March 3, 2002
Genesis 4:1-8
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Matthew 9: 9-13
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“COMMENTS I HAVE HEARD:
They're Always Talking About Sin.”

About three years ago, when I was in the office at the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, I received a phone call from an individual in this Church.  Mercifully, I did not know who that person was and have no idea even now.  The gist of that conversation was roughly as follows:  This caller said, “The children in our Sunday School have been writing prayers, which have been displayed on the wall.  Some of these prayers talk about sin and the forgiveness of sins.  Some of us are unhappy about this emphasis.  Is “sin” a word?  Or is it an idea which is even a part of Congregationalism?

I think I said, or if I didn’t, I should have said, “Not only is sin a reality in Congregationalism; it is part of the thinking of all Christians and certainly is used frequently in the Bible –– 441 times, to be exact.  It is impossible to be a Christian believer and not deal with the subject of sin, because it is impossible to view an omnipotent deity without sensing our human frailties.

Today, then, we are talking about sin. In the text of the morning, Jesus is sitting at a table with his disciples.  Some tax collectors and sinners came and sat with them; isn’t that an interesting coupling, tax collectors and sinners?  And isn’t amazing that they felt more comfortable with Jesus with than the religious authorities of that day?

The Pharisees, ever eager to get anything on Jesus, ask, “Why does your teacher sit with tax collectors and sinners?”  Jesus hears their comments and says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, go and learn what this means.  I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

This little exchange serves as a starting point for our discussion.  As far as Jesus was concerned, sin was a reality, and it was a reality that infected people.  Jesus, suggests William Barclay, is not saying that “there are some who are so good that they have no need of his message.”  He is saying that He did not come to call those who are so self-satisfied that they feel they do not need assistance.  Jesus came to call those who are aware of their weakness or sin and aware of their need to be saved from the path they are on.

Those who are self-satisfied are essentially selfish people who are more concerned about themselves than they are about the lives of others.  Being possessed by the desire to save one’s own soul, rather than others, is the surest way to lose one’s self.  The Pharisees’ religion was selfish because, in the adherence to rituals and laws, they failed to be concerned about others.

Now, if the word or concept of sin is difficult for some to hear and accept, we need to deal with a definition that highlights what I am trying to say today.  I concur with the late Leslie Weatherhead, who said, “ I believe that sin is a dark fact of human life, which cannot be dismissed by euphemistic psychological labels.”  Sin is separation from God –– and I want you to note here that I am speaking of sin, not sins.  It is, in classic Christian thinking, a missing of the mark.

Believers in God believe that sin is whatever you do that pushes God or others away from you; that widens the gap between them and you, and it widens the gaps within your self.  Back to our story: The sin of the Pharisees in this story is the “holier than thou” attitude which pushes other people away.

This type of sin is endemic in many Churches today.

Let me give you a simple illustration.  For the past three weeks, a couple has been attending services right here at First Church.  They were contacted last week, and they said “We like the services; we like the Church, but not one person has spoken to us during our presence at the services.”  This is not unique to our Church, and to be fair, some visitors seek anonymity.  Why are we so afraid to introduce ourselves to those we don’t know?

The issue we are speaking about is sin: alienation from God.  It results in sins becoming a way of life.  Weatherhead says, “Sins are like the rash on the skin; they are the symptoms of internal dis-ease making the self, the center around which all else revolves.

This is exactly what the story of Adam and Eve is all about in the book of Genesis.  Adam means “man,” and the writer of Genesis is telling us what is fundamentally wrong with the human race, then and now.  The original sin refers to the tendency we have toward selfishness which cuts us off from God and from our fellow humans.  Whether we want to hear it or not, the Biblical record is that there is something wrong in the human race; none of us is as innocent, nor as well disposed, as we think we are.
This does not mean that we are monsters of depravity or lost souls who must grovel in our guilt and live in the fear of eternal damnation.  That is the stuff of novelists, playwrights and evangelists pleading for results, and for the need to paint a dark picture, in order that humans can be saved from something.  That is also the attitude of some faith persuasions.

The Bible acknowledges the fact that humans are sinners.  We place ourselves before God, over and over again, but the Bible is a book of hope and continually offers a way for humans to reorient their lives, so that dealing with SIN, results in SINS not developing so terribly.

I concur with C.S. Lewis, in his book “Mere Christianity,” when he says, “The vice I am talking of is pride or self-conceit; and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals is called Humility.  According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride.  Un-chastity, anger, greed, drunkenness and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison; pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”  That is counter to the culture of our time.  Go to any bookstore and see the best-sellers’ shelf; it is filled with books about how to elevate yourself: “Looking Out for Number One,” “Pulling Your Own Strings,” and a host like that.

Pride, by its definition is competitive.  Pride gets no pleasure out of having something; pride gets pleasure by having more than another.  Pride is obsessive until one has more, is better educated, or better looking than others.  Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

That is the power of the Christian gospel: in Christ, we are accepted and forgiven.  There is no ranking of personalities; all are loved, all are forgiven, and only those who by willful action choose to reject this love and forgiveness of God are lost.  They are lost because they are still in competition, still trying to be God, instead of simply accepting God.

Let me point out that having pride is a huge temptation in our culture.  Our way of life is based on a competitive model.  As a society we honor winners.  There are few parades for “losers who may have played well.”  There are few accolades for those who are moderately successful and are satisfied in their level of achievement.  Our whole economy is based on the reality of greed.  We want people to want more and more, so that we can produce more and more, and thus, through this process, we achieve more and more.

Where is God in this thinking?  That’s what Jesus was alluding to when he said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.  That is also why, with painfully few exceptions, the most generous people in our society are those who are not wealthy.  Any analyses will show that, percentage-wise, they are the people who care most and give more, because they have lost the need and the desire to compete.  With the loss of competition, the loss of pride is diminished, and people are more open to admit their frailties or sinfulness and to allow God to be the Lord of their lives, rather than pride.

The reason why many people don’t like to talk about sin is because, for many, the only message they have heard is all wrong.  The emphasis of Christianity is not “What can we do to get God to love us?”  Yet, that is what many preachers and many denominations have as a central plank in their system.  The truth that Christianity must proclaim, because it was the message of Jesus is, “What can we do in light of God’s love for us?”

Thomas Aquinas used to argue: “Only when we grasp the permanence of God’s love can we see how fickle out love is toward God.”  The great theologian Karl Barth put it this way, “Only Christians are sinners.”  By that, he meant that only those who know how much they are loved can be aware of how much they betray that love.

William Willimon puts it, for me, most succinctly: “Unless we first sense that Christ is the answer and has always been our answer, then we will continue to occupy ourselves with minor problems which are not our real problems.  We will continue to worry about what to believe, how to feel, what to say, how to act.  Until we first sense the grace of God in Christ, we will be unable to see that our real problem lies in our anxious posturing, self-depreciation and self-justification with which we are trying to earn what we already have as a gift.  God has made us all somebodies, but most of us live our lives as if we were nobodies.”

In John,, Chapter 4, Jesus meets the lady living in adultery at the well.  She comes for water and is surprised that Jesus speaks to her, because in that culture, men did not speak to women they did not know, and secondly, she is a Samaritan, and Jews did not speak to Samaritans.  Jesus crosses the tradition barriers in order to affirm the woman and accept her.  He makes her aware of the fact that he knows of her sin and that she is forgiven.

In Luke 7, a woman comes and kneels at Jesus’ feet.  She weeps, kisses his feet, anoints them with ointment, and wipes them with her hair.  Jesus does not forgive this woman of her sins; Jesus declares to her that she is forgiven.

That is the manner of the New Testament message.  When the prodigal son returns home, his father forgives him before he can even repent. Many Churches get the message backwards.  We do not repent and grovel in order to earn God’s forgiveness; we are made aware of God’s love and forgiveness, in order that we may accept it.  An awareness of God’s grace precedes repentance and change.

If you want to have the Christian life spelled out in a nutshell, I know of no better understanding than that which Paul delivered to the Romans.  It is found in Romans, Chapter 8, and I am reading selected verses from that chapter.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  For all who are led by the spirit of God are sons of God.  For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship.  When we cry ‘Abba, Father!’ it is the spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

“If God is for us, who is against us?  Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword?

“No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Compared to the greatness of God, we are indeed sinners, because we fall short of the mark.  But in his infinite love, God loves us, and through Jesus, our Christ, has forgiven us.  We do not live and act to earn God’s love and forgiveness.  We cannot earn it.  We live and move and have our being in Christ, responding to the love with which we are loved.

The great Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, put it this way.  “If there is one thing that unites us all, it is our forgetting, our overlooking how much we have been loved.  For most of us, our biggest problem is not what have done or not done, not what we have felt or not felt or believed or not believed, but simply that we have not remembered with how great a love we have been loved.  I suppose the basic difference between Christians and ordinary persons is simply, Christians know they are loved.”

We are sinners and we need to acknowledge that fact.  We do not, nor can we, measure up to the fullness of God.  But we can acknowledge the great love with which we are loved, and respond, because we are forgiven.

We do not grovel or repent to get a reward.  We try to live a life of response to the love that we have already received in Jesus Christ.  Therefore, we live lives of responsive joy and gratitude, ever singing, “Thanks be to God who gives us his victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ.  May that be the ministry and the emphasis of this Church.

Amen.