To Save All People…
Scriptures: Genesis 3:1-7, 22-24, Romans 5:18-6:4, 14-19
What is a minister’s favorite topic for a sermon? O, c’mon, you should have come right back at me with that answer. It’s SIN, right? Well, OK, if you’re a regular member of this congregation maybe you haven’t heard me preach all that much on that topic. I’m a lot bigger on topics like God’s grace and love and establishing justice on the earth. But it’s no accident that arguably the most famous sermon in the annals of American Christianity is Jonathon Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, preached in 1741. Just kind of makes you shudder to think about that title, doesn’t it? I went back and looked at that sermon, and, boy, it sure makes you want to run to the nearest pub and drown all your troubles (of course, in Edwards’ day, pubs weren’t open on Sundays). He begins with a verse from Deuteronomy: “Their foot shall slide in due time,” and then he begins to lash out at his congregation: “In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, that were God’s visible people….. and that, under all the cultivations of heaven, brought forth bitter and poisonous fruit…..” His first major proposition is: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” And it doesn’t get much better from there: “They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins.” And since it is Halloween how about this bit of spiderish imagery: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked…..Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.” I’m ready to run screaming from that church, aren’t you?
Of course, some have sought to contextualize this sermon by saying that it was being preached to a particularly hard-hearted congregation, and that it was what was called an “awakening” sermon which also emphasized “the unexpectedness of the moment when God will execute justice”. But that doesn’t make it any easier to hear or to believe that Edwards’ listeners found themselves ready to repent and completely turn over a new leaf.
“Sin” has become a dirty word in many parts of Christianity today. It’s almost as if it had four letters in it so we could call it a four-letter word like some of those others we think of as “dirty”. We’ve backed away from it in pulpit and pew – why? – well, perhaps because in large measure, like Jonathon Edwards, the church has over the years had too much of a morbid preoccupation with sins. And the companion of this preoccupation is what we’ve been talking about in part over the past few weeks: a sense of judgmentalism which says that it is “those people” somewhere out there who are “sinning”. Nevertheless, nevertheless….. I’m going to try to have us look at the nature of sin this morning and why it plays such an important part in our lives.
I wanted us to say the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith together this morning, not only because it is good for us to re-experience a testimony to those things we believe, but particularly because of this felicitous affirmation that God “seek(s) in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin.” I really like the pairing of those last two words. “Aimlessness” is our precondition for what we mean by “sin” – just look at some of the synonyms for it: “lack of purpose”, “lack of direction”, “pointlessness”, “senselessness”. When you are feeling aimless it is all too easy to feel that there is no point to life, that, as the nihilist is wont to say, suicide is the only answer. Or, if not to that extreme, at least to a kind of malaise – a not-wanting-to-get-out-of-bed-in-the-morning sort of feeling, a where-do-I-go-from-here sense? It is out of such feelings of pointlessness and senselessness that we are led to sin.
Note also in this affirmation that we are talking here about an active God – one who seeks for us in our aimless wanderings. I am reminded here, as I am so often when thinking about our active God, of Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven”:
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him,”
until finally the one who is fleeing hears,
“Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?
…..
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
No matter what our aimlessness and desire to run away, God is constant and chases after us.
When a non-Christian looks at Christianity one of the greatest stumbling blocks to accepting it is the doctrine of original sin. Possibly only the ideas of the bodily resurrection and the virgin birth are greater stumbling blocks. For, this concept says that we human beings are by our very nature sinful – and yet, paradoxically, we are responsible for our own actions. A fifth century theologian, Celestius, saw the logical difficulty in this doctrine when he said, “We must ask whether sin comes from necessity or from choice. If from necessity then it is not sin; if from choice then it can be avoided.” But the champion of original sin was Augustine, and he answered Celestius in this way: sin does come from choice – Adam’s choice. Adam could have refused the temptation, but because he had an inclination to be rebellious he chose sin, and we humans continue to participate in that sin ever since. All of us are sinners because of Adam’s sin – so went Augustine’s thinking.
Now, I’m starting to see some eyes glazing over. This way of thinking really isn’t much of a part of our present belief system or has had much influence on the way we act, I’ll bet many of you are thinking. But whether you realize it or not, in many of our practices this doctrine still has an influence. Why is infant baptism still widely practiced in our churches? The original reason behind this practice was to make sure that the baby was filled with the Spirit of God, because he or she was born a sinner. We may not think in these terms today when we bring our babies and children to the baptismal font, but that was the theological reasoning behind infant baptism; otherwise, we would practice only believer’s baptism – baptizing those who of their own free will can commit themselves to Christianity. So, we continue to carry out a belief in the idea of original sin, even though we may not consciously think of it as such.
But the idea of original sin is not simply an outmoded doctrine; it is also a way of telling us something profound about human nature – namely, that the basis for sin is pride. Here we are again with the Pharisee extolling himself in prayer, as we talked about last week – the very epitome of pride when he is supposed to be coming to the temple to pray. Read again the Genesis account of the fall, and you will see that Adam’s temptation is to increase his knowledge in order to become more powerful in his own right. He did not want to be “little less than God”; he wanted to be like God. Sin comes as a result of human pride wanting to play God and not because of Adam and Eve’s shame at seeing one another naked. This was simply a consequence of knowledge; yet, as a result of this consequence, sin has erroneously been identified with sex down through the ages. The church has finally come to realize that our sexual nature is not related to our sinful nature as such, although the way in which we use our sexual nature may have something to do with the sin of pride.
Adam’s pride is the reason for his condemnation, and this, then, becomes a striking insight into our own nature when we begin to act out of a prideful desire to go beyond our own limitations in power and knowledge. This is what happens when we begin to judge others. Those of you who were here last week can now begin to hear some echoes of what we were talking about then – that standing in judgment of others — seeking to set ourselves up as superior to them – like the Pharisee in the temple – causes us to engage in the sin of pride.
Reinhold Niebuhr, in discussing sin, talks about three prides: our pride of power (desire for control over others for its own sake), pride of knowledge (an intellectual belief in the infallibility of human reasoning), and pride of virtue. What a strange and paradoxical idea! But it’s related, again, to what we said last week about the traps that are there when we want truly to practice humility. Niebuhr makes this highly paradoxical and fascinating statement: “Moral pride thus makes virtue the very vehicle of sin.”
Let me take us back, now, to the UCC Statement of Faith. The line following the one we’ve been focusing on says, “You judge people and nations by your righteous will declared through prophets and apostles.” The affirmation here is that God is the judge, not us with our limited human capabilities. Paul says it this way in Romans: “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” (12:19) We sometimes quote this passage to support the idea of a wrathful and righteous God; but look at where Paul is leading us in the very next verse: “No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink….. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’” (12:20-21)
Moral pride leads us to want to pass judgments on others and even on nations, and to do this we very often lump people together in categories, or make judgments based on limited knowledge, like what we read in the paper, see on TV, or get through surfing the Internet (remember that what’s put up on Internet sites – especially blogs and twitters – can hardly be thought to be infallible).
Now, I want to be cautious here. Pushed to one extreme this line of thinking can lead us to indifference and apathy about what goes on in the world. You’ve heard me use this before, but one of the biggest moral conundrums for me is: can we be tolerant of intolerance? Can we afford not to stand in judgment of the bigot? Can we let dictators ride rough-shod over us? You’ll remember from the 1960s that the non-violent movement had a slogan: “despising the sin while loving the sinner.” In matters of justice it is important to recognize those forces loose in the world that lead to injustice – what Paul, again, calls “principalities and powers”. Here is where human judgment quite rightly comes into play. If we do not make decisions, we can’t live. The trick is not to so identify a person with a force – like bigotry – that we fall into the trap of self-righteousness by hating the individual because they represent something we dislike. You can begin to see why sin is such a difficult part of human nature to grasp – because it can so subtly use our own sense of virtue. The author of Genesis had a great deal of insight when that author called the serpent “more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.”
The “prophets and apostles” spoken of in the Statement of Faith are said to declare God’s “righteous will”. So, they were quite often judgmental about evil forces abroad in the world. They were not indifferent to what was going on around them. The word “righteousness”, by the way, is related to an old English word, “being rightwised” – or, a putting right, a changing from wrong to right. For Paul, in the text we used today from Romans, this “being rightwised” is the condition for receiving life. So, in order to “save all people from aimlessness and sin” God makes right people and nations through God’s judgment. Paul then sums up the meaning of sin and judgment for us: “For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners [Adam’s original sin], so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous [Jesus Christ’s act of sacrifice].” This is the promise of judgment: that there is no judgment in God without mercy. Salvation from sin – being “rightwised” – is possible only when we have accepted God’s judgment upon us.
That old and esoteric doctrine of original sin actually tells us something pretty important about us which needs to be remembered: namely, that we are human beings and not God. Adam, in wanting power and knowledge, forgot this. When we exploit our power and knowledge and virtue (Niebuhr’s three sources of pride), we are in danger of forgetting this, too. Sin is a prideful rebellion against the authority that God has over our lives.
So, maybe it’s not too difficult to preach about sin, after all, in this year of our Lord 2010. What is important to realize is that our specific acts are not sinful as such, but rather sin arises from our attitude toward what we do. If our actions are motivated by a concern for our own pride of power, knowledge, or virtue, then we are smack in the middle of human sin. If our actions are motivated by a realization of the mercy and grace that God has already given us and by the desire to act on that realization out of all humility, then we are beginning to rise above that old Adam sense of original sin. Is this truly possible? In the grace of God all things are possible. It remains for us to practice the “being rightwised” that God wants of us.
Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
October 31, 2010
To Save All People… (Genesis 3:1-7, Genesis 3:22-24, Romans 5:18-6:4, Romans 6:14 - Genesis 6:19)
Genesis 3:1-7
3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. (ESV)
Genesis 3:22-24
22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (ESV)
Romans 5:18-6:4
18 Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. 19 For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. 20 Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
6:1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (ESV)
Romans 6:14-23
14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (ESV)
