Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's January 16, 2005 Sunday Morning worship service.

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Annie Dillard in her marvelous book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, tells this little story: Once upon a time, an Eskimo hunter went to see the local missionary who had been preaching in his village.

“I want to ask you something,” the hunter said.

“What’s that,” the missionary said.

“If I did not know about God and sin,” the hunter said, “would I go to hell?”

“No,” the missionary replied, “if you did not know about God and sin, then you would not go to hell.”

“Then why,” asked the hunter, “did you tell me?”

Like the Eskimo hunter, we’d just as soon not know about sin. Sometimes, we’d rather not know all that we know about each other, not to mention ourselves when we speak of sin.

Which, in some ways, to be truthful, when we speak of sin, isn’t all that difficult, because sin, as a Presbyterian minister at the recent General Assembly meeting said, sin is a word that “has lost its place in our culture. Nowadays, it is usually applied to desserts [or the most recent episode of Desperate Housewives] . . . to listen to us you would conclude that nobody sins anymore. We make mistakes. We err in judgment. We assume that we are basically nice people who are making progress . .. The only problem is, that’s just not true.” (citation lost).

In a famous book written by the psychiatrist Karl Menninger in 1973 entitled,. Whatever Became of Sin? the author acknowledged that sin has largely dropped out of the American vocabulary, the religious concept of sin having been replaced by the languages of law and medicine. Thus, instead of talking about wrongdoing as a rupture in our relationship with God and with neighbor, we talk of crime and punishment or we talk about wrongdoing as a sickness or illness, but the word “sin” rarely enters our public discourse. Even in the church, aside from our weekly corporate prayer of confession, I wonder how often do we actually use the language of sin?

One preacher notes: “Maybe those of us in the church have watched too many courtroom dramas on television. Maybe we have spent too much money on self-help books, or maybe we have just forgotten how to speak our own language. However it has happened, we seem to have abandoned our own paradigm for dealing with human failure in favor of the medical or legal paradigms (Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin, 36).

In the medical model, we receive diagnosis instead of judgment, and treatment instead of penance. In the legal model, we owe a debt to society for everything we do wrong – if we are caught, that is. Thus, lawlessness is the great metaphor for human failing, and “no small part of the appeal of this model is the belief that we can single out the wrongdoers and put them away, freeing those of us who have not been caught for anything to enjoy a bracing sense of innocence” (Taylor, 57).

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with legal or medical categories for dealing with the problem of crime or illness, it’s just that sometimes it feels as if we too easily blame wrongdoing on DNA, social circumstance, biochemistry, abusive parents, birth defects, or head injuries.

In many ways, it seems that our culture has downsized the number of things we call sin – from children born out of wedlock to divorce and addiction. We call lying “spin” and we call greed “motivation.” But sin is about taking responsibility for choices, facing the brokenness of the human condition, and realizing that the consequences of sin rupture our relationships with God and others.

It’s odd that the language of sin has lost its place when, of all things, especially here in the South, Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God and the idea of the cross as an atonement for sin predominate in the religious consciousness of so many Christians.

“Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” spoken not once but twice by John as he sees Jesus on two different occasions, the first upon the recognition and revelation associated with Christ’s baptism.

The lamb and sin: It is an echo of a theme we have heard running throughout the Hebrew scriptures: it was the blood of the lamb smeared on the doorposts of the Hebrew homes in Egypt that indicated for the angel of death to “pass over” when that 10^th plague struck every Egyptian household; it was the paschal lamb offered in the temple on the Day of Atonement that appeased God’s wrath over Israel’s wrongdoing; the innocent suffering of the lamb was an image Isaiah used to describe the suffering servant; the lamb and the wolf living together signaled a new age to come of peace across creation, and Jewish apocalyptic literature also made reference to the lamb.

John draws on a long history when he calls Jesus the “lamb of God.” The main thing that John says is that this lamb deals with the “sin of the world.” Quite a claim, when you stop to think about it. Sin of the world – no thing small or trivial about that. A world in bondage to sin is encountered by the lamb who frees from sin. As Jesus says later in John, “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (8:34-36)

For the Gospel of John, Jesus is not only the fulfillment of the hopes and promises of God to Israel, but also for the whole world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” a verse so repeated and so often used for narrow evangelistic purposes that we forget just how radical a theological claim that really represents. The innocent, unspotted lamb is quite a contrast to the bespotted tragedy of a world caught in sin. “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

Just what is sin? And just how does Jesus take it away? We might wonder. Is it innate, i.e. original, and therefore finally inevitable? Or is sin really a matter of choice? Is it only something an individual can do, or can it also be corporate, something that not only corporations and nations can do, but families and churches, too?

A huge concept, this concept of sin. Those who have relied on the notion of original sin to explain the human predicament and the persistence of evil in the world, search in vain for that phrase in the Bible. Even the word “sin” doesn’t appear in the first garden and its aftermath. Nonetheless, primarily because of the influence of the church father St. Augustine of the 4^th century, the Eden story has become the archetypal story of sin for Christianity, leading many of us to think of sin primarily as an expression individual disobedience or transgression. I, for one, in my childhood, wondered what would have happened had Eve not partaken of that fruit – or worse yet, what if she had and Adam had not – would all the women be clothed and all the men be naked – a childhood thought, as I said!

Yet, the Bible does not support such a simple reading. There are many different ways of speaking of sin. There is, in scripture, for instance, the great sin of Sinai when an entire people chose to worship a golden calf they could see in lieu of a sovereign God they could not see. There is the sin of the sons of Eli, who helped themselves to the best cuts of meat from offerings meant for God. There are sins so endemic to certain places that they are called the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Ninevah, or Judah. There are sexual sins recorded in scripture, such as David’s affair with Bathsheba, but there are also the sins of the rich against the poor. And there are the sins of those who have more faith in military might or even religious ritual than they have faith in God.

Thus, individual disobedience, which I suspect is what usually first comes to mind when we speak of sin or think of Adam and Eve in the garden, is not the only form of sin – not by a long shot. But even personal disobedience as sin has at least three different Hebrew words to speak of what is entailed.

First there is the Hebrew word which means “to miss the mark,” a term from archery, but also a term that identifies willful or intentional sin such as David’s plot to kill Bathsheba’s husband Uriah. David, a leader chosen by God, didn’t set out to do wrong, but along the way he got distracted. Other things drew his attention away from God, and he missed the mark.

Another term for sin has to do with acting wrongly, or in a common word in the prophets, performing “iniquity,” or some violation of the commandments. Anytime the Israelites prefer the sweet favors of Baal or Asherah, the Babylonian gods, to the stern justice of Yahweh, the people engage in shameful behavior that violates their covenant agreement with the Lord God.

A third Hebrew term has to do with “rebellion,” that is, to openly transgress and choose separation or revolt from God. Among the expressions of this kind of sin denounced by the prophets were foreclosures by wealthy landowners who turned poor people out of their homes, unjust laws that hit women and children the hardest, and preachers who said whatever people wanted to hear.

But all these terms are linked together by a common theme of going against the will of God. Whether people are missing the mark, acting wrongly, or engaging in outright rebellion, they are out of sync with God.

There are, indeed many ways to speak of sin, a topic that I have only touched on briefly today. But sin, I think, boils down to that which causes a great distance, a big gaping hole, to be between us and God and between us and other human beings. . . . sin is a failure of faith and a broken trust -- it is a deadly alienation from the source of life.

We may look fine from the outside, but sin is always lurking, lurking, lurking deep in the gut, whether inside me or inside the church or inside the nation.

No matter how innocent any one of us may believe ourselves to be, our rap sheet is actually pretty long. And as a species, we need all the forgiveness God can possibly provide.

We tell the world to look and see the light shining through us, yet we ourselves are blind when we look in the mirror. We, for example, throw away more food each year than small nations produce, and it is hard to believe that we are still debating whether hate crimes are really crimes, or whether guns really do kill people.

Of course, it is no easy thing to see sin in yourself, especially when we seem to be so good at seeing it in others

This very weekend is a glaring reminder of just how short we have fallen. It wasn’t so long ago that southern Christians used scripture to justify slavery, and some still use it to justify the exclusion of women and others from leadership in the Church. I think my own first encounter with sin in another person, and still one of my most formative and vivid memories, was in 1964, as a first grader, going across the street where we lived in Anderson, South Carolina, to play with a friend who was a second grader, and really not knowing what to say or do when he took me into his room and showed me the pocket knife and other weapons his father had given him so that he could defend himself at school and use them on “them n_____-“ in the days following integration.

Or here’s another illustration of a similar facet of that sin that I read this week. An Episcopal minister writes: “I received my first dose of corporate sin during the civil rights era, right after my family moved form Ohio to Alabama in 1962. Since I was only eleven years old I did not know what to call it yet, but I could feel the visceral wave of rage and fear that moved through my sixth-grade classroom when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s name was mentioned. It was as if my classmates had reached some agreement about him while I was out of the room. I would have asked them what they were so mad about, only I was afraid that would just make them madder . . .in 1963 I was sitting by the window in Miss Wyatt’s seventh-grade classroom when the principal’s voice came over the intercom. He regretted to tell us, he said, that President Kennedy had been shot. I did not hear the rest of what he said because so many of my classmates were clapping and cheering. Even then, I knew that they were not individually mean people. They were caught up in something bigger than themselves, which they could not even see” (Taylor 9).

There is, of course, another memorable verse in the Hebrew scriptures that speaks of sin: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

Sin is like that – it gets passed on, it is incidious and lethal and without regard for color, race or clan or nation – unless, that is, we can come again to see Jesus, as if for the first time, and really, really believe that yes, here is the lamb of God who does take away the sin of the world.

The temptation, and this is still being played out in some churches and by some people, is to wallow like the poor benighted pig in the reality of our sinfulness, and to use the sheer inescapability of the pig-pen to do nothing about the dirt that we eat and that covers us.

That is not the answer. The answer, I believe, is accepting and trusting what the lamb of God has done, but more than that, it is in practicing within ourselves, our churches and our nations, that which is, finally, the only remedy or antidote for sin.

In Durham, North Carolina, two college students were out on a date. There was drinking, too much drinking. As the boy was driving her home, there was a terrible accident. She was killed.

Police charged him with manslaughter, and preparations were made for a trial. It seems justice and jail time was the appropriate response to such sin. The perils of Driving under the Influence should have been better known by a 20 year old adult. If we coddle and send drunk drivers off with just a pat on the head, we are asking for even more trouble and tragedy.

Just before the trial, the parents of the young woman who had died met with the young man, and issued a statement. They said, “One precious wonderful life has already been lost. We do not want to lose another. This young man has served a day in jail, and as far as we are concerned that is enough. We want him to be sentenced to live, to go on and make something of his life, to live the life that our daughter will not be able to live. We therefore urge that he be allowed to live in the light of this tragedy, to go on and make something of himself for the good.

The state decided, after the parents’ plea, not to prosecute the case.

Innocent, helpless, terribly wronged and wounded people, forgiving, taking away the burden of someone else, and allowing someone else to live (Pulpit Resource, 33:1, 16).

It reminds me of today’s gospel. So let it be. Amen.