H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
April 27, 2003
The Essence of Sin
1 John 1:1-2:2
Daughter Carole to her mother on Monday: "So you're preaching about Thomas on
Sunday?" Surprised Mother: "No, that text always gets used, I figured I’d work
with one that we didn’t focus on so much."
"I like Thomas. I like hearing stories we’ve heard before – you should preach
on Thomas."
Well sometime yesterday I was beginning to wish I’d taken Carole’s good advice. But
I figured it was time to tackle sin in this place – so instead of dealing with the
healthy skepticism of a faithful Thomas - we’re moving into a text written to a group
ready to splinter and dealing with a different kind of doubt. These believers weren’t
quite sure that Jesus had really ever been a flesh and blood human (searching for the
historical Jesus – not an interest). These folks thought it more likely that Jesus was a
spiritual emanation from God who simply appeared to be human and so could continue
this fabulous spiritual existence even after that very public crucifixion.
Certainly not the problem of today’s skeptics. But along with this elevation of the
spiritual nature above all else was a tremendously modernly self-serving belief that since
only the spirit mattered and all matter (flesh) was evil it didn’t matter to the spirit
if the flesh sinned. So there was a lot of hard partying and uncharitable behavior
happening within this community of believers. "The elder" author of this letter
is trying to delicately bring out how solidly he had experienced Jesus, God’s Son, and
how much it does matter that we walk in God’s pure light and never deny the reality of
sin.
Now we Baptists are known for dealing decisively with sin. I’m guessing you’ve
heard about the Quaker who owned a particularly ornery cow. Every time he milked the
irritable animal it was an ordeal. One morning after stomping the farmer’s foot,
whipping his face with her tail and upending the filled milk bucket, the customarily quiet
man marched in front of the cow, pointed his finger in the old bovine’s face and said,
"Thou dost know that I am a Quaker. Thou dost know also that I will not strike thee
back, but I can sell thee to a Baptist!"
And unfortunately, on a much more somber note, you may also have heard that the
Cabarrus Baptist Association is striking at Concord’s McGill Baptist Church about just
who has their permission to profess faith in Christ and be baptized as a follower. The
Association has no doubt about how to identify an unrepentant sinner.
Does that make your Baptist skin crawl like it does mine? Let me read vs 10 of this
chapter once again: "If we say that we have no sin, we make God a liar, and God’s
word is not in us." Its as if these Cabarrus Baptists never read of the woman caught
in adultery in John 8, where Jesus in response to their charges concerning her guilt,
squats, writes in the sand and says "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the
first to throw a stone at her."
Aldous Huxley reminds us in The Devils of Loudon "Those who crusade not for
God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world
better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was,
before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our
intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
When I challenge you about the sin in your life – most of you will come up with an
action, a behavior that you repeat occasionally, often, perhaps only in your day dreaming:
A dark room, a tax sheet, dissing a kid at school, a bowl of ice cream. But God wants
us to reach past these symptoms, these externals, to move to that inward experience where
something precious has been severed; an essential tie has been broken through cruel, harsh
behavior. Barbara Brown Taylor asserts that the essence of sin is "the violation of
relationships." (Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation) It is
turning away from the light and love of the one’s closest to you; turning away from the
very light of God.
When you are separated from that which gives you energy, your very ground of Being, all
of life, loses vitality. When the source of meaning no longer carries truth for you, your
purpose for life matters little, a dissipate existence is all you have left and reaching
for life’s antidepressants becomes common-place.
If we say we’ve never known betrayal, isolation, separation, we deceive ourselves and
the truth is not in us. Yet if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will
forgive us our sins, transforming our lives with value, meaning, purpose and peace.
In Walter Wink's book The Powers That Be, he writes, "Faith in God is
believing that anyone can be transformed." We are not beyond the reach of God’s
light. No matter how deep our separation, how dark the isolation we have known, God wants
more for us in this life.
1 John says that God yearns for fellowship with you, wants a relationship of substance
with each of us. The Greek word for fellowship is "koinonia" which, in part,
means having something in common. What can the God of Light have in common with those of
us who rather perpetually stumble along in the darkness? This passage and others assert
that what we have in common with God is life in Christ.
The message of the incarnation is that God has come to dwell in humankind. O Come, O
Come, Emmanuel we sing with longing, Come God-who-is-with-us – God born in the flesh -
be our light.
The message of salvation is that we have new life in the risen Christ. It is in the
hope of resurrection that we each find hope for becoming a more whole person tomorrow than
we find our selves to be today.
No one writes about this better than Nancy Eisland, a broken, brilliant woman who has
spent her life ministering to disabled individuals. In her book, The Disabled God,
she focuses on the wounded, resurrected body of Christ. With an imperfect body, broken by
injustice, she asserts that - the resurrected Christ carries meaning precisely because
this Christ "embodied both impaired hands … feet… pierced side and the
imago Dei," the image of God. An imperfect body is the very body which carries God’s
image. Your imperfect body, your broken life is the one where God seeks to dwell in light!
We walk in the light, the integrity , the wholeness of God, when we walk in harmony
with each other. We walk with God when all the relationships around us are nourishing our
lives. Take a look around folks – we won’t have to cast our eyes very far before they
land on someone who does not nourish our spirit. But our Christ of the broken body says
confess that irritation, that hostility, that condescension and a faithful God will
transform even our eyes so that we can look on others with God’s love.
Grace is the gift God provides so that we might be released from the trap of repetitive
sin. Instead of judging our neighbor, feeling guilty and then continuing in our negative
reflections, we can walk in the light that says – this judgement falls short of seeing,
naming, the beauty of another. We can confess, admit, acknowledge the reality of our
judgements and we can turn away from that kind of behavior. We can do it. We can practice
sinning less. If we ask, God will assist us in the transformation of life – our life and
the lives of others.
In his book Mending the Heart, John Claypool states that: "Life is not a
spelling bee in which we are lined up against a blackboard and given harder and harder
words to spell---and if we miss one word we can never play again." Rather, Claypool
tells us, "…God is more interested in our future than in our past, more interested
in the kind of person we can yet become than the person we used to be."
We practice the corporate confession of sins in this place. It’s not just an
opportunity for the ministerial staff to gig you or to express their pent up hostilities.
The collective confession of sin reassures us that we are not alone in our propensity to
sin or in the possibility of our being redeemed from that sinning. We confess together so
that we may hold one another accountable, we might lift each other above our sins rather
than sink gleefully into them together.
Have you heard that slight perversion of your mother’s old adage? "If you don’t
have anything nice to say about someone – come sit by me?" Or "Better listen
close the first time, cause we don’t repeat our gossip twice." We can do better
than that.
Ours is not a disembodied faith. Australian theologian, William Loader
writes "Flesh and blood and real human relations are not an encumbrance, but
themselves the theatre of the divine." (
www.textweek.com, First Thoughts on Year B Epistle
Passages from the Lectionary: Easter 2) Whether we nourish or diminish life in those
around matters if we are to be children of the light or children of darkness.
At her high school graduation, Maya Angelou’s white principal belittled the education
she and her classmates had received, ridiculed the excellence any black student had
achieved, by reminding them of their place in the structure of a racist, classist, sexist
society. For him, their color, their poverty was their destiny. He sought to separate
these children from their worth, from their community, even from their identity as God’s
dearly beloved.
Angelou says it wasn’t until the audience stood and swelled with the music of Lift
Every Voice and Sing that Angelou’s crushed and crucified spirit was brought back to
life. She writes that despite the thousands of times she had sung those words, not until
that moment had she realized that they had anything to do with her.
"God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
God who has brought us thus far on the way;
God, who by your might, led us into the light,
keep us forever in the path, we pray."
"Faith in God is believing that anyone can be transformed!"
No one is beyond the reach of God’s light.
You may shoot me with your words.
You may cut me with your eyes.
You may kill me with your hatefulness.
But still, like air, I’ll rise."
(Maya Angelou, Still I Rise)
If we say we’ve never known betrayal, isolation, separation, we deceive ourselves and
the truth is not in us. Yet if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will
forgive us our sins, transforming our lives with value, meaning, purpose and peace.
Copyright, nea 2003
