not missing the mark with this or that bad act but missing the mark with one's whole life. Sin in the Bible is not a little "baddie" you do here or there: play cards, dip snuff, go with fast girls. Sin is a basic condition of human lives from which proceeds are sorts of big and little "baddie" deeds, which are results of the life which has missed the mark, not the sin itself.
The life condition of hamartia, sin, which infects us all long before and long after it ruptures in overt acts is experienced internally. You may not have called it by the name sin but you know what it feels like. It is that cut off feeling that has self, other, and God dimensions. As much as I think, worry, and look out for myself, I'm still not very happy. I still feel sort of out of whack with myself, not even sure which me running around inside me is the real me. It is experienced in my relationships when my suspicions, my grudges, and my look-out-for-number-one-ness keeps me from loving even the special people as much as I need and want to love them. Who hasn't felt that cut off feeling with God, part of us fearing there is not a God, part of us fearing there IS a God and he may settle accounts with us some day. Sin, hamartia, is missing the mark, missing the connections with myself, others, and God, with my life. Sin is being out of whack and not knowing what to do about it.
Some observations and notions about sin follow. They are Biblical and I think if I can say well what I believe God wants me to say about it, the result will be more good news then bad.
FIRST, risking being redundant, the condition of sin – hamartia – is universal. As Paul said, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Now, that isn't just a passage that people print in those irritating tracts they hand you. It is the story of all of our lives. All of us sin and fall short like an arrow falling short and missing the target hamartia of life. All of us are out of whack. It just shows up in different people in different ways.
There is no condoning of the act of adultery committed by the woman brought to Jesus. Jesus tells her to go and sin no more. Yet, reading between the lines, there may have been a spiteful husband whose insensitivity drove her to infidelity; some Bible commentators have suggested that perhaps her husband had set up the whole incident to get even. Yes, she did wrong. But what about the guys looking for rocks to throw? Was what she did any more a sign of rottenness than their desires to splatter her brains or get Jesus in trouble with the Romans or the temple? Same goes for the Cadillac story. Who was that much better than the rest? The secretary using or being used by the boss, the unfaithful and unlucky husband, the vengeance getting wife, or the 'Mr. Every Person Guy' (like you and me) just wanting to get something for nothing.
In a recent novel entitled Tar Baby Toni Morrison has a character named Valerian reflect upon what he comes to realize as the sin of innocence. That is, hamartia of not knowing you are guilty of at least letting evil things go on in life. Valerian is a successful businessman who learns only after his son is a young adult that his mother, Valerian's wife, had abused him as a child. As a child he suffered from time to time his mother pricking him with pins, not enough to really damage, but just enough to hurt and frighten him. Without Valerian knowing it, his wife had faced and corrected her problems which had caused her to do what she did. Yet Valerian had remained aloof even though he finally admitted that he always knew something was not quite right.
"He (Valerian) thought about innocence there in his greenhouse and knew he was guilty of it because he...had watched his son grow and talk but also about whom he had known nothing. And there was something so foul in that, something in the crime of innocence so revolting it paralyzed him. He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know.... He was guilty therefore of innocence.... An innocent man is a sin before God.... No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind (of life)."
How guilty we are of the sin of innocence. We see the other person's problem in our family but are so blind to our insensitivity which has at least aggravated if not caused the other one's problem. We clamor for the death penalty and fail to realize that we might very well be sitting on death row had we walked around in that guy's shoes and circumstances long enough. Luck, not virtue, saves our necks most days. The sin of our innocence shows even in our economics. We are all afraid of inflation. So we think things will be better when we cut 26 billion from human service spending – the least inflationary of all government spending – and add 26 billion to an already bloated war-making budget – the most inflationary of all government spending – because it doesn't add to a society's basic productiveness. We innocently think things will get better feeling little for those who will go even more wanting for a job, an education, healthcare, somewhere to live, something to eat.
The Bible and church have been saying it a long time to us. You, I, nor the world is ever going to get much better until by the power and grace of God we confess our own sin, not the other guy's sin, confess our OWN Hamartia. We all sin. Some of us just show it in more acceptable ways than others. Strangely enough, to confess our own sin brings relief from all the energy we burn hiding and playing games with ourselves. Confession brings openness to others and God who can help us change ourselves and our world.
SECOND, as we come to confess our own hamartia instead of only seeing the other guy's, we are empowered by God to have compassion not condemnation for each other. I am freed from using my energy to cover myself. I am freed from having to beat up on you to get the attention off of me. My hostility toward others who with their hamartia remind me of things about myself that I want to ignore is dispelled.
As a young priest, John Wesley went to frontier Georgia as a missionary. If you know the story of Wesley's adventures in early 1700's America, then you know it was pretty much a disaster for him. One day, nevertheless, Wesley visited with James Oglethorpe who was the first governor of Georgia appointed by the English monarch. During their conversation, a servant passing through the room accidently bumped into and broke a favorite vase of Oglethorpe. General Oglethorpe went into a rage telling the servant to get out and never come back. Wesley, perhaps a little too soon, told Oglethorpe that he should forgive the servant's accident. To that, the governor said: "I will never forgive him. Wesley replied: "Then, Sir, I hope you never sin.”
Whether the person be a welfare recipient, an irritating character at the office or school, or the culprit is a family member with whom you are in conflict, the fact that the other person is not perfect is no excuse not to care, forgive, or help. For neither are you or I perfect. Confession moves us from condemnation of each other to compassion for one another.
Confession of our own participation in the universal hamartia that infects the world empowers us to move from condemnation to compassion, and thus we are ready for the THIRD dimension of reconstruction of ourselves by God's forgiveness and the reconstruction of the world with God's help.
You may have noticed that the sermon is entitled "Friend SIN?". How can recognition of our rotten core be good? Simply, the only way we can become who God wants us to be is to be honest about who we are. When I stop beating around the bush with my life and face the ugly hamartia in me, then I am ready for help. Sometimes we are successful at explaining away our rottenness by projecting it on others – our parents, our spouse, the government or the Russians – or rationalizing it away with fast talking. The trouble is that we cannot make the guilt and bad feelings go away from our guts. Only something beyond us, something like God, can take away the guilt and sin away. You can call it forgiveness, you can call it reconciliation, rebirth, redemption, acceptance, salvation. Pick a word, any word, but at the base it is letting the "just as I am” love of God into your life.
Here is what one man wrote about his conversion experience while he was in prison: “The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying...bending on my knees to pray – that act – well, that took me a week.... For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world." After that confession he says: "I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life's thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof. It is as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime. I would be startled to catch myself thinking in a remote way of my earlier self as another person.” The change in us may not be as dramatic as this man's, our guilt may not be for as socially condemned deeds as his, the difference in us may not have as much of a clear distinction of before and after. Yet there is a difference in us when we face our own evil and accept our place alongside everyone else on earth who ultimately has to depend on the gift and grace of God's loving forgiveness not on our smudged life report cards.
God has to do his loving, feeding, and healing in the world through people, that is, sinners. If this world is going to be saved from ignoring each other to death, from mass starvation, from nuclear annihilation, then it will have to happen through God's use of reconstructed and reconstructing sinners like you and me. It will have to happen by people who realize that whites and blacks, rich and poor, convicts and socialites, Americans and Russians more alike than different, are all infected with hamartia as much as the rest. Haven’t our families, our churches, and our world suffered enough damage from the guilty innocent?
God, help us to be your confessed, compassionate, reconstructed and reconstructing sinners.