My August preaching series will focus on Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation. "Sin," according to Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and noted preacher, "is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance." Many would argue with this proposition. Mainline Protestants all across the country are tired of hearing about sin and salvation, and preachers seem reluctant to address the topic altogether. Of those clergy I have spoken to about sin the responses range from “no one wants to hear about that” to “the last thing we want to do is remind people why they hate the church, another rant about our depravity…”
The odd thing is this, as acts of selfishness and neglect, as acts of various kinds of evil, come across our screens and into our conversations we wonder how all this is possible. After all with the focus of our public education system, not to mention our public institutions, being firmly on enhancing self-esteem, telling each other how much we love and care about each other, how beautiful we are, how gifted and special we all are, how is this inhuman behavior so common?
Let me give you a concrete example. This July Kim and I attended a number of Jazz Festival concerts, Kim’s favorite being Sheila E. Some of you might remember that Sheila E was once Prince’s drummer. During the concert Sheila E interrupted her music to ask each member of the audience to find a random stranger and tell her or him “I love you”. For most of my life this has been the dominant mantra of our education system, our health system, of convocation speeches, of talk shows and popular books, not to mention TED talks. “You are special, you are gifted, that you matter.” But while I do NOT subscribe to the notion that things are getting worse (they aren’t) I do think many of us assumed this positive reinforcement would have created a kinder, gentler, more compassionate society. It has not.
So perhaps we do need to revisit this very old word “sin”, if only to ask why we continue to offer to each other not our best selves but instead something that we can’t be proud of, whether as individuals or as a society.
Taylor finds that the medical paradigm of sin as sickness and the legal paradigm of sin as lawlessness both lack the complexity and richness of the theological paradigm of sin as missing the mark, acting wrongly, and rebelling against God's will. The author wants to reinstate the spiritual practice of repentance and the virtue of being a righteous person, or one whose "aim is true." While sin may be seen as "a helpful, hopeful word" by Taylor, fundamentalists, who claim to represent Christianity all over the world by the sheer strength of their numbers, continue to imbue the term with toxic and dehumanizing power. So what do we do with “sin”, dismiss it as too tarnished to offer any light to our public conversations about inhuman behavior or is it time to rehabilitate the word, as Taylor wishes, and use it to point us in a helpful direction that sheds light on the presence of God in these challenges?
Ultimately that is for you to decide.
In her first chapter on sin Taylor reminds us that trying to push something away from our consciousness not make its reality disappear. She writes, “Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human beings will continue to experience alienation, deformation and damnation, and death no matter what we call them. Abandoning the language will simply leave us speechless before them, and increase our denial of their presence in our lives.” How true!
Without the language of sin we will inevitably come up with other answers, not all of them helpful. There are a great many people who, in the absence of a language of universal sin, will point to certain groups of people and suggest “what can you expect from them?” Some others will shrink the problem, make it all about our manners, our piety, our polite “niceness”. But surely this has nothing to do with the collective sin of remaining silent as our planet heats up, as refugees live in over-crowded camps around the world, as people in this country have to line up at foodbanks to eat. And then there are those who suggest there is no such thing as sin, they just double-down on this positive message that we are all intrinsically good, begging the question why selfishness, neglect and evil remain part of the human condition.
Taylor repeats that “sin does not translate simply as rule-breaking” as if you can legislate sin away with more legislation or rules applied by families or organizations or communities. The pastor in Taylor knows that humans are fallible, that no matter how many rules, how severe the penalties, how much shaming we inflict on the guilty, people will “fall”, people will sin. Taylor shares some of her formative years where she learned the transforming nature of “consequences” as a means of overcoming sin. “I learned that while a sincere apology might get their attention, it was changed behavior my parents wanted from me. To that end they set up consequences for my actions, so that I could experience the results of my choices.”
It was also in her formative years that Taylor moved outside her family’s mainline faith tradition to experience more evangelical Christianity. “There I heard sin defined as rebellion against God which could take any number of forms. Not surprisingly the sins described were all individual, private, and interpersonal; these included drinking, drugs and sex outside marriage. We also hear a lot about the Ten Commandments. This narrative we received that night included only one way out, to accept that we as humans were corrupt and then to surrender ourselves to Jesus and acknowledge that his death was an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Then we would be forgiven and made right, once and for all, with God.” The choice was stark and the consequences severe. But at least there was a story and a rational for our ongoing sinful nature.
Taylor would accept the premise that sin was a rebellion against God but with time and experience and thought she could not accept the underlying thesis of this worldview, namely that God would create life to test Her handiwork, to give life to a process of testing who is good and who is bad. Given all of the factors that go into who makes these personal good choices and who doesn’t, where you are born, the ease or hardship of your life, that relative challenges you face, how could you ever use this one simple test to determine eternal life?
In seminary Taylor learned from the great scholars of the faith, names like Barth and Tillich. “I learned the difference between sin and sins—sin being the existential state of distance from God and sins being the willful human choices that maintain that distance.” The 1928 Book of Common Prayer gives voice to this understanding of sin, “Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, judge of all men. We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.” The part of that prayer that spoke to Taylor was not the wrathful God but rather the language was “plural, not singular.” Sin was more than my neighbor telling a lie or my own temptation to swear or drink, it was the profound reality of our distance from God’s presence, from God’s covenant, from God’s intended “way”.
Taylor mentions the scared story, the Good Samaritan, several times in this opening chapter. She does so because this tale reminds us that sin is relational, personal and social. Note that our individualistic impulse, as people of western democracies, is easily triggered by the failure of the religious man and the lawyer to act. But notice too that the hero of this story, the one who follows God’s way, is a Samaritan, and we know then that Jews and Samaritans hated each other. Our sins are not just a matter of personal interactions but also being aware of our racism, sexism and homophobia. I recall from my childhood persons who never spoke a carnal word or uttered a blasphemy against the Lord, persons who would never lie or cheat or steal but who would use the N-word, use hate speech about gays and lesbians and believed anyone who belonged to another faith was a child of the devil.
What makes this story so instructive is how Jesus uses it to answer a fundamental question about the nature of humanity. “Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him, What is written in the law? What do you read there? He answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. And he said to him, You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live. But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, And who is my neighbor? Jesus replied…” This story is a reply to the question of what we are made for. The answer is we are made for love, for connections, for compassionate responses, for community. Sin is a rebellion against God, it is the rejection of our true intent, it is our failure to meet the moment, the challenge, the covenant we were made to fulfill.
We will hear more about sin and the lost language of salvation next week. In the meantime I remind you we are loved, not because we are perfect, but rather in our imperfections, we learned that there is a path back to who we truly are. We give thanks. Amen.