The Wages of Sin

   

Propers: Reformation Sunday, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

John’s Gospel conceives of sin as alienation, as estrangement, primarily from God. Yet since God is the infinite unity undergirding and upholding everyone and everything in every moment of our existence—who fashions the world by His Word and breathes it to life in His Spirit—alienation from God thus inextricably entails alienation from the world, from each other, and even from ourselves. Without the One, we lose the many.

Sin causes us to be strangers in a strange land, slaves in our own homes. And so the Gospel for John, the Good News of Jesus Christ, is that God has come down as the Son to enlighten us, to liberate us, and to bring us all back home in Him. God eliminates our estrangement from Him by becoming one of us, one with us, eradicating the distance between God and humankind. And this is the hinge of history for John: Christ as the Alpha and the Omega, the creation and the culmination, the majesty and the mercy, all wrapped up in one.

And because of what He has done, we are free: free to be like Him, free to become Him, by living in His Spirit, by joining in His Body. We have been torn out of time. We have been pulled from the bloody red river of history to stand now with one foot in eternity, one foot already in the end of time, as foretastes of the feast to come, as little Christs for the world. How’s that for a blessing? How’s that for a mission?

We can see the effects of sin all around us. And it isn’t what most people think. It isn’t about an in-group and an out-group, a boastful judgmental moralizing. No, it’s about alienation. It’s about estrangement. And that’s everywhere, isn’t it? We have become so desperate for human connection, for healthy community, and we no longer know where to get it, do we? We no longer know where to look.

We don’t trust anybody anymore. We don’t trust politicians or clergy, or scientists or teachers, let alone neighbors or family. So we go online, where connection, presumably, is easy and anonymous. But it isn’t safe. We know that. So we protect ourselves with projections, with avatars, with false images, false selves. We cannot bare our souls online. Friendship is by nature something intimate and quiet. What we do on social media isn’t really friendship; it’s performance. It’s dancing for the mob. And we know that they’ll turn on us at the drop of a hat.

Alienation, all of it. Estranged even as we’re fiber-optically connected. And that wears on us. That eats at us. Which is why we’re all so nervous and anxious and depressed.

Now tomorrow night is Halloween, one of my very favorite holidays. Halloween and Christmas, the dark and light of American seasonal celebration. And the reason why we love these two in particular, I think, has to do with magic. Magic is big business these days. Check out the price of quartz crystals online. Target has a spell book section; it’s right next to the books on Evangelical Christianity. The retreat of organized religion hasn’t led us to atheism, but to superstition, to disorganized religion. And why is that, do you suppose? What is magic’s appeal?

I think it has to do with sin, but again, not in the way we assume. I’m not going to rail against Tarot cards and astrological charts. No, I think the postmodern interest in magic is an attempt to escape from sin, escape from alienation and estrangement. Magic tells us that we’re all connected. Magic tells us that we can draw power from nature, that we can reconnect to the world and to spiritual realms unseen.

It’s a rebellion, you see: a rebellion that’s already been coöpted by marketing, but a rebellion nonetheless. We long, we ache, to know again our unity with nature, with the cosmos, with angels and ghosts and spirits elemental. We long to regain some power, some participation, that we’ve lost to a society governed exclusively by the market and the state. It is in a sense deeply humanizing.

The explosion of witchcraft is not so much anti-Christian as it is a movement seeking reform, seeking to provide what the Church ought to have been providing, what we were meant to have been providing, all along: Resurrection! New life! A Kingdom of mercy and of wonder and of grace, liberated from our bondage to history, crude materiality, and death. Magic seeks to reënchant a sterile world; which is exactly what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ pours out for us all.

About 400 years ago we made a wager. We made it by redefining human liberty. Throughout the classical and medieval periods, Western civilization, both pagan and Christian, understood liberty as self-control. The only truly free person was one who could govern himself, who had the education and the fortitude to strive for a life of virtue, of self-sacrifice. And that’s just another way of saying love. Love is a choice to put others first, to love them as ourselves.

And we exercised this virtue through all sorts of associations: through village, church, and school; through guilds and assemblies and clubs and lodges and charitable organizations. We learned to tame our desires, passions, for the common good. But 400 years ago, men like Thomas Hobbes chafed at this, at the entangling web of societal commitments that made up all our lives. This wasn’t liberty, Hobbes said. This was confinement. Real liberty meant letting our passions run wild.

But we couldn’t do that outright. We’d all eat each other. So, Hobbes said, we created Leviathan: the idea of a single, monarchic authority whose only aim would be to make sure that my right to swing my fist ended where the other man’s nose began. The only function of the state, in Hobbes’ understanding, was to maximize personal liberty by letting us pursue any desire, free from our neighbor pursing his desire. And all the other associations, voluntary or otherwise, they just got in the way.

We shifted from an anthropology of common good to one of personal rights. But the second part of this wager, the corollary to pursuing unfettered desire, was a war declared on nature. Nature constrains desire, constrains liberty. And so we must wipe it out! We must master it, tame it, through science and technology. This potent combination of a personal right to pursue desire, enforced by the ever-expanding bleeding edge of technology, gave birth to the Enlightenment.

And the Enlightenment—well, what hasn’t it produced? Colonization. The Industrial Revolution. Capitalism. Democracy. World Wars. Splitting the atom. The Space Race. The Information Age. Global warming. The petrochemical revolution. The Third Agricultural Revolution. The whole dang modern world! And a lot of good has come from that, truly. Thank God for vaccines and antibiotics and women’s rights and labor laws and public education and the social safety net, such as it is.

Yet all of these good things have come down to us with a hefty price, and now the bill is due. We are more alienated than ever: from the spiritual, from the natural, from the societal, and from ourselves. We burned down the world in pursuit of greed. And now we don’t know who we are, people with neither a past nor a future. All we have left to us are garages full of junk and mountains of personal debt that exist solely to send billionaires to Mars. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

So you see, my brothers and sisters, that sin has not gone away. It is worse than ever. War is sin. Poverty is sin. Pollution is sin. Loneliness is sin—not that there’s anything wrong with being alone. I rather like it, in proper dosage. But no human is meant to live without love. No human is meant to be alienated from God and His world. And so, in the face of this challenge, we are called to reform. That’s what today is about.

Reformation Sunday cannot be just some denominational triumphalism: we were right and they were wrong. No. There were Reformers long before Luther, and there have been Reformers since. The Church is always reforming. And all of them worthy of that title called the people of God to a reformation of the Spirit, to re-form ourselves in God’s Image, in the person of Jesus Christ. Sin is still the same, and its cure is still the same: the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Come receive the cure, here, today, together.

Here we find Word and water. Here we find Body and Blood. Here we deeply engage with the Scriptures around the issues of our day. Here we are raised from the dead! And then we go out—out as the Body of Christ, as the sainted sinners of His Kingdom, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless and teach the ignorant and rebuke the sinner and forgive the repentant and ceaselessly declare to all of Creation the infinite, inexorable, white-hot grace of God.

You are saved, from all of it! Now go out and save the rest.

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