The Gift of Sin
On a sunny day in September…a stern-faced, plainly dressed man could be seen standing still on a street corner in the busy Chicago Loop. As pedestrians hurried by on their way to lunch or business, he would solemnly lift his right arm, and pointing to the person nearest him, intone loudly…”GUILTY!”
….Without any change of expression, he would resume his stiff stance for a few moments…(and) then, again, the inexorable raising of his arm, the pointing, and the solemn pronouncing of the one word, “GUILTY!”
The effect of this strange pantomime on the passing strangers was extraordinary…. They would stare at him, hesitate, look at each other, look back at him again; then hurriedly continue on their ways.
One man, turning to another…(was heard to) exclaim: “But how did he know?”
So writes Dr. Karl Menninger in his book Whatever Became of Sin.
Guilty. If someone on the street suddenly pointed at you and pronounced you guilty, what would come to your mind? Of what sins are you guilty? Overwork? Self-indulgence? Guilty of a few little white lies? Overdue library books? Guilty of uncharitable thoughts? Of raising your voice or your hand to another person in anger? Of keeping the extra $5 the cashier gave you in error when you paid for a purchase? Guilty of judging harshly someone whose beliefs or opinions are different from yours? Or perhaps you’re guilty of one of those good old seven deadly sins: envy, anger, pride, sloth, avarice, gluttony or lust. All of us, it seems, have cause to feel at least a little guilty about something.
Sin. It isn’t a word we use much these days—yet it still carries a lot of baggage.
There’s the idea of Original Sin—that we all are marked from birth with the stain of sin passed down to us through the generations from Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God and were tossed out of Paradise. In her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, scholar Elaine Pagels describes the way in which this notion of original sin, dreamed up by Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century, came to dominate the Church. A primary reason was that original sin could be used to justify both the authority of the Church and of the state. If human beings were depraved, unable to resist their urges to sin, then they were desperately in need of what the church could offer: salvation, including by forced conversion. And then, of course, since the Church was making decent citizens out of dreadful sinners, the state would be justified in using its force and power to support the Church’s work.
Unitarian Universalists rejected the idea of original sin long ago, and along with it the idea that we are saved by the death of Jesus or by some other action from on high. In the early nineteenth century, our Unitarian and Universalist forbears preached our “likeness to God,” the idea that we’re created in the divine image and that our nature reflects that beauty and goodness.
I agree with the idea of the innate human capacity for goodness, but I think we do ourselves a radical disservice when we reject the concept of sin entirely. Indeed, I believe that a grounded moral and spiritual life requires an understanding of sin. We need a definition of sin that helps us cope with our lived experience—how we feel when we have violated our cherished values, or when someone has trespassed against us. We need a definition of sin that acknowledges our failings and the reality of evil in the world, but also recognizes the possibility of our goodness. And if we can find this definition of sin, we might even find that sin can be a kind of gift.
At some point in my theological education, sin was defined for me as a word translated from Greek, meaning “missing the mark”—the image of an archer shooting an arrow at a target, but missing the bull’s-eye. I found this to be a useful concept, for while it acknowledged that we all make mistakes, it also left room for us to try again to get things right.
In recent years, I’ve heard two modern definitions of sin from clergy friends of mine. One of them, a United Church of Christ minister, defined sin as that which is destructive, whereas God is that which is creative. The other, a Presbyterian, defined sin as those actions or inactions that prevent the God in us or the God in another from shining through.
These are good definitions. I wonder, though, if they are strong enough to stand up to real evil in the world. Rape, child abuse, war, torture, domestic violence, environmental devastation, lobbying scandals, drug dealing—missing the mark? By a mile. Actions which prevent the God in us or the God in another from shining through…yes, but so much more. Destructive of the creative force within another, yes.
I believe that we sin when we zone out, numb ourselves, deny the reality of our lives or our times. I believe that the purpose of our lives is to grow in consciousness, and to live up to who we truly are by becoming more fully present to ourselves and to all that is. So when we go unconscious, we forget who we are. We forget that we are interdependent with all that lives, and we take on a kind of radical “me first” individualism. We forget to exercise our muscles of compassion, of generosity, and act as if ours were a world of scarcity, where there is never enough love, enough money, enough attention, enough of whatever it is we need. We forget to live our lives deeply, to live our values. Instead, we stay safe and shallow.
The hard part for me in defining sin this way is that if sin is unconsciousness, then I am sinning all the time! Being awake, aware, and mindfully present from moment to moment is not only nearly impossible, it also can be painful. It brings full awareness not only of joy and beauty, but also of suffering and despair.
The good part about understanding sin as unconsciousness is that we can change it.
Nearly two hundred years ago, our Universalist ancestors—particularly the great ultra-Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou—believed that sin lay beneath all human misery, and because no human being would wish to remain miserable, sin would eventually bring us into reconciliation with an all-loving God. Ballou did not believe God would punish sinners, arguing that the separation from God created by sin was, in itself, punishment enough. In this way, sin was a gift from God, designed to help create a lasting unity with the Eternal.
This is the gift of sin: it leads us back into relationship with one another, with ourselves and with that larger wholeness some name God. It can lead to our deepening, our growth in consciousness, our movement toward right relationships. It reminds us that if we want to experience what is most sacred in this universe, we must find it and honor it in one another.
So, if you ever pass a street-corner preacher shouting “Repent!” or the next time you feel a twinge of conscience nagging in a small corner of your mind, the next time someone dear to you flinches and you don’t know why—before moving on to the next thing in your life, pause for a moment and listen. For the voice of wholeness calls to us in many ways, if we will only pay attention.
- The Gift of Sin - November 26, 2014
