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Sermon for November 14, 2004
In
the Letter to the Romans, The Apostle Paul writes, “Sin came into the world
through one human (namely Adam) and death through sin, and so death spread to
all because all sinned.” He tells us in
another place that “All have sinned”
and yet elsewhere in the same letter he says that we are “slaves of
sin”.
If
you read the e-mail announcements you would have seen that the title of my
sermon today is “The Myth of Original Sin.”
You may have expected me to start with the story of Adam and Eve and
their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
This story is normally called the Fall and Christians from the time of
Paul have seen that story as the account of our estrangement from God and the
beginning of our enslavement to sin.
But
I have begun with the quote from the apostle Paul for a simple reason: the story of Adam and Eve is not about the
Fall of humanity or about the enslavement of humanity to sin. Ask any Jew. After all this is their story.
They would tell you that the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and their
expulsion from paradise is an object lesson in what happens when you disobey
God, but they would deny the idea that the event triggered some permanent break
between God and humanity, or caused a distortion of human nature or brought
about the wholesale handing over of humanity to the power of evil. No, for Judaism the lesson is simple. If you disobey God, you suffer.
Now
some of you may have trouble with this idea because it seems to present God as a
harsh cosmic judge and we are uncomfortable with the idea of a God who punishes
us. If we’re going to have a God, we
want a God of love.
But let’s
look for a moment beyond the particulars of the Hebrew notion of God and see
what principle might be there. If there
is a spiritual force in the universe that influences it, and if the universe is
guided by some spiritual principles, then it would make sense that living in a
way that violates those spiritual principles would have some effect.
For
example, in our affirmation of faith, we say that our goal is that “all souls
shall grow into harmony with the divine.”
Why do we seek that?
We
seek that because we recognize that the divine is good, that it is moral. We also recognize that humanity’s well-being
rests upon the realization in our lives and in our world of the spiritual
principles that influence and guide reality.
We want to live in harmony with the divine, because that’s the best way
to live and because to not live in harmony with the divine creates problems for
everyone.
We also
recognize that the principle Judaism teaches is true on a practical level. There
are consequences to our actions. And there are negative consequences when we do
the wrong thing. I still recall the
time in college when I finally grasped the principle that the human body was
not designed to hold a full quart of scotch.
There were definite negative consequences.
This
also works in more subtle ways. The
Greek philosopher Heraclites said, “A person’s character is their fate.” If you are a selfish person, there are
consequences. You may not be able to
trace a direct line of cause and effect between some selfish act and its result,
but the end the result of living selfishly is there, maybe it’s in the
fragility or brokenness of your loves, maybe it’s somewhere else, but its there.
You
may pretend for a while or even for your whole life that living greedily pays
off, but in the final analysis, you pay for it someplace. Maybe not in your finances, but perhaps in
your relationships to others or in your enslavement to your possessions. In the end, there are always consequences to
wrongdoing; seen or unseen, obvious or hidden.
We
don’t always like this, but while the idea that the spiritual will embrace and
bless us no matter what we do may seem comforting at first glance, the notion that
the spiritual doesn’t care about how we live is really discomforting when you
think about the implications of that thought.
If the power behind reality is really amoral, that would leave us in a
cold, hard Darwinian universe, where the strong survive at the expense of the
weak, where ultimately might is right, where moral practices exist merely for the
convenience of the powerful, and where ethics have no real foundation.
Now
you can disagree with the Jewish notion that there is some sort of personal God
overhanging reality, handing out punishment for every mistake or unkind deed
you do; but it is more difficult to
disagree with the notion that there is a way we should live, that reality unfolds
according to certain principles and that our happiness and the happiness of
others depends on everyone living in harmony with those principles.
The
story of Adam and Eve is a reminder that there are principles by which we
should live and that there is a penalty for not doing that. It’s not a very good story, since the whole
thing turns on eating a piece of fruit, but despite that detail, which reflects
the story’s roots in ancient mythology, it does make a reasonable point.
The
problem is that when Paul uses the story, he does something more than just articulate
this point. Paul argues that as a
result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, we have become slaves of sin, that we
are powerless in its grip, that we are unable to do good even when we want to.
This
was a novel idea. No Jew in Paul’s time
would accept his analysis of the plight of humanity. No Jew would accept it today.
Yet after Paul, this notion became an essential element of Christian
thought. It is an idea that shapes our culture in a surprising variety of ways
and, I would argue, shapes our understanding of ourselves even when we
consciously reject the idea.
With
this idea, Paul even contradicts Jesus, who says that he didn’t come for the
righteous, but for sinners. But that
statement implies that some people are righteous in and of themselves, and
don’t need to be saved by Jesus. In
fact, the Old Testament is full of examples of people who are righteous, who do
the right thing, who live lives pleasing to God, who are not slaves of sin, and
are not powerless to do good. It is
difficult to reconcile these scriptures with what Paul says.
But
if Paul’s idea was so novel and radical, where does it come from? We could be skeptical and understand this as
simply a great marketing ploy. First
Paul creates a need: we’re all sinners, lost and helpless. Then he provides the solution: Jesus.
It’s brilliant. Create a need
and fill it. Kind of like when the
deodorant industry convinced us that sweating was bad and we all needed more than
just a deodorant, we needed antiperspirants.
They created the need, then they filled it. And certainly the church has benefited by consigning everyone
automatically to hell, then controlling the only way out.
But
I think such a cynical approach is unmerited in Paul’s case. He was a man who
suffered a great deal for what he believed, and according to tradition, was
killed for his beliefs. It’s probably a
stretch to attribute some base motive to him.
I
think Paul was trying to come to grips with a real problem. People sin.
People want to do the right thing, but inevitably end up messing
up. How do we explain that? Well one way is to find a power responsible
for it. And Paul comes up with it, “The
power of sin”. Paul is the first person
to personify sin, to speak of it as a force controlling our lives. Before Paul people talked about sins, about bad things we did, but never
about Sin as some sort of dark force
that enslaved humanity. Not until Paul.
I
think that in part Paul was wrestling with his own history. In one autobiographical passage in his
letters Paul claims that as a young man he kept the Law of God perfectly, that
in his early life he didn’t sin. In fact, he claims that he outstripped all his
contemporaries in his zeal for Judaism.
Yet Paul also knew that this zeal lead him to persecute Christians for
their beliefs. In fact the Book of Acts
tells us that when the first Christian martyr, Stephen, was murdered for simply
preaching about Jesus, Paul stood by giving his approval and assisting the
murderers.
Now
it’s hard to get into Paul’s head based on the few scattered accounts of this
period in his life; but I wonder if Paul looked at what he had done and decided
that if someone who was trying so hard to obey God still ended up doing so much
that was wrong; that maybe there was something wrong with humanity, maybe we
were fundamentally flawed.
Of
course you and I might look at the same situation and say that maybe there was
something wrong with being so zealous, with being so sure he was right, with
being so ready to impose his views on others at any cost. I think we’d have a point. In fact Paul never gives up that zeal or
that arrogance, he just transfers it to the cause of Christianity. He condemns people who don’t follow his teachings. He tells people who get sick or suffer the
loss of a loved one that they must have sinned. He antagonizes his fellow missionaries and is generally uncompromising
about doctrine and practice. Paul helped
set a tone of intolerance in Christianity that continues to this day. To use a biblical term, Paul was an ass.
If
you haven’t figured it out, I don’t like Paul.
I’ve often said that if we were locked in a room for more than half an
hour, we would come to blows.
At
the same time, when we confront any religious tradition, we need to be
open. In this case we need to ask
ourselves what, exactly, Paul was seeing, what was he wrestling with? What is there for us in what he says?
Paul
does express something found in many religions. The sense that we are somehow alienated from the divine, that we
have somehow lost our way. Most
religions also admit that there is a great divide between who we are and what
we would like to be. Was there some spiritual
cataclysm in our past, some rupture that brought this alienation? That is what many religions suppose.
On
the other hand, others would say that we are born of this earth, that we are burdened
with the reminders of a dark evolutionary history, a history of aggression and battle
for survival that still shapes us, unconsciously driving us to act in ways that
violate our higher nature.
Still
others would say that the very structures of society, whether they be some form
of soul-crushing totalitarianism or a de-humanizing capitalism, have driven us
from ourselves, and enslaved us to demands that ultimately reduce us to mere
machines, mere instruments of production.
I
sometimes think that Paul’s problem as a young man was that he thought it was
all about his effort. If he just
gritted his teeth, sucked it up, learned the rules, and tried real hard, that
he could be what he wanted to be. He tried that and failed miserably.
Maybe
the problem is that we are not meant to live this life alone: maybe the problem is that in order to grow
into harmony with the divine we need first to experience it, to be touched by
it, to get to know it. And then we need
to allow it to operate in our lives until it’s presence pervades us and we and the
divine grow together into one. Maybe
to be in harmony with the divine is more than to just live by some rules, to correctly
read the universe and discover the principles we should be guided by; maybe it means to reach out to the mystery, to
embrace it and to be embraced by it, until we become it. Maybe our alienation comes from choosing to
live apart from the divine, apart from our source.
While
there may be truth for us to discover in Paul’s idea, there are dangers there
also. The primary danger is that we can
see ourselves as victims; unable to deal with the dark forces that operate
within us or outside us. This notion
permeates our society.
Within
us? We can give power to our lower natures. We can surrender to the selfish beast that
lurks within each of us, the ancient memory of our species’ struggle for survival. We can give into fear and anger and
lust. We can bow before our primitive
self or we can rule over it. The
problem is that too often our society teaches us that this is the real us. That we need to express it to be ourselves.
Within
us? We can also see ourselves as
victims of our past. We can let the
traumas and struggles of our own lives, traumas and struggles both great and
small, twist us and shape us. I
remember seeing one of the victims of the sexual abuse scandal in Boston
interviewed on television. Each time he
spoke he would say, “My life is ruined.”
As I watched him, I wondered why he would say that. He was a young man, he had years of life
ahead of him. Was his life really
ruined by something that happened twenty years earlier, something that was not
his fault?
In
contrast, I know of a woman who was brutally raped and beaten and left for dead
in a park about a dozen years ago. If a
passerby hadn’t discovered her when he did, she would have died. Surely that’s enough to shatter anyone’s
life, to leave them traumatized and incapable of functioning again. Yet every
year this woman and her husband celebrate the day this happened, they celebrate
it as her new birthday, as the day she got a second chance to be alive.
What
is the difference between the two? I’m
sure both got counseling and I am a strong advocate for counseling. That is part of how we fight the power of our
past. But I wonder if the difference in
the outcome for these two victims came from the degree of power they were
willing to give to these events. The
woman has gone on to a happy and productive life. The young man died from a drug overdose.
What
about the dark forces outside us? We
live in a world where people see themselves as victims of forces outside themselves,
of forces that determine their behavior.
Companies don’t have to care for their employees or their communities or
their country because then they wouldn’t make as much money. Even Howard Dean said, “Corporations are
amoral.” Corporations will tell you
that are ruled by the quest for profit.
They have no choice in their decisions.
But the truth is, they don’t have to be amoral. Yes, it would cost them to care about
something besides profit; but to be
unwilling to pay a price for doing the right thing is not the same thing as
being unable to do the right
thing. They could chose, but they would
rather play the victim.
We probably
won’t get universal health care in this country because it would cost too many
people too much. But just because doing
the right thing will require sacrifice, doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means
you’re unwilling to make the sacrifice.
We
can think of so many people that have chosen to do the right thing despite its
cost. We can think of Nelson Mandela,
imprisoned for twenty-seven years for doing the right thing. We can think of Martin Luther King, killed
for doing the right thing. We can think
of Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks. And we
can think of countless lesser known people who broke the shackles of society to
live the lives they wanted to live. And
we can think of the price they paid for it.
Just because freedom costs, doesn’t mean you don’t have it.
If
the story of Jesus tells us anything, it tells us that we are free. Free to tell the truth, free to break the
rules, free to challenge the powers that be, free to combat prejudice,
distorted religion, and self-righteousness, free to do good, and free to live
without regard for the consequence. The
story also tells us we are also free to be crucified.
In
fact, contrary to Paul, the story of Jesus tells us that we are not slaves to
anything. We have absolute freedom, as
long as we are willing to pay the price.
To exercise that freedom is to realize authentic humanity.