Sin
Given by James Covington on September 23rd, 2007
Fall has arrived. I love this time of year. I love the cool mornings and evenings. I love the warm afternoons we have been having. And I love looking about and seeing so much around me turn into a new season. The short walks I allow myself in Central Park this week have seemed surreal–the sun glistening so wondrously through the trees. I say to myself and my neighbors as we pass each other and comment on the beauty, “enjoy while you can, it will not last forever.” I know, of course the day will come when the leaves of the trees will fall off–almost in unison–and then have their shape for winter. I love seeing the colors turn from green to golds and reds and every shade in between. Once again the earth goes through its rhythm with the promise of spring present even as the fall turns into winter.
When it comes to our lives, if only they were as predictable and ordered as the earth. If only it were so easy for us to be in touch with the cycles of our lives, where we are going, where we have been, and the things that we are called to do.
For us humans, I think, it takes more work. Our lives go by, year by year. One event leads to another. We mark the milestones that come our way. But a lot happens, the days go by and we wake up one morning and wonder how it is we got to this place. Life doesn’t seem to have moved in the same kind of order as the trees losing their leaves at a certain time of year.
You may have heard the story of the person who finds himself before St. Peter and the Pearly Gates. St. Peter explains that it’s not so easy to get into heaven. He asks, “Were you generous and kind? Did you do good deeds, give money to the poor, help your neighbor?” The fellow replied that he couldn’t remember doing any of these things. St. Peter, exasperated, said, “You must have done something good!”
“Well,” said the fellow, “there was this old lady. I came out of a store and found her surrounded by a dozen Hell’s Angels. They had taken her purse and were pushing her around. I got so mad, I threw my bags down, pushed my way through the crowd, and got her purse back. I helped her to her feet. Then I went up to the biggest, baddest biker and told him how despicable, cowardly and mean he was and then I spat in his face.”
“This is impressive,” said St. Peter. “When did all of this take place?”
“Oh, about 10 minutes ago!” replied the man.
Most of the time we strive to live our lives well. We strive to do the right things. But we are human and don’t always do what we set out to do. All too often it is only in hindsight that we see what we should have done or what we would have liked ourselves to do.
Our intentions are good, but we don’t always get to where we want to be.
And so it is with our world. We read the newspaper and we wonder how the world got into the mess that it is in. We see the brokenness around us–in our world, in our community and it is easy to not want to look at the pain so present in the world. Sometimes it is just too much. And we don’t always know what it is our role should be in all of this. Sometimes it is just easier to not do anything.
The Jewish High Holy days have just ended with the observance of Yom Kippur. First came Rosh Hashanah, when the new year is welcomed. But before the year can really begin comes Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, which ended last evening. According to Jewish High Holy Day tradition, God takes out the Books of Life–a very thin book in which are inscribed all the evil people, an even slimmer volume for all the good people, and a much thicker volume for the rest of us. After reflection on our choices and repentance for sins, we are obliged to reconcile with God and neighbor–atonement–at-one-ment.
It is the Day of At-one-ment, when we are invited to be at one with God. Before the new year can really begin we must first turn and look back and take stock of our lives. We must atone for the things we have done to harm others, ask for forgiveness and then reorient ourselves to where we want to be. We fast to prove, to ourselves as much as to anyone else, that we are human, that we have instincts and can say no to them. All living creatures are programmed by instinct. Only human beings can say no to instinct. You can train a dog not to eat through fear of punishment, but you can never teach a dog voluntarily to go on a diet or to pass up food for ideological reasons. Only humans can do that.
The Abrahamic religions refer to our shortcomings as sin. Sin is a word we seldom use anymore because of the association that word carries with guilt and judgment and the natural depravity of human beings.
Interestingly, Muslims are still honoring Ramadan, which carries with it a similar attitude of repentance and atonement. Muslims are also expected to fast and to put more effort into following the teachings of Islam as well as refraining from lying, stealing, anger, envy, greed, lust, sarcastic retorts, backbiting, and gossip. Obscene and irreligious sights and sounds are to be avoided; sexual intercourse during fasting hours is also forbidden. Purity of both thought and action is important.
Here’s the thing: True Religion in an effort to help make people into good human beings, to overcome the destructive and hurtful impulses we all are capable of committing. Within the immense tapestry of Judaic folklore, there is a quaint story, whose importance can be easily overlooked.
Two men, one young and the other old, are facing each other. The younger man is balancing himself on one leg. The other, whom we may picture wearing a modest skullcap, holds his right hand over his heart and halfway extends his left hand, palm down, toward the first man.
The older man is Hillel the Elder, greatest of the rabbinic patriarchs. The place is Jerusalem, sometime in the forty-year period between 30 BC and 10 AD–during the reign of the hated Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas. The story in question is from the Talmud and is given in very few words: A man approaches Hillel in a nervously defiant attitude. “I will embrace Judaism,” he says, “on the condition that you can teach me the whole of the Torah while I am standing on one foot.”
Straightaway, Hillel replies: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary. Now, go and study.”
This is the entire story. We are told nothing further about this man. Perhaps, pensively lowering his foot, he wonders why he has been told to “study.” Has he not just been given the essence of the teaching in one simple directive:
What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Could anything be clearer? For him? For us? Consciously or semi-consciously, we believe we know what is good. Our only question is whether we will act upon it., whether we will put it into practice. What is there to study? Well when it comes to human emotions, fear and anxiety, human aggression, human depravity, and human predator ness, we have to study all the time to learn how and why we often fail our best intentions. As the apostle Paul said it: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The good that I would do, I do not; the evil I would not do, I do!
Human beings can indeed hurt one another. I witness it everyday in my office when I work with couples who speak harshly to one another, blame one another, judge one another, are unfaithful and wonder why they are so unhappy. I teach them to study their emotions and thereby hopefully learn to express and describe feelings and articulate their needs and be human without going to war with one another. Is that not what we must study and learn to do in all aspects of our lives?
Religion calls on people to become good human beings. What we sometimes fail to realize is that every culture and every religion has some explanation for human foibles. Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson acknowledged that “There is a crack in everything God has made…” It has been suggested that “The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless.” Or as Mark Twain said, “Man was made at the end of the week, when God was tired.”
For the ancient Greeks, sin was ignorance. For the Buddhist, sin comes from attachment to the things of the world. For the Christian, pride, the “perverse desire of height,” is the source of all sin. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it trenchantly: “Actually the view that men are “sinful’ is one of the best attested and empirically verified facts of human existence.” In our more psychologically oriented age we have re-defined sin. Freud wrote of the triumph of the id(our natural pleasure-seeking instincts) over the Superego(our conscience) and Ego(our reasoning capacity). Carl Rogers, in contrast to those who view self-love as the problem, posited self-hate as the cause of our bad behavior. For theologian Paul Tillich sin is separation –a feeling of alienation from the Ground of Being–God–and separation from both our neighbor and our deepest self.
What can “sin” mean to Unitarian Universalist, or is it a concept that went out along with electric typewriters? And what do we do with heaven and hell? Do our ethics lack something if they are not bolstered by these traditional theological categories?
I believe the concept of sin reminds us of our human finitude and our innate capacity to do harm. I believe heaven and hell are poetic concepts to describe good and evil on earth. I believe Unitarian Universalists need to take seriously those tendencies in human nature that historically have been called sin.
My current understanding of human nature takes seriously our proclivity to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. Let us admit it: we can be so bound up in ourselves that we are hurtful to others. Let us also acknowledge that in our better moments we can exhibit gentleness toward our most troublesome neighbors and do daring deeds for justice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”
That is a very sobering statement, but I believe it to be a very true one. I have only to look at myself. I have experienced the “urge to kill”: I have “shot from the hip” when I wished I had been silent; I have put my selfish interest ahead of those that have a greater moral claim. I have sinned. I suspect you have too.
I read recently of a man looking for a good church to attend who entered one in which the congregation and the preacher were reading from their prayer book. They were saying, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” The man dropped into a seat and sighed with relief as he said to himself, “Thank goodness I’ve found my crowd at last.”
Unitarian Universalists have always resisted the idea that babies come into the world with the taint of original sin. Sin is a word that does not fall trippingly from the Unitarian Universalist tongue. The idea of Original Sin appalls those of us who believe human nature to be good; and sin just does not go down well in our psychological age.
Our danger is that in our skepticism of the rigidities of commandments, Ten or otherwise, we fall into the trap of having no moral values at all. There is a NEW YORKER cartoon depicting a group of people standing in the fumes of Hades, while Satan, pitchfork and all, says to them: “You’ll find there’s no right or wrong here. Just what works for you.”
That kind of self-centered ethic does not move us toward moral and spiritual growth. It reminds me of the phrase I often hear describing our faith: UUs can believe anything they want.” If each of us follows an ethic of self-expedience we will become like public media politics in which truth comes from shouting, wisdom is revealed by not listening, courtesy is obsolete, civility is gone.
The key question, however, is not whether there are impulses that sometimes overtake and overwhelm us. As the Apostle Paul puts it, all of us “have sinned.” But does this mean that sinning is the only thing we can do? Is the human condition such that we are, in the words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.”
When I look at our world today, I see things that seem almost inexplicable unless humanity is profoundly fallen. I’ll mention only four: domestic violence, pornography, sex trafficking in women and children, and genocide. Augustine would say that no man (and we are talking mostly about men) would commit any of these atrocities unless he couldn’t help it. How could a sane man beat his wife senseless? How could a rational man get on a plane and fly to the far East, where a young girl has been shackled to a bed for him? How could people of sound mind bludgeon their neighbors to death or blow them to smithereens, even if they pray to a different god?
As to pornography, I believe we are currently engaged in one of the most wide-ranging and risky social experiments ever undertaken. The role that internet pornography is playing in the lives of our boys and young men terrifies me. WE are not talking about a couple of magazines stuffed under a mattress. What I fear is the long-term effect of live-action pornography, which teaches boys and men to treat women as objects, to demand and degrade them and to feel pleasure in the process. Will heavy internet porn users eventually be able to build healthy relationships with women? God help us.
In light of these pervasive depravities, original sin seems like exactly the right point of view. It sees wickedness as part of our DNA.
We need a different understanding of sin, one that bears witness to the depravity of our world. Yet recognizes the innate ability of men and women to do good. It tunes out that the word “sin” did not originally refer to the innate wickedness of humanity. The word is derived from a Greek verb used by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey to describe the result of throwing a spear or shooting an arrow. To sin is to miss the mark.
And what is the mark? One of the most famous of all sayings is also attributed to Hillel the Elder: If I am for myself alone, what am I. In other words we are the moral and ethical animal. We are responsible for one another. We are obliged to love and to care, if we are to exist meaningfully and purposefully. There will be no real happiness in our lives until we discover how to serve what is greater than ourselves and with that how to serve our fellow humans, our neighbor. The mark is the mark of virtue. It is the mark of goodness.
If we use sex in a selfish and demeaning way, we miss the mark. It is sin. When we use money and finances in a selfish controlling and dishonest way, it is missing the mark. There is no goodness. It is a sin. When we use religion or politics to kill, maim, control, oppress, it is missing the mark. There is no goodness.
Remember the mark is the mark of ethics, of goodness, of virtue. Virtue comes when we decide, yea choose, yea desire the right thing. In his treatise on ethics, Aristotle says that anger can be virtuous if it is focused on the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way. Virtue comes when we choose the right thing, in the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way. If we choose to commit our actions and responses in this way, the result will not be sin, but virtue.
During Jesus’ ministry, his followers frequently asked him questions about the kingdom of God. When will the kingdom of God come? What must I do to enter the kingdom? These questions came during a time when the Hebrew people felt weary and oppressed. They longed for a place of peace, a time of hope, and a community of justice and love. Jesus responded by saying, “The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, “It is here, or “It is there,’ For the kingdom of God is within you.”
The kingdom of God is about who we are on the inside. It’s about what we choose and desire and whether we make choices that hit the mark. The opposite of sin is virtue: choosing the right thing, in the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, in the right way. This is a daunting standard, but no one ever said living a virtuous life is easy. This is why we have to study! It requires us to ask hard questions about how we exercise our free will. It calls us to use our freedom responsibly, by calculating where the mark of virtue lies and striving our best to hit it. Yes, we will sometimes miss the mark. We will sin. That’s why we need each other–a community of forgiveness and encouragement .
I leave you with one other thought: Human behavior is contagious. As we strive to avoid cruelty, as we seek to be gentle to our neighbors, we set up a moral and spiritual chain reaction which spreads, ever so slowly, ever so slightly, into the world beyond us. That we create this kind of contagion is more important today than ever before. Why? Edmund Burke said it best: The only thing necessary of the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. When good people do nothing, you miss the mark.