Say What?
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Reading
Series I, Cycle A
Say what? Saint Paul never thought he got to the place where the power of sin was completely gone in his life. Saint Augustine never preached that once you received the power of Christ into your life all sin was gone. Martin Luther, from whom we get all these Reformation slogans, preached "always sinner; always justified." So what does this mean? "Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him" (1 John 3:5--6).
What does that mean, because there are so many who testify that the deeper Christ comes into one's life the more conscious one is of the power of sin? The more one strives to fulfill the love and will of Christ, the more one becomes aware of the gap between what is desired and what is accomplished. What does John mean that those in Christ do not sin?
What is sin? One gets the impression sin is like modern art. Everybody knows what it is, but don't ask them to define it. When the Old Testament wanted to describe it, the story of Adam and Eve and the fall was told. In the New Testament, rather than give a definition, God sent Jesus and said that is what human life ought to look like and anything else is sin. This passage from 1 John comes as close as any passage to a dictionary--type definition of sin. Sin is the transgression of the Law of God. So it is not surprising that the Shorter Catechism uses that as the answer to the question, "What is sin?" Answer: "Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the Law of God."
But that just throws us back to the next question: What is the Law of God? And that is why the Old Testament and the Jews are so concerned with the law. You have to know the rules so that you can keep them. And then sin is disobedience. Sin is when you break the rules, and yet all that rule keeping slowly makes you numb. You begin to feel like U2 in their Zooropa album: "Don't move, don't talk out of turn, don't think, don't worry everything's just fine. Don't grab, don't clutch, don't hope for too much, don't breathe, don't achieve, don't grieve without leave...." Don't, don't, don't.
Soon, after all those rules, something inside of us begins just to want to break one, just to do something wild and reckless. There are so many rules that we find ourselves longing to rebel, and so sin is often defined as rebellion, as the putting of ourselves in the place of God and deciding for ourselves what is right or wrong. Paul wrestles with this human response to the law. The law is good in that it tells us what is bad, but the law creates a line that always tempts us to step over it, just to assert our own independence. This is the Frank Sinatra theme song sin: "I did it my way." Nobody's going to tell me what to do. There is a sense in which this is quickly becoming our culture's favorite sin. Listen to our ads: "You got to break some rules. Nobody says you have to stay on the roads. Just do it." Yes, there are rules, but rules are made for whimps. Rules are for the other guy. The stop sign on the corner is not intended for us. Others are supposed to stop, but we live here. We know the community; we'll just drive through if it looks clear. For decades the medical community has been telling us the rule that smoking has a negative impact on the quality of life, and people keep saying, "Well, maybe for others but, hey, our mother died at age 87 and she smoked." Here, sin is the rebellion of the heart that refuses to allow something else or another to rule. This is what 1 John is saying. This is the word for sin that is used here. John says when we allow Christ to become Lord of our lives, we no longer fall guilty to the dimension of sin that claims we can be our own boss. With Christ acknowledged as Lord over our lives, we have surrendered that arrogance that claims we don't need any help. Once we have said that Christ is God's Law for life and put that in the center of our lives, we have not become free from all the dimensions of sin, but we are no longer living in the sin of believing we can be our own Lord.
Disobedience, rebellion - two aspects of this thing called sin when sin is seen in relationship to the Law of God. But when we move from the definition of the Law of God as the Law of Moses and the covenant to the life of Christ as the fuller expression of the law, the will, and the intention of God for creation, then sin as the breaking of that law becomes different as well.
The story of the fall of Adam and Eve has always been important scripture to people because it preserves the beginning good and reality of creation. Creation began as God's good work, and creation was created well, is good, and worked properly. The story of the fall provides an explanation for the origin of evil without making the Creator directly responsible for it, and at the same time it gives humanity a place and responsibility of immense consequences. The creature's actions had an amazing impact on the creation of God. When the story becomes the description of the Law and will of God in the goodness of creation at the beginning, then sin becomes different. Or when you look at Jesus Christ and say that there is the full definition of what human life is supposed to be, sin takes on some different definitions.
From the story and the life, our first awareness of sin may come in the feeling that we are missing something. Paul Tillich called it the sense of alienation. Tillich says we are estranged from the Creator. Sin is that universal feeling of having lost something. Homer Rogers writes, "Why is it that you can sit in a rocking chair on the front porch of the house in which you were born and lived all your life and look at the landscape you have seen every day of your life and still feel homesick for somewhere else?" What is it that makes us all feel a little sad when our new clothes get washed and they are not new anymore? When that pretty, clean white sheet of paper has to have an erasure mark on it?
Maybe you saw the movie Grand Canyon. Remember the scene where the immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and tries to go around it? He gets off the freeway and since he does not know the town, he begins to enter a more and more run--down area. The realities of urban life become more stark and frightening. Then his car stalls out, and he is stranded there at the corner where a gang of youth gathers. He does use his car phone to call a tow truck, but as he waits, five of the young people surround his car and begin to talk trash and vandalize his car. Then the tow truck arrives and the driver begins to hook up the disabled car. The gang protest. The driver is stealing this plump turkey from them. The tow truck driver takes the gang leader aside and says, "Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off. Everything's supposed to be different than what it is here."
Everything was different, and now sin is felt and experienced as that feeling of deprivation, that feeling of lostness, that awareness of having missed the mark. Sin becomes all those things that we do that we know are not what they should be. Vows should be kept. Marriages should last. Friends don't betray friends. Families ought to be able to talk to each other. Homes should be a place of safety and comfort for children. Sin is whatever causes us to fail to live up to the way it should be. Sin is the missing of the mark. Jesus Christ is the standard and where we fail to live up to that standard of faith and obedience we are participating in sin. This dimension of sin is never left behind completely until we are made perfect in glory.
Sometimes sin is manifested by a kind of deceitfulness. Scott Peck, in a book called The People of a Lie, suggests that one of the marks of evil is that it will not recognize the truth. We have been told all our lives to honor our fathers and mothers, but in truth we do not like them very much, and yet we refuse to acknowledge that we pretend. We fake it and the deceit poisons us and our other relationships. We acknowledge Jesus is our model and we want so much to be like him, so we deceive ourselves and refuse to see our shortcomings and our failures or to listen when others criticize us. Sin becomes manifested in deceit and pretense, lies and falsehood.
Harvey Cox once suggested that in the story of the fall, the real sin was the refusal to accept responsibility, a kind of lack of ownership for actions, an indifference. Everybody blamed it on somebody else, a dimension of sin which we are not unfamiliar with in our own time.
What John says is that arrogant rebellion and disobedience by breaking the law and will of God is over when we come into the grace of God in Christ Jesus. If we acknowledge that Christ is our Master and that we need his help to obtain life more fully, then that sin which is defined by the wild, reckless lawlessness of life is over for us. We may not always like it. We may not be able to fulfill what we know we should do, but we know we are not God and we know there is a God--intended purpose for life.
When we step back and define sin by the story of the fall and the life of Christ, sin is the smearing of a relationship, a betrayal of a partner to whom we have taken blood--brother bonds. Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God. Sin is the spoiling of the goodness of God. Sin is that which interferes with the will and purpose of God. Sin is what interferes with the way things are supposed to be. When sin is conceived in this larger picture of any and all that is not what God intends for life and creation, then some sins we live in are the results of our own actions and some sins we live in are the results of actions of others, and we live in those sins as conditions with which we must find a way to live in grace. Jesus says marriages are supposed to endure. Some people get divorced because they want the separation, so they live in that less--than--God--intended situation as an action they choose. But some people get divorced who do not want the separation, and so they live in that less--than--God--intended situation as a condition from which they must find a way to continue. Some of us have poor health because of genetic gifts. Some of us have poor health by what we have done to ourselves. God's intended shalom is for all of us to have life and life more abundant. Illness and disease are contrary to God's intentions and will. Sickness and poor health are a result of the power of sin at work in history, but some poor health is a result of our actions and some is a condition with which we must live.
As the people of God who seek to live in the full joy and power and grace of God, we pray that God will infuse in us the power and Holy Spirit of Christ so that we become a place on earth where we get closer and closer to the way God intends life to be. As John suggests, once we enter into that relationship of knowing we are not masters of our own fate and lords of our own destiny, that kind of sin is no longer our demon. Our challenge is to discover how we can live so that life might become more like it ought to be, and how we call to repentance those who sin by the actions they choose, and yet still offer grace to those who are caught in the midst of sin, which is simply the condition into which they have been forced.
For God has intended us all to be called his children. See what love the Father has for us that we should be called the children of God, for so indeed we are.
What does that mean, because there are so many who testify that the deeper Christ comes into one's life the more conscious one is of the power of sin? The more one strives to fulfill the love and will of Christ, the more one becomes aware of the gap between what is desired and what is accomplished. What does John mean that those in Christ do not sin?
What is sin? One gets the impression sin is like modern art. Everybody knows what it is, but don't ask them to define it. When the Old Testament wanted to describe it, the story of Adam and Eve and the fall was told. In the New Testament, rather than give a definition, God sent Jesus and said that is what human life ought to look like and anything else is sin. This passage from 1 John comes as close as any passage to a dictionary--type definition of sin. Sin is the transgression of the Law of God. So it is not surprising that the Shorter Catechism uses that as the answer to the question, "What is sin?" Answer: "Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the Law of God."
But that just throws us back to the next question: What is the Law of God? And that is why the Old Testament and the Jews are so concerned with the law. You have to know the rules so that you can keep them. And then sin is disobedience. Sin is when you break the rules, and yet all that rule keeping slowly makes you numb. You begin to feel like U2 in their Zooropa album: "Don't move, don't talk out of turn, don't think, don't worry everything's just fine. Don't grab, don't clutch, don't hope for too much, don't breathe, don't achieve, don't grieve without leave...." Don't, don't, don't.
Soon, after all those rules, something inside of us begins just to want to break one, just to do something wild and reckless. There are so many rules that we find ourselves longing to rebel, and so sin is often defined as rebellion, as the putting of ourselves in the place of God and deciding for ourselves what is right or wrong. Paul wrestles with this human response to the law. The law is good in that it tells us what is bad, but the law creates a line that always tempts us to step over it, just to assert our own independence. This is the Frank Sinatra theme song sin: "I did it my way." Nobody's going to tell me what to do. There is a sense in which this is quickly becoming our culture's favorite sin. Listen to our ads: "You got to break some rules. Nobody says you have to stay on the roads. Just do it." Yes, there are rules, but rules are made for whimps. Rules are for the other guy. The stop sign on the corner is not intended for us. Others are supposed to stop, but we live here. We know the community; we'll just drive through if it looks clear. For decades the medical community has been telling us the rule that smoking has a negative impact on the quality of life, and people keep saying, "Well, maybe for others but, hey, our mother died at age 87 and she smoked." Here, sin is the rebellion of the heart that refuses to allow something else or another to rule. This is what 1 John is saying. This is the word for sin that is used here. John says when we allow Christ to become Lord of our lives, we no longer fall guilty to the dimension of sin that claims we can be our own boss. With Christ acknowledged as Lord over our lives, we have surrendered that arrogance that claims we don't need any help. Once we have said that Christ is God's Law for life and put that in the center of our lives, we have not become free from all the dimensions of sin, but we are no longer living in the sin of believing we can be our own Lord.
Disobedience, rebellion - two aspects of this thing called sin when sin is seen in relationship to the Law of God. But when we move from the definition of the Law of God as the Law of Moses and the covenant to the life of Christ as the fuller expression of the law, the will, and the intention of God for creation, then sin as the breaking of that law becomes different as well.
The story of the fall of Adam and Eve has always been important scripture to people because it preserves the beginning good and reality of creation. Creation began as God's good work, and creation was created well, is good, and worked properly. The story of the fall provides an explanation for the origin of evil without making the Creator directly responsible for it, and at the same time it gives humanity a place and responsibility of immense consequences. The creature's actions had an amazing impact on the creation of God. When the story becomes the description of the Law and will of God in the goodness of creation at the beginning, then sin becomes different. Or when you look at Jesus Christ and say that there is the full definition of what human life is supposed to be, sin takes on some different definitions.
From the story and the life, our first awareness of sin may come in the feeling that we are missing something. Paul Tillich called it the sense of alienation. Tillich says we are estranged from the Creator. Sin is that universal feeling of having lost something. Homer Rogers writes, "Why is it that you can sit in a rocking chair on the front porch of the house in which you were born and lived all your life and look at the landscape you have seen every day of your life and still feel homesick for somewhere else?" What is it that makes us all feel a little sad when our new clothes get washed and they are not new anymore? When that pretty, clean white sheet of paper has to have an erasure mark on it?
Maybe you saw the movie Grand Canyon. Remember the scene where the immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and tries to go around it? He gets off the freeway and since he does not know the town, he begins to enter a more and more run--down area. The realities of urban life become more stark and frightening. Then his car stalls out, and he is stranded there at the corner where a gang of youth gathers. He does use his car phone to call a tow truck, but as he waits, five of the young people surround his car and begin to talk trash and vandalize his car. Then the tow truck arrives and the driver begins to hook up the disabled car. The gang protest. The driver is stealing this plump turkey from them. The tow truck driver takes the gang leader aside and says, "Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off. Everything's supposed to be different than what it is here."
Everything was different, and now sin is felt and experienced as that feeling of deprivation, that feeling of lostness, that awareness of having missed the mark. Sin becomes all those things that we do that we know are not what they should be. Vows should be kept. Marriages should last. Friends don't betray friends. Families ought to be able to talk to each other. Homes should be a place of safety and comfort for children. Sin is whatever causes us to fail to live up to the way it should be. Sin is the missing of the mark. Jesus Christ is the standard and where we fail to live up to that standard of faith and obedience we are participating in sin. This dimension of sin is never left behind completely until we are made perfect in glory.
Sometimes sin is manifested by a kind of deceitfulness. Scott Peck, in a book called The People of a Lie, suggests that one of the marks of evil is that it will not recognize the truth. We have been told all our lives to honor our fathers and mothers, but in truth we do not like them very much, and yet we refuse to acknowledge that we pretend. We fake it and the deceit poisons us and our other relationships. We acknowledge Jesus is our model and we want so much to be like him, so we deceive ourselves and refuse to see our shortcomings and our failures or to listen when others criticize us. Sin becomes manifested in deceit and pretense, lies and falsehood.
Harvey Cox once suggested that in the story of the fall, the real sin was the refusal to accept responsibility, a kind of lack of ownership for actions, an indifference. Everybody blamed it on somebody else, a dimension of sin which we are not unfamiliar with in our own time.
What John says is that arrogant rebellion and disobedience by breaking the law and will of God is over when we come into the grace of God in Christ Jesus. If we acknowledge that Christ is our Master and that we need his help to obtain life more fully, then that sin which is defined by the wild, reckless lawlessness of life is over for us. We may not always like it. We may not be able to fulfill what we know we should do, but we know we are not God and we know there is a God--intended purpose for life.
When we step back and define sin by the story of the fall and the life of Christ, sin is the smearing of a relationship, a betrayal of a partner to whom we have taken blood--brother bonds. Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God. Sin is the spoiling of the goodness of God. Sin is that which interferes with the will and purpose of God. Sin is what interferes with the way things are supposed to be. When sin is conceived in this larger picture of any and all that is not what God intends for life and creation, then some sins we live in are the results of our own actions and some sins we live in are the results of actions of others, and we live in those sins as conditions with which we must find a way to live in grace. Jesus says marriages are supposed to endure. Some people get divorced because they want the separation, so they live in that less--than--God--intended situation as an action they choose. But some people get divorced who do not want the separation, and so they live in that less--than--God--intended situation as a condition from which they must find a way to continue. Some of us have poor health because of genetic gifts. Some of us have poor health by what we have done to ourselves. God's intended shalom is for all of us to have life and life more abundant. Illness and disease are contrary to God's intentions and will. Sickness and poor health are a result of the power of sin at work in history, but some poor health is a result of our actions and some is a condition with which we must live.
As the people of God who seek to live in the full joy and power and grace of God, we pray that God will infuse in us the power and Holy Spirit of Christ so that we become a place on earth where we get closer and closer to the way God intends life to be. As John suggests, once we enter into that relationship of knowing we are not masters of our own fate and lords of our own destiny, that kind of sin is no longer our demon. Our challenge is to discover how we can live so that life might become more like it ought to be, and how we call to repentance those who sin by the actions they choose, and yet still offer grace to those who are caught in the midst of sin, which is simply the condition into which they have been forced.
For God has intended us all to be called his children. See what love the Father has for us that we should be called the children of God, for so indeed we are.
