Speaking of Sin
February 21st, 2005
This is the time of the church year, during Lent, when we talk a lot about sin. It used to be, maybe in the 1950s or 60s, that you would hear a good number of sermons on sin. These were of the hellfire and brimstone variety, usually the preacher shouted out a long list of warnings and prohibitions until everyone was shaking in their boots. Perhaps you are familiar with the old Baptist adage “I don’t smoke and I don’t chew and I don’t go with girls who do.” In those days, sin was easy to identify—it was dancing; it was going to a movie on Sunday afternoon, it was tasting alcohol. Avoiding sin was as simple as sticking to the long list of rules and regulations that your particular church decided upon.
But nowadays, you don’t hear many sermons on sin. And I think that there’s good and bad consequences for not talking about sin the way we used to. One positive aspect of not talking about sin in “hellfire and brimstone” terms is that maybe we have come to a better understanding of what it means to sin. The idea of sin is not a concrete monolith that is always easy to define. Alcohol, dancing, and tobacco may all still represent certain sins or evils in our culture, but they are certainly not an exhaustive list. The Bible itself has many words for sin, many ways of talking about disobedience. For example, it is never enough to think of sin as just a long laundry list of no-no’s to stay away from; sin can also result when the people of God do nothing. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus shows us that just as beating and robbing the man on the road is a sin, so too is walking by and ignoring him in our rush to accomplish more “important” things. Just as burning a cross in your neighbor’s yard is sin, so too is not speaking out when someone else does it. There is a sin of action and a sin of inaction, sins of commission and omission. It’s too easy to sit and list off all the bad things we’ve never done while quietly forgetting about all those good things that we should have done.
Not talking about sin in church leads to problems. Even though sin is not always so easy to classify, when we avoid the topic completely, we lose part of our Christian confession. Speaking of sin is important in church because it reminds us of our human limitations and our inability to earn grace on our own. It reminds us that we can’t explain away the bad things that have happened in our lives by dwelling on what our parents did to us or what genes we inherited. When we stop preaching on sin, it becomes too easy to justify our every action in a world that is full of quick excuses and therapeutic values. Why worry about sin when we can just feel good about ourselves, when we can buy into the lie that right and wrong are just relative concepts?
The day Christians become too refined or too good to talk about sin in church is the day we begin to lose the story of our salvation. Through growing, struggling, and learning together, I hope that this Lenten season we will reflect anew on what it means to have sin in our lives and in our world.