Why I Still Believe In Sin

I had a shocking conversation today with a person I truly respect.  This is a person whose deep faith and thoughtful understanding of theology have been a source of help to me on more than one occasion in my ministry.  Although I have this person's permission to use their name, I will leave that to his/her discretion.

We were speaking on the phone about some recent articles about church and public perceptions of religion.  As so often happens, the conversation turned to the question of sin and its place in our theology, our world and the ministry of the church.  We had not been talking long when my friend said, "I'm not sure I really believe in sin anymore."  Now this is a person who, following an earlier crisis in faith, left the daily life of ministry to pursue other work in service to the church. S/he did not feel that it was possible to continue in parish ministry while walking that particular difficult spiritual path.  This new revelation, though, came as a shock.  "I'm not sure I really believe in sin anymore."

Uncharacteristically, I was at a loss of words.  Luckily the silence was filled by some explanation of that revelation.  My friend has been struggling in recent years with the divisions in the church over the ways sin has been understood in recent controversies in the church. "Sin," my friend said, "is just a weapon to beat up on some people."  In other words, our language of sin has, my friend thinks, become so wrapped up in declaring misdeeds by others as sinful that we have lost any understanding of sin as part of the universal human condition. 

There is certainly some truth to that idea.  We do use the language of sin more to accuse others than to describe us all.  I cannot deny that sin has morphed from a description of the human condition to a new weapon in the arsenal of intramural ecclesiastical debates.  That is certainly true.

But I cannot get there with my friend and say I no longer believe in sin.  In fact, I think I believe in sin more now as a 42yo than I did when I was knee deep in systematic theology as a 28yo seminarian.  I believe in sin so much more now because I see it, feel it and, if I am honest, live it every day.  Whether it is failing to be a good neighbor, putting the god of job security before the God of bold proclamation or just being unreasonably judgmental of the driving abilities of the person waiting on the light to turn a particular shade of green before going, I am a sinner and I fall short of the glory of God.

It is important that we who are part of the church get comfortable speaking about sin and our own sin in particular.  Other than the love of God for the world that overcomes sin, there is no other unifying human experience like our sin itself. 

When we speak of sin in terms of their sin or that person's sin, we turn that universal human condition into an us vs. them equation when in fact it is us vs. sin.  Sin is not a label made to be slapped on the unpopular or the unliked.  It is not a weapon to beat and belittle those with whom we may disagree.  Scripture is clear, we ALL sin and fall short of the glory of God.  And, for we Presbyterians, the Reformed tradition is clear that there is not a hierarchy of sins that sets some people above or below others.  We are all sinful and we are all in need of God's grace.  End of story.

Perhaps part of the reason people are losing faith in organized religion (liberal, progressive, conservative and all) is that we do an increasingly poor job of speaking our own language.  When sin is misrepresented in conservative circles as something that "they" have and "we" are forgiven for, the church becomes a stereotypical closed society when its real purpose is to be the welcoming community of the saving Christ.  When, in more liberal circles, sin becomes little but an antiquated idea, quaint but hardly relevant, we lose one of the central parts of our own nature revealed in history and an understanding of the root cause of much human suffering.

I am a sinner and so are you and we live in a sinful world.  Let's stop playing the "your sin is worse than my sin game" and get on with the work of addressing the impact our sin has on our world.