There is one thing you may not know about the All Souls liturgy. The preacher and not the music director chooses the hymns. I confess this for two reasons. First, since the only time any of you complains to Wally about the music is when one of the hymns is unsingable, any confusion in this regard is unfair to Wally. Granted, I have permitted this confusion to persist for twenty-two years. That was wrong. I confess it. I have sinned.
Not that I wasn't caught on occasion. One way or another, sinners always pay. In this case, when I've been caught, punishment has been swift. Wally would simply say, "I didn't choose that terrible hymn. Forrest did. Talk to him." On the other hand, since most of you are by nature too polite to complain to Wally about his hymn selection, justice has never been fully served. Now that it has, I invite you to be as polite to me as you have been to Wally. You may not know this, but the ministerial ego is by nature a very fragile one. Not only is it in my best interest but in your best interest as well that my sense of self-worth should not be wantonly diminished, especially on Sundays. So if you hate my choice of hymns, keep it to yourself. In other words, hate the sin but love the sinner.
The second reason I confess this today is that, to begin my sermon in the way I wished to, I had to confess it. Because I am a sinner, I would otherwise have been perfectly happy to perpetuate this illusion, even at another's expense, as long as possible. But I found the perfect way to begin this sermon on sin, and, for better or worse, it required my finally coming clean on this hymn selection business. You see, in the back of the hymnal, suggested hymns are listed for almost any subject imaginable. Faith, forgiveness, friendship; goodness, gratitude, grief; Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa; Jesus, justice, joy; even Pagans, Reason, Science, and Animals. After all, this is a Unitarian hymnal. I don't mind the breadth of listed topics. That is what makes this appendix useful for preachers, helping us to identify hymns that complement our sermon subject. To this rule, I can think of only one major exception. Remember, this is a Unitarian hymnal. I should have known it without looking. There is no section on sin.
Before joining this denomination, I heard one of my divinity school classmates boast, "We Unitarians don't believe in sin." How very convenient, I thought. I knew this character quite well. I'm sure that what he really meant to say is that he believed in other people's sin the sins of racism, homophobia, classism, agism, specism (that's a sin against non-human animals) just not in his own complicity. After all, his theology (to the extent that you could call it such) was politically correct. He wasn't a sinner. He was an enemy of sin.
One year after I came to All Souls, the Dean of a Unitarian seminary spoke here. He said that there are two kinds of people: healers and killers. He estimated that only about six per cent of the people in the world were healers. (That, clearly, is why there are so few Unitarians.) The good news was that if we could only increase the number of healers just the tiniest bit, we healers could save the world. I remember this as if it were yesterday. It was almost enough to drive me back to Presbyterianism.
On the other hand, those on the religious right who ignore such systemic sins as racism and homophobia trivialize sin. In Paul Tillich's words, they mistake moralism for morality. With a keen eye for the motes of lust or gluttony in other people's eyes, they completely miss perceiving the beams of bigotry in their own. A moralistic preoccupation with the behavior of individual sinners distracts their attention from a higher morality, often, for instance, blinding them to social imperatives such as justice and compassion.
Ironically, fundamentalists of the left and of the right are more alike than they imagine. If in negative print images of one another, both manifest a kind of sheep or goat mentality. Each is the sheep to the other's goat.
In my book too there are sheep and goats, but each of us are both, or have the capacity for being both. I do not believe, to quote the Common Prayer book, that "there is no health in us." Neither do I believe that we were all born good only to be twisted by deleterious forces in the fallen world we enter. The Calvinist would rescue us sinners from this world. The liberal utopian would redeem our world from sin. Neither approach strikes me as being in the least bit sensible. Hence this mornings sermon, on "Sin and Sensibility."
Let me begin by sharing my own definition of sin. Sin is a state of brokenness, alienation, division, estrangement. All of us have experienced this. Often, we are divided within ourselves, estranged from our neighbors, even our loved ones, and alienated from God, from the very ground of our being. The opposite of sin is salvation, a word that means health or wholeness. Not only is this clear from the Latin root, but the parallel Teutonic etymology suggests the same meaning: hale, health, whole, and holy spring from the same root.
We are all sinners in at least this sense: we have all done things we know that we should not have done, and not done things that begged our doing. A bad conscience is not a bad thing. It does, however, remind us of all the little and sometimes the big ways in which we have let ourselves, one another, and God down in the course of our daily lives. Almost all meaningful spiritual work begins here. We struggle to close the divisions within ourselves; this leads towards integrity. We endeavor to lessen our estrangement from our neighbors and loved ones; this leads towards reconciliation. And we try to move from being apart from to a part of the one interdependent body, to stand more firmly on the ground of our shared being; this leads towards salvation, or wholeness. In Christian theology, the goal both within us, between us as individuals, and between us and God -- the goal is atonement. You hear of Christ atoning for our sins, or of a sinner atoning for his or her own sins. Literally, the word atonement means at-one-ment -- again, oneness, integrity, and wholeness in place of division, alienation and estrangement.
From personal experience and observation, all of this makes a great deal of sense to me. To acknowledge our own sin and our complicity in sin is a sensible thing to do. For one thing, it helps to temper our pride, in traditional Christian taxonomy the number one sin. It can also temper our perfectionism, make us a little less judgmental, lead to a bit of saving humility, and place us on a more even playing or living field with our loved ones and neighbors.
There is only one problem with the Christian attention to sin, even atonement from sin. It turns out to be spiritually of much greater utility to the sinner than to those who are sinned against. It is all and well for a wife-beater or child-abuser to be saved by Jesus. I wouldn't begrudge that for a moment. But what about the battered wife or molested child? What about the sinned against? Do we invite those who have been stripped of their self-esteem to cast away pride? Often they have no pride left to cast away. Do we tell them to love their enemies, to forgive their persecutors, to empty themselves and be filled? Only, I think, if we do something else first and by first I mean for as long as it takes to begin truly attending to their innocent wounds. It strikes me as only sensible that we should focus as much theological and spiritual attention on the victims of sin as on the sinners themselves.
Here an Eastern concept may prove helpful. In Korean and Vietnamese the word "han" is used to describe the deep wound of victims. As Andrew Sung Park writes, "Han is the pain of a victim internalized in depth." Think of it as a black hole. In astrophysics, a black hole is created when a star expands to the point that inner core implodes. This is called a supernova. After the explosion, the star collapses into its own center. This collapsed star or collapsed ego -becomes a black hole. Its gravity is so strong that it swallows up whatever it touches.
Certainly you know people who are swallowed up by their own pain. This is sometimes unnecessary self-indulgent and narcissistic. In such cases, the individual is ultimately responsible for his or her own release. But in other cases, for true victims of others the reality of han -- or of the black hole of pain that sucks the joy and meaning from life -- cannot so easily be gain said.
Here a dose of liberal theology can offer a counterweight to more orthodox theological systems. Compared to orthodox theologians, liberal theologians especially liberation theologians have a keener eye for the victims of sin, at least they have a keener eye for victims of structural or systemic sin, sins such as racism, sexism, or homophobia.
Andrew Sung Park, the Methodist minister I cited above, is one such liberation or, from the Korean, minjung (downtrodden) theologian. He speaks of The Wounded Heart of God. "Sin may be forgiven by the repentance of sinners," he writes, "whereas han can be resolved by the healing of the sinned-against."
Going back to the sheep and goat metaphor, if goats are sinners and innocent sheep the sinned against, it remains that there are not two kinds of people, only one, each of us both sheep and goat. The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said that the preacher's task is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But in my experience and I feel this more strongly today than I ever have before people can't be divided that neatly. In one respect or another, each of us is comfortable in ways that diminish our desire for self-transformation or service to others, and at the same time each of us is afflicted in ways that lead us to need comforting. We manifest both sin and han, both unwarranted wounding pride and unwarranted wounds of pain.
Sin and han manifest themselves in similar ways: sin through division, estrangement, alienation; han through isolation, resentment and helplessness. Whether through wounding or by inflicted wounds, the fabric of our life, of our shared being, is cut to pieces by both. By the same token, salvation or healing for both sin and han also spring, if in different ways, from the same source. Many people call this source God, but the name we choose to give it doesn't really matter. God is not God's name; God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each; the holy spirit of life that moves within us, between us and beyond us; the power whose grace, if we are humble enough to accept it and act upon it, both saves and heals words again that mean very much the same thing: salvate, the greeting in Latin that means "Good health to you!;" and, holiness, the Teutonic derivative of holy, hale and health.
When our lives are riddled with sin and han, there may indeed be no health in us. But I can promise you this. There is hope for us. Alone we may each be little more than wounding and wounded souls. The hope, manifested in homes and communities daily, is that together and by the grace of God, we can find liberation from our sins and liberate one another from our han. Not completely, of course. (Remember, this is All Souls Church not All Saints Church.) To our dying day we will continue to wound and to be wounded. But if we have the courage to attend to our spiritual houses, we also can both foster and encourage atonement at-one-ment. That is our hope. And our prayer.
Let us unite ourselves in the spirit of prayer.
.Spirit of light and of love, shine thou in us, putting to flight
all the forces of darkness and guilt, of sin and selfishness.
Shine also through us to any that live in shadow,
And so fill us with thy radiant spirit that we may be
a lamp unto our neighbors' feet and a light unto their path.
And when this day is done, may every face we have met
Be the brighter for our meeting, and every heart braver,
With new joy and cheer and grace and strength. (Adapted from Theodore Parker)
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls 2000.
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