Sin

Propers: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 13), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sin.

For St Paul, sin is more than a matter of poor choice. Sin is a power in the universe, an enslaving power, that exists somehow beyond himself and yet within himself. Paul is at war with sin and therefore at war with some twisted part of who he is. “The good that I would do, I do not do,” he writes to the Romans. “And the evil I would not do is exactly what I end up doing. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Sin is our word for all of those powers within us, around us, and beyond us that separate us from the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty of God; powers that pull us away, that divide us, from the harmony intended by God for the flourishing of all Creation. But appearances to the contrary, sin has no substance in and of itself. It is not the yin to God’s yang, a Dark Side at war with the Light. Sin is simply brokenness, incompleteness, a note of discord within the divinely ordained symphony of the cosmos. It is a gash, a wound, gaping hole; it is not really there.

The sinner, then, is no heroic rebel, no protagonist of his own Paradise Lost. Rather, the sinner is sick, twisted, curved in on himself, a cave creature gone blind trying to hide himself from the sun. In a purely rational world, we would not sin. We would look to the Good and the True and the Beautiful, and we would do whatever proves necessary to live in accordance with them, that we might be good and true and beautiful ourselves.

Yet this is not our experience, is it? So often we know what is right, we know what is good and healthy and life-giving, and we choose—don’t we?—we choose to do just the opposite; because the sin is easier, or more pleasurable, or just because we want to watch the world burn. And it’s almost as though it’s not even us doing it, we aren’t ourselves, we aren’t living up to the person we know we’re supposed to be. And yet! And yet: “The good that I would do, I do not do. And the evil I would not do is exactly what I end up doing. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

C.S. Lewis wrote that we don’t know how bad we are until we try very hard to be good. And that, my friends, is why we have the Law. Now, the Law, with a capital L, is a revelation of truth. It reveals to us what is good and right and reasonable. In the Old Testament we have the Mosaic Law, the Law of God’s people Israel, but our notion of Law goes beyond this. There are natural laws written into the very fabric of Creation. And there are moral laws inscribed upon every human heart.

This doesn’t mean that the Law is self-evident, like two plus two. We often have to dig deep in order to find it, both as individuals and as communities. And the Law does not manifest itself in precisely the same way across various human societies. But the basic moral truths of right and wrong—do not murder, no not steal, do not lie; respect your elders, honor your dead; live kindly, live piously—these are universal precepts, Law in the deepest and truest sense of the word. Society would be literally impossible without them: try to imagine, for instance, a civilization holding up lying and murder as its highest virtues. They wouldn’t last a day, let alone a generation.

This Law, Paul says, is our pedagogue. That is, the Law acts as our schoolmaster, our childhood tutor. It teaches us right from wrong. And whenever we encounter the Law clearly laid out, whether that be in the Bible or some other great work of religion or philosophy, our first instinct is to compare ourselves to that standard. It is then that we begin to realize just how short we fall. The self pits itself against the Law and inevitably finds itself wanting: “I fought the Law and the Law won.”

Sin is always there, you see. But we don’t realize how deep into sin we are mired until we measure our lives against the rule of Law. We forget how dark it is until someone turns on the light. And then we wish they’d kept it off.

So what next? Having seen how far we’ve fallen from grace, what is our next move? Well, having measured ourselves against the Law and not enjoyed the results, we then measure our neighbors against the Law. And we feel a little better, don’t we? We may be bad, sure, but at least we’re not as bad as all these other poor slobs. Ride that bell curve for all it’s worth. Surf to self-justification upon the great surge of the unwashed masses. We’ve moved now from denial straight to bargaining.

But this justifies nothing. On the contrary, wielding the Law as a weapon against our neighbor only drives us more deeply into sin. We simply cannot escape from the harsh light of truth. We couldn’t even if we wanted to, and half the time we don’t even want that. The Law is Good and True and Beautiful and we are not. From where is our help to come?

Paul’s answer is that we have to get out from inside of ourselves. We have to stop curving inward, and escape to find new footing upon solid ground—a promise that is stronger than our weakness. And this, of course, is Jesus Christ. Yes, the Law is our pedagogue, but children outgrow their tutors. We as the people of God must now come of age and move on to spiritual adulthood. Having recognized the depth of our sin, and our own inability to fulfill the righteousness demanded by the Law, we must turn now toward the Light, toward our only hope: the promise of grace in our Lord Jesus Christ. The Law’s last lesson for us is that the Law drives us to the Gospel.

When we cannot fulfill the Law, Christ fulfills it for us. The Goodness and Truth and Beauty that we cannot achieve on our own is poured out upon us as free gift, purely out of grace, purely out of love. It is the promise of peace and joy and life everlasting—a heaven we could never hope to earn, yet neither can we lose!—for the New Covenant of salvation rests not on our own promises, so readily broken, but on the unbreakable promise of Jesus Christ, our God made flesh. And God does not break promises.

And so we are free, cries Paul! Free from the cycle of sin and reproach; free from all the powers within and without—the devil, the world, and the flesh—that would separate us from the love of God; free from our ignorance apart from the Law and from our despair when we are placed naked and trembling before it! In Jesus Christ, the gulf between God and Man, the chasm torn by our sin, has been healed, has been sealed up, for God is in Christ and Christ is in us, in Word and in Spirit, in Body and in Blood, now and forevermore! And St Paul rejoices:

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the Law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

And it is precisely because we are freed from the power of sin that we must shun it all the more. We must strive for the Good and True and Beautiful in every aspect of our lives—not because God’s love must be earned; not to judge our neighbor or feel better about ourselves. Rather, we strive for what is Good and True and Beautiful so that grace may abound all the more, as it flows freely from sinner to sinner, absolving us in the ocean of God’s mercy, so that we participate in the salvation of God’s world, drawing humanity and all of Creation into the perfection of Christ at the end of the age!

It’s not about keeping score. We are freed from our sins so that we can free our neighbor.

“For now that you have been freed from sin and bound to God, the advantage you gain is sanctification; the end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.