Selling Sin In A Celebrative Age
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series II, Cycle B
Dialing the number of a large, well-known metropolitan church, the caller asked, "What time is your Sunday worship service?" A booming voice replied, "We don't have worship around here, we have celebration at 11 a.m.!" Today the "C" word is in. Celebration drives the gathering of the people of God. Praise singers warm up the congregation in the opening moments and the mood is laboriously upbeat. Worship in most of our congregations exudes the positive mood. We live in a celebrative age, where mention of anything negative, like sin, is out of bounds.
In liberal or conservative churches, Lent is something of an embarrassment. Focusing on our need for repentance and making amends is something we avoid, instead centering on the forgiving love of God, the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit, and the positive elements of Christian faith. Selling a good look at sin is a struggle, even on Ash Wednesday. Sin does not sell well in our celebrative age.
A contemporary Ash Wednesday service makes the point. After some scriptures and prayers of confession, the congregation came down the aisle to receive the mark of ashes on the forehead. After this, the worshipers took a couple of steps and stood in front of a large bowl of water. There the pastor dampened a cloth in the water and wiped off the ashen smudge from each worshiper, who returned to the pews. All told, only a few seconds were given to ponder the fact of sin. Absolution and forgiveness were quickly invoked as if we cannot manage a serious conviction of sin.
It seems that positive thinking has become the dominant feature of our culture, including the church, so that we are sheltered from wrestling with the fact of sin -- personal and social. We may be thankful that we are delivered from many of the narrow traditions of Grandpa's and Grandma's Christianity. However, their staunch seriousness about the faith puts our soft spirituality to shame.
Here we are on Ash Wednesday, smack dab in the middle of Lenten considerations of sin, repentance, and making amends, but without any enthusiasm for such disturbing realities. Instead, we strain toward the glories of Easter and one more rendition of the "Hallelujah Chorus." Can modern Christians in affluent America with our culture of success and positive thinking find our way back to a sturdy experience of Ash Wednesday and Lent? If so, we may have to begin with some history of this tradition.
Ash Wednesday Begins The Season Of Lent
The early Christians had no sentimentalities about sin. They knew that the real human issue is our deliberate disregard of God in favor of our own preferences. Some people in our time are not so certain about the centrality of sin. They tell us that sin is only one of the great enslavements from which we need deliverance. One New Testament scholar says that our captivity by structural oppression and our alienation from a sense of life's purpose and meaning are both as destructive as sin. Certainly the New Testament speaks of both these enslavements and of our need to be delivered from their destructive effects on our lives. However, oppression and alienation are assaults from the outside. Sin is the enslavement we have chosen and in which we continue to participate, not the result of things over which we have little control. Our real spiritual dilemma is that we choose our own desires rather than God's wishes for us. Here is the real issue.
When the early Christians began to mark the forty days before Easter, minus Sundays, they were not thinking about their oppression under the Empire, nor were they paying much attention to any alienation from a victorious life. Rather, they focused on their sin -- the condition of inner resistance to the grace of God, a resistance often stronger than any desire to live the holy, godly life. Thus they created a holy space where they came to worship, considering their deliberate denial of God in their lives. They took these forty days before Easter and remembered Jesus' forty days in the wilderness, putting their lives over against the stern realities of Christian cross bearing. They had no illusions about their ability to avoid the failures of discipleship. They knew it would be no significant triumph if they came to church on Easter Sunday, having omitted the walk through the hard honesty of Lent. They shunned any self-congratulations and prayed for God's grace to forgive their sin. They pleaded for the empowerment to live beyond their natural ungodliness. Only from a somber Lent did they think they might celebrate the joy of Easter.
Sin Is A Personal Malady
Let's attempt, if only for a very small moment, to detach ourselves from our excessively self-affirming culture and inquire about the radical wrong within us. This will be difficult for there is not much around us that caters to a critical assessment of the waywardness of the human heart. We are so convinced of our right to baptize every natural desire and inclination, that anyone or any circumstance that might bring our sin into clear focus is hustled out of sight and mind. And if our exclusionary tactics will not suffice, we will haul out the psychobabble and declare that any negative thoughts about our supposed innate worth and dignity are dangerous and bordering on the pathological.
It's a long shot, but in a serious Lent, we moderns could yet find ourselves hearing the Word of God about our human condition. We could start by remembering the garden story, which, by being on the first pages of scripture, ought to tell us something. Some of us have taken comfort in knowing that this story is not history as Grandpa and Grandma believed. Yet we seldom listen when they go on to say that this story's point does not hang on history, but on what is called its existential point -- this is how life is for us before God and one another. The story says there is something within us resisting the ways of God, and any saving trust in God's mercy and grace.
Lent could be a moment when we face the fact that we are the Adam and the Eve in that garden, spoiling the only essential life-giving relationship we know. We could recognize that we are the ones then, living east of Eden, outside the grace and mercy of God, with our inner malady compounding itself in anxious, devious, and destructive living. An old African-American gospel chorus runs the list of needy sinners: brother, sister, preacher, deacon, before asserting, "It's me, it's me, it's me, O Lord, standin' in the need of prayer." This could be our Lenten anthem, much more pertinent than the sentimental and evasive stuff we often sing.
Miracles for us moderns are not interruptions of the flow of nature, or unexpected historical occurrences. For us, a miracle would be concluding that sin is an inescapable reality in which we resort to all sorts of diversionary strategies, lest we find ourselves having to come to terms with it. For too long, moderns have supposed that an earlier generation's anguish about personal sin was something from which we have been delivered through our modernness. We have come to believe that there is something horrid about confessing that we are sinners, desperately in need of God's grace and forgiveness. There is no guarantee that Lent will change all of this, but we must not rule out the ability of God to confront us during these forty days. The cure for us is like chemotherapy for the soul -- it nearly kills us before we become healthy once again. If this should happen, Easter would be as no other we have ever experienced.
The Malady Takes On Structural Proportions
In a pastor's meeting, one passionate brother stood up to speak to the needs of the church and the world. He acknowledged all the racism, the plight of the poor and the oppressed, HIV, terrorism, corporate corruption, and the church's terminal timidity. Then he offered his remedy, "We just need to love one another!" It was like a pointless speech by another pastor during the heyday of the civil rights controversies. He said that all the racial tensions would ease if blacks and whites would offer courteous greetings.
These sentimental suggestions fail because the church neglects the truth that the structures of human existence reflect our sinfulness. Family, government, economy, educational and medical institutions, cultural activities -- all perpetuate injustice, favoritism, and bestow inordinate awards and favors upon those few. Love and kindness are not going to check the entrenchment of sinful institutional injustice.
Langdon Gilkey's father was the dean of the chapel at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and a friend of the young Reinhold Niebuhr. Gilkey tells of his father bursting out of his study yelling, "Reinie's gone crazy!" He then said he was reading Niebuhr's recent book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. "He's written this book," said the elder Gilkey, "and I don't understand at all why he has done it or what's he's saying -- and neither does Harry." (Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City.) Both Gilkey and Fosdick later acknowledged the wisdom of Niebuhr's writing that social structures and institutions often move with crushing injustice in spite of the morality and good intentions of persons who maintain these structures.
Abraham Lincoln found himself at the center of unimaginable violence in an effort to quell a political rebellion and end the national tribulation of American slavery. Lincoln seemed aware of his compromised position so that neither self-righteousness nor vindictiveness became part of his outlook. He believed the violence and death on the battlefields made it impossible to speak confidently of the theological meanings of the war or of any moral posturing. The guilt of slavery was widespread and the ways of correcting it became filled with moral complications. Our refusal of God's ways entangles itself with our corporate lives, becoming a disruptive assault on human happiness and fairness for all.
This means that the church needs deliverance from any sentimental voicing about making our public world a godly place. This hope will not come with a simple call to love. Righteousness is difficult enough on the level of personal relationships. It is infinitely more complex when we seek to attack the evil ingrained in our public institutions. This may be why many mainstream and evangelical churches have domesticated the gospel, limiting it to religious and spiritual needs of our personal faith and lives. We recognize that the great public needs, dominated as they are by institutions and systems, are complicated and so resistant to change that we become discouraged and frustrated. So we specialize in prayer, Bible study, evangelism, healing ministries, feeding the poor, and sending out missionaries. All of these ministries are vital and necessary, yet their dominance of the agenda of the church shows that we are largely incapable of imagining a prophetic ministry over against the dominant systems of our day.
If somehow during Lent we could consider the issue of sin as it plagues our necessary systems and institutions, the church might take on a new vitality and mission beyond the present passion for church growth. Sin is a hard sell in our time. It means owning up to the sins in our hearts and minds. Sin is at the heart of the injustices and oppressions by which we organize life together. Social sin is even more difficult to manage than our personal transgressions. However, the weeks of Lent might be an opportunity for us to consider the difficulty of its mission, just as its Lord sensed the difficulty of his mission. We can struggle with personal and corporate ministry issues during this forty-day wilderness moment.
In liberal or conservative churches, Lent is something of an embarrassment. Focusing on our need for repentance and making amends is something we avoid, instead centering on the forgiving love of God, the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit, and the positive elements of Christian faith. Selling a good look at sin is a struggle, even on Ash Wednesday. Sin does not sell well in our celebrative age.
A contemporary Ash Wednesday service makes the point. After some scriptures and prayers of confession, the congregation came down the aisle to receive the mark of ashes on the forehead. After this, the worshipers took a couple of steps and stood in front of a large bowl of water. There the pastor dampened a cloth in the water and wiped off the ashen smudge from each worshiper, who returned to the pews. All told, only a few seconds were given to ponder the fact of sin. Absolution and forgiveness were quickly invoked as if we cannot manage a serious conviction of sin.
It seems that positive thinking has become the dominant feature of our culture, including the church, so that we are sheltered from wrestling with the fact of sin -- personal and social. We may be thankful that we are delivered from many of the narrow traditions of Grandpa's and Grandma's Christianity. However, their staunch seriousness about the faith puts our soft spirituality to shame.
Here we are on Ash Wednesday, smack dab in the middle of Lenten considerations of sin, repentance, and making amends, but without any enthusiasm for such disturbing realities. Instead, we strain toward the glories of Easter and one more rendition of the "Hallelujah Chorus." Can modern Christians in affluent America with our culture of success and positive thinking find our way back to a sturdy experience of Ash Wednesday and Lent? If so, we may have to begin with some history of this tradition.
Ash Wednesday Begins The Season Of Lent
The early Christians had no sentimentalities about sin. They knew that the real human issue is our deliberate disregard of God in favor of our own preferences. Some people in our time are not so certain about the centrality of sin. They tell us that sin is only one of the great enslavements from which we need deliverance. One New Testament scholar says that our captivity by structural oppression and our alienation from a sense of life's purpose and meaning are both as destructive as sin. Certainly the New Testament speaks of both these enslavements and of our need to be delivered from their destructive effects on our lives. However, oppression and alienation are assaults from the outside. Sin is the enslavement we have chosen and in which we continue to participate, not the result of things over which we have little control. Our real spiritual dilemma is that we choose our own desires rather than God's wishes for us. Here is the real issue.
When the early Christians began to mark the forty days before Easter, minus Sundays, they were not thinking about their oppression under the Empire, nor were they paying much attention to any alienation from a victorious life. Rather, they focused on their sin -- the condition of inner resistance to the grace of God, a resistance often stronger than any desire to live the holy, godly life. Thus they created a holy space where they came to worship, considering their deliberate denial of God in their lives. They took these forty days before Easter and remembered Jesus' forty days in the wilderness, putting their lives over against the stern realities of Christian cross bearing. They had no illusions about their ability to avoid the failures of discipleship. They knew it would be no significant triumph if they came to church on Easter Sunday, having omitted the walk through the hard honesty of Lent. They shunned any self-congratulations and prayed for God's grace to forgive their sin. They pleaded for the empowerment to live beyond their natural ungodliness. Only from a somber Lent did they think they might celebrate the joy of Easter.
Sin Is A Personal Malady
Let's attempt, if only for a very small moment, to detach ourselves from our excessively self-affirming culture and inquire about the radical wrong within us. This will be difficult for there is not much around us that caters to a critical assessment of the waywardness of the human heart. We are so convinced of our right to baptize every natural desire and inclination, that anyone or any circumstance that might bring our sin into clear focus is hustled out of sight and mind. And if our exclusionary tactics will not suffice, we will haul out the psychobabble and declare that any negative thoughts about our supposed innate worth and dignity are dangerous and bordering on the pathological.
It's a long shot, but in a serious Lent, we moderns could yet find ourselves hearing the Word of God about our human condition. We could start by remembering the garden story, which, by being on the first pages of scripture, ought to tell us something. Some of us have taken comfort in knowing that this story is not history as Grandpa and Grandma believed. Yet we seldom listen when they go on to say that this story's point does not hang on history, but on what is called its existential point -- this is how life is for us before God and one another. The story says there is something within us resisting the ways of God, and any saving trust in God's mercy and grace.
Lent could be a moment when we face the fact that we are the Adam and the Eve in that garden, spoiling the only essential life-giving relationship we know. We could recognize that we are the ones then, living east of Eden, outside the grace and mercy of God, with our inner malady compounding itself in anxious, devious, and destructive living. An old African-American gospel chorus runs the list of needy sinners: brother, sister, preacher, deacon, before asserting, "It's me, it's me, it's me, O Lord, standin' in the need of prayer." This could be our Lenten anthem, much more pertinent than the sentimental and evasive stuff we often sing.
Miracles for us moderns are not interruptions of the flow of nature, or unexpected historical occurrences. For us, a miracle would be concluding that sin is an inescapable reality in which we resort to all sorts of diversionary strategies, lest we find ourselves having to come to terms with it. For too long, moderns have supposed that an earlier generation's anguish about personal sin was something from which we have been delivered through our modernness. We have come to believe that there is something horrid about confessing that we are sinners, desperately in need of God's grace and forgiveness. There is no guarantee that Lent will change all of this, but we must not rule out the ability of God to confront us during these forty days. The cure for us is like chemotherapy for the soul -- it nearly kills us before we become healthy once again. If this should happen, Easter would be as no other we have ever experienced.
The Malady Takes On Structural Proportions
In a pastor's meeting, one passionate brother stood up to speak to the needs of the church and the world. He acknowledged all the racism, the plight of the poor and the oppressed, HIV, terrorism, corporate corruption, and the church's terminal timidity. Then he offered his remedy, "We just need to love one another!" It was like a pointless speech by another pastor during the heyday of the civil rights controversies. He said that all the racial tensions would ease if blacks and whites would offer courteous greetings.
These sentimental suggestions fail because the church neglects the truth that the structures of human existence reflect our sinfulness. Family, government, economy, educational and medical institutions, cultural activities -- all perpetuate injustice, favoritism, and bestow inordinate awards and favors upon those few. Love and kindness are not going to check the entrenchment of sinful institutional injustice.
Langdon Gilkey's father was the dean of the chapel at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and a friend of the young Reinhold Niebuhr. Gilkey tells of his father bursting out of his study yelling, "Reinie's gone crazy!" He then said he was reading Niebuhr's recent book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. "He's written this book," said the elder Gilkey, "and I don't understand at all why he has done it or what's he's saying -- and neither does Harry." (Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City.) Both Gilkey and Fosdick later acknowledged the wisdom of Niebuhr's writing that social structures and institutions often move with crushing injustice in spite of the morality and good intentions of persons who maintain these structures.
Abraham Lincoln found himself at the center of unimaginable violence in an effort to quell a political rebellion and end the national tribulation of American slavery. Lincoln seemed aware of his compromised position so that neither self-righteousness nor vindictiveness became part of his outlook. He believed the violence and death on the battlefields made it impossible to speak confidently of the theological meanings of the war or of any moral posturing. The guilt of slavery was widespread and the ways of correcting it became filled with moral complications. Our refusal of God's ways entangles itself with our corporate lives, becoming a disruptive assault on human happiness and fairness for all.
This means that the church needs deliverance from any sentimental voicing about making our public world a godly place. This hope will not come with a simple call to love. Righteousness is difficult enough on the level of personal relationships. It is infinitely more complex when we seek to attack the evil ingrained in our public institutions. This may be why many mainstream and evangelical churches have domesticated the gospel, limiting it to religious and spiritual needs of our personal faith and lives. We recognize that the great public needs, dominated as they are by institutions and systems, are complicated and so resistant to change that we become discouraged and frustrated. So we specialize in prayer, Bible study, evangelism, healing ministries, feeding the poor, and sending out missionaries. All of these ministries are vital and necessary, yet their dominance of the agenda of the church shows that we are largely incapable of imagining a prophetic ministry over against the dominant systems of our day.
If somehow during Lent we could consider the issue of sin as it plagues our necessary systems and institutions, the church might take on a new vitality and mission beyond the present passion for church growth. Sin is a hard sell in our time. It means owning up to the sins in our hearts and minds. Sin is at the heart of the injustices and oppressions by which we organize life together. Social sin is even more difficult to manage than our personal transgressions. However, the weeks of Lent might be an opportunity for us to consider the difficulty of its mission, just as its Lord sensed the difficulty of his mission. We can struggle with personal and corporate ministry issues during this forty-day wilderness moment.
