| Sermon for Sunday, March 6, 2005 SIN AND SALVATION: LONGING TO BE GOOD AGAIN9th in a series on The Heart of Christianity; What is the Christian Life All About? by Rev. Cindy Bates St. Andrew United Methodist Church Scripture: Psalm 51:1-12 1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. 4Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. 5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. 6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. So, I said to Harvey, “How is it that you announce a sermon series, and then, when you get to the sermon on ‘Sin and Salvation,’ you leave town?” And then he smiled, a rather mischievous little smile, and said, “I don’t know much about sin.” Now, what do you think? Of course, you could come to the conclusion that he thought I should preach on this subject because I do know something about sin…but I would rather you not go there! The truth is, we all know something about sin. It is a concept that has always been central to the Christian faith. In The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg quotes a friendly Buddhist who quips, “You Christians must be very bad people – you are always confessing your sins.” Even though the word “sin” has been a part of our Christian vocabulary for centuries, that does not mean that we all have the same understanding about sin or its relationship to “salvation,” another significant word from our Christian tradition. Both terms are multi-layered in meaning and for many persons these words are no longer in a vocabulary used to talk about faith because they have taken on a lot of baggage that has to do with being fearful, judgmental, and only thinking about God in terms of being responsible for punishment or reward related to our actions. My association with the terms goes back to my first day in college. Feeling a little lonely and in need of community I made my way to the student union. To my surprise, I had no sooner sat down with my Coke when a rather attractive young man asked if he could join me. After a few words about just arriving on campus, and where I was from, he turned to me and asked, “Are you saved?” Frankly, I don’t remember much of the conversation after that! The words sin and salvation are not words that commonly come up in our everyday conversation unless maybe we are commenting on the sermon topic of a TV evangelist. When I was out to dinner the other night with some friends they asked me what I was preaching on this Sunday and when I said I was preaching on sin and salvation there was a definite pause in the conversation. We actually did have an interesting discussion that followed, but we had to get past the initial reaction to those words. Unfortunately, ridding our faith vocabulary of a word like sin without providing other alternatives leaves us with an inability to articulate an important aspect of our human condition. The famous psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, attempted to point out this dilemma several years ago when he wrote a book titled, Whatever Became of Sin? This week, while reflecting on my own understanding of the concept of sin, I remembered a story that the minister of my hometown church used to love to tell about the old guy who never could stay out of trouble. Everyone knew he meant well, but by his choices and actions he was always getting himself in a difficult situation. Whenever he found himself in trouble he would make his way to church and kneel at the altar and say, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Fill me, Lord. Fill me.” He would then leave the church, go out and repeat his bad behavior and in a few days return to once again kneel at the altar and say, “Oh, God, I’m sorry! Fill me, Lord. Fill me.” He repeated this cycle over and over again until one day, the pastor, who had witnessed this pattern many times, stood at the back of the sanctuary. Just as the old man finished with, “Fill me, Lord. Fill me.” The pastor spoke up with, “Don’t you do it, Lord. He leaks!” Well, yes, and don’t we all! As we listened to the words of the Psalmist in the scripture reading this morning, we heard, “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” Implied is a sense of guilt that many of us have known and with which we can identify. Or we hear the words of the apostle Paul in the book of Romans, struggling with his own human condition and he says, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Our scriptures are full of sin and salvation language because the scriptures tell our human story. We are created by God. We make choices that cause us to wander away from God to the point of getting lost. God’s love intervenes to bring us home again. There is this reality of human behavior, the plight of the human condition, that we experience whereby we try to explain what is “not right” or “not good” or “separate from what God would desire of us” and we in the Christian faith have called that sin. It is a reality of life that we experience and we need to be able to talk about it. So, how do we do that? And what words do we use to express our need for salvation, a remedy for what is not right or broken within us, or within the world? The Monday Noon Book group just finished reading The Kite Runner a powerful first novel by Khaled Hosseini. In the opening pages of the book, the main character has a telephone conversation where he hears a message from a friend, a message his whole being wants to believe. His entire life he has struggled with alienation and a lack of peace within himself for actions and choices from his childhood. The message he hears from his friend is a simple one. “There is a way to be good again.” More than any novel I have read in awhile, it is a story about who we are as human beings, struggling to love and be loved, seeking ways to have our wounds healed, our brokenness restored, our closed hearts opened. We must have language that can express who we are and who God is and how God desires to transform us into who we were created to be, in relationship with God. Marcus Borg, in The Heart of Christianity suggests we need to expand our vocabulary to include other understandings of sin other than “disobedience” to God. Living our life in relationship to God is far more than obeying rules so we can be rewarded by going to heaven. Jesus’ ministry and teachings were much more concerned with living in relationship with God and others in this world than giving a formula for an individual reward at the end of this life. Throughout both the Old and New Testaments sin and salvation did not describe only the life of an individual. Sin and salvation spoke of life in community, striving to bring about God’s desire for all of humankind. The most important question is what do you think about sin and salvation? What words do you need to express feelings of being lost, exiled, separated, wounded, blinded, bound, unworthy? And how do you see God responding to these conditions of our humanness as individuals as congregations, as societies? One of my favorite playwrights, Eugene O’Neill, wrote a play called “Great God Brown”. It is a rather depressing play, as many of O’Neill’s plays are, but he had an incredible way of articulating the human predicament. At the end of this drama, the main character says this, “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” I have never agreed with the line that says we are born broken. I think life breaks us. But I do think we live life mending, trying to find healing, and it is a loving God who is present with us, desiring for us, helping us experience wholeness once again. I think the Christian faith is all about responding to that love. As we continue through this season of Lent, we will hear the stories of Jesus, his life, death and resurrection. And, we will try to find the words, the images, the meaning of what that life and death and resurrection can mean for our lives so we can respond, so we can open ourselves to all the ways in which God desires to transform our lives, our world. In a few moments we will celebrate Holy Communion together. Our faith tradition says it is a time for us to come before God and confess our sins, to acknowledge our brokenness before God and to express our desire to live a life patterned after Jesus, our Christ. Our communion liturgy includes a lot of religious language that may or may not have meaning for you. But, thanks be to God, Holy Communion is so much more than the words that attempt to convey its meaning, its truth. It is a gift that we have received through Jesus Christ. It is a “thin place” that Harvey talked about in his sermon last week, a place where we can open ourselves, our hearts, to God’s love, God’s desire for us. As we share together in this sacrament this morning, I invite you to come before God, just as you are, to be before God in silence, or to use whatever words you need to use to say, “Here I am God. Open me to your love.” Let us pray: Gracious God, we thank you for your gift of life. We thank for your gift of love. As we go from this place may that love be understood and shared. Amen |
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