What is Sin?

¹⁶For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”^£

¹⁸For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. ¹⁹For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; ²¹for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. ²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools; ²³and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. ²⁹They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters,^£ insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, ³¹foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

A Sunday school teacher had just concluded her lesson and wanted to make sure she had made her point. She said, "Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?"

There was a dead silence, then suddenly a little hand went up in the back row and a small voice cried out, "SIN!"

This wasn't what the teacher was looking for when the question was asked, but the little boy was right, in order to have forgiveness of sin, one must first face sin itself.

So often in contemporary mainline churches, we are so eager to speak about grace and forgiveness and love and God's mercy, we sometimes forget that all this is necessary, because of sin.

So many folks, having grown up in more conservative Christian communities, perhaps, are afraid of sin. "Sinning, (as a verb) will send you to hell!" you may yourself have heard as as child from some teacher or pastor or even parent or other adult as they wagged a finger. In this way of looking at things, sin is an action, a verb, as in "don't sin," perhaps because it is easier to explain to children or to attempt to control for all people. You know, just wag that finger and say "DON'T!!"

Yet others extend these prohibitions further, to more mundane categories and warn about mortal or deadly sins:

Pride or Vanity, which is excessive belief in one's own abilities, sometimes recognized as the sin from which all others arise.

Anger or Wrath, manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury.

Greed, the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual.

Many of these have their roots in the Ten Commandments and certainly some in the New Testament as well.

Many years ago, in the Armenian Evangelical tradition, much like many other conservative protestant traditions, many other things were seen as serious and dangerous sins, of which good, spiritual Christians needed to repent. Among these were, smoking, gambling, swearing (either in terms of profanity or even swearing an oath), drinking alcoholic beverages, dancing, (those last two, particularly on church grounds!) visiting movie theaters, working on Sundays, selling things in church, and on and on…

"Mekhk" these old fashioned, old-time Armenians would say, in the days of my grandfather's youth, and wag that almighty finger against the sinner, the one who was playing fast and loose with his eternal security and place in heaven.

I've got to tell you, most movies are not a problem for me, nor is drinking in moderation, nor smoking or working on Sundays, or many of these old traditional prohibitions… Some of them may be exhibiting bad judgement or bad taste or unhealthy or whatever, but sin? I don't think so… Even the Apostle Paul says, "All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial." [2] Why not? Well what do you think? Do you think these are all sins?

What is sin? Is it something you do? Like all these examples I've already mentioned, that if you don't do you won't be sinful?

One ancient, protestant statement of faith, the Westminster Confession of 1646 [3] says this about sin:

Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlilty and temptations of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit…

By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of the soul and body.

They being the root of all humanity, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death, sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.

From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.

So, what does this mean? Some theologians and church folk, three hundred and fifty years ago, read the bible and looked around them at the state of the world and speculated that 1. Adam and Eve were the first to sin, the first to ever do something wrong! Despite being created by God, who was otherwise thought to be incapable of creating anything but perfect things, they screwed up. 2. Because of their sin, because of their mistake or their screw up, they were corrupted. They fell off their pedestal of perfection. They were tossed from their perfect garden, Dden and punished. 3. Because of their mistake, and because of their position as the father and mother of all humanity, this corruption, this imperfection was passed along from person to person to each of us.

Now, I think this too has problems, but it moves away from the idea of sin as just bad things we do. It says that sin is a condition. It is the state of the world, or at least all humanity, passed along from person to person, from the beginning of time.

I don't know about Adam and Eve being the mommy and daddy of all the people that ever were born. Or about them being perfect. Or some snake being a flesh and blood representation of evil to the two of them which caused them to be corrupted. Or God punishing them for their corruption.

But sin is a state of being. It is a state of seperation and alienation from God. It is the condition of the world and of every human being.

Adam and Eve perhaps did exist and perhaps they were the mother and father of all humanity and were punished by God. I don't know, I wasn't there, and the words that describe these situations can be interpreted a miriad of ways. But I do believe that if they were born perfect, they were born only as perfect as humans can be… No, God did not create anything with flaws or imperfections or problems, but God did create something finite, perishable and fragile, which, at the same time contains something eternal and spiritual. This creature, this human is at the same time like God in Spirit and yet different, probably because it has body and flesh.

Humans are not all-knowing, not all-present and not as powerful as God. Adam and Eve, as the first humans must have been created clean and with a fresh slate, without any transgression, as are each and every human being, perhaps perfect in spirit and hope and intention. But like all of us, who can't control everything, and don't know everything, within them the potential existed to do their own thing, disobey God and float confused away from God and into trouble.

Another of the ancient church theologians, John Calvin, the father of Presbyterianism, who wrote almost 450 years ago in Geneva, Switzerland, referred to sin as ignorance, blindness and befuddlement.[4]

Calvin takes this analysis from the verses we read today from the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans.

" for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. ²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools;"

So yes, there is a choice somewhere along the line in each person's experience of sin. But the choice that leads to problems is whether to be in the light of God, or in the darkness of sin. Not just on the surface, in the particular sins of lying, stealing, coveting, greed, dancing or whatever…

And that seperation, that confusion or befuddlement away from God, is impossible to completely avoid. The Apostle says later in his letter to the Romans,

^"18For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me."

Sin can be resisted, but not completely, it is an inevitable part of life on earth. I can hope to do good, to stay with God and to be sinless. But I cannot achieve that status completely, because ultimately, I cannot be anything but what I am, a flesh and blood, human being, with passions, weaknesses, flaws, imperfections and pain.

And sin does not come from outside, from the serpent, from Satan, the Devil or the temptation that comes from there, sin it comes from within.

Did you know that the worm at the core of some apples doesn't come from outside the apple? Worms don't bore their way down from the skin to the core of an apple. They are born in the apple's core and eat their way out. Long before that apple was an apple, some insect came along and laid an egg in the bud of an apple blossom. As the apple grows, the worm grows as well deep within the apple and rots the apple out from the inside.

The apostle Paul also talks about the Genesis of sin from the inside of the sinner out, in the long passage we began with this morning.

They knew God, says Paul, but they of their own accord, in their own hearts and minds, decided to not pay attention to God, to not honor God and most of all to not thank God. With gratitude and humility lost, the limits and connections to God are broken and like a sattelite that somehow breaks free from a planet's orbit and gravity, that lost soul begins to spin out of control, farther and farther away from God.

From ingratitude and self-centeredness, to "degrading passions," to "debased minds" goes the progression says the Apostle Paul, and then come the individual actions and messed up behavior: "envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, gossip, slanderers, and the rest."

It isn't the action that leads to the transgression, but the distance from God that leads to the questionable, hurtful and destructive behavior.

So how does one stay clear of sin? How does one do the good? How is one redeemed from this awful state of being? Can't do it. Its not in us, as we read from that other passage from Romans (chapter 7). If the Apostle Paul says he can't do it, how do we expect to? He's not any better than us, no great Saint above all the rest, but we are no different from him either. We're all stuck in the same mind, the same condition, the same sin.

Next week we talk about redemption, we'll spend more time thinking about the rebound from Sin. Even the Apostle Paul, who is so hard on himself and every other sinner in God's creation, believes there is a way out. We'll think more on it next week, but I don't worry, I won't leave you hanging here today, a basic thought about it goes like this:

Sin is that seperation between us and God, humanity and perfection, mortality and eternity. That seperation is deeper and wider than a million Grand Canyons. There is no way to cross the breach, to traverse the chasm on our own. But there is a bridge. There is a Way to cross the great divide between God and humanity.

Jesus, is that Way. God's grace and forgiveness lays a bridge across that seperation.

Jesus is the splice that solders and repairs the cracked and broken wire that breaks the connection between God and humanity.

Jesus is the ambassador that comes from above to heal the disagreement and the war between mortality and eternity.

Jesus who instructs his disciples, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me," gives all the world a way out of the despair and befuddlement of sin and hopes to lead those who would follow, back to God and the hand of fellowship offered to all Creation.

There is almost nothing we can do about sin. It is the way we are wired, the way we are built and unavoidable. Yet next week as we look to Jesus, we will look to the one Way out and consider our hope in Him.

[1] http://deadlysins.com/sins/index.htm

[2] 1 Cor. 6:12

[3] Creeds of the Churches. Ed. J.H. Leith. 3^rd ed. 1982. John Knox Press. Louiville, KY. 201.

[4] Calvin: Insitutes of the Christian Religion, in two volumes Ed. J.T. McNeill. Westminster Press: 1960. 1.4.1-2. pp 47-48

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