Easter 3B

The Third Sunday of Easter April 19, 2015 Ok, my friends, today we’re going to talk about sin. Now, you may be thinking, “What the heck, Melanie? We just got through with Lent. Can’t we get a little break during Easter from thinking about sin?” Or you may be thinking, “I’ve had enough talk of sin from my previous church to last a lifetime. I wonder if I go to the bathroom now, if she’ll notice if I just don’t come back?” Now look, I don’t really like talking about sin, either. While I have been an Episcopalian all my life, like you, I have also been beaten with the club of perceived sin by some of our fellow Christians here in Central Mississippi. But, just because other Christians have misused the concept of sin, I think we can reclaim it and recast it, because it is an important reality of our lives and the world we live in and especially our relationship with God and other people. This past week, I bought a new book. It’s titled Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations and is compiled by theologian Matthew Fox. I’ve been reading one a day and reflecting on it, and on Wednesday, I read this quote and reflection about sin. It’s a good place for us to start our conversation today. The quote of the day is from German medieval mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg: “From the very beginning, God loved us. The Holy Trinity gave itself in the creation of all things and made us, body and soul, in infinite love. We are fashioned most nobly.” Fox writes of this, “Some religious leaders teach that at the beginning humans were ugly and evil and full of something called ‘original sin.’ Jesus does not teach that. Nor does Mechtild, who reminds us that we were ‘fashioned most nobly’ from the get-go. We were loved from the beginning. And this nobility and lovability includes our body and soul. We were made, not in sin, but in ‘infinite love.’” i This is a good starting place for talking about sin because it reminds us that we (and all of creation) have been created and claimed as “good” by God the creator. But, we all know sin is a reality. Our epistle reading for today talks about it, names it as “lawlessness” and talks about how sin is a characteristic that separates the righteous from the unrighteous. Jesus also talks about it in today’s gospel reading. In Luke’s gospel, this is the first time that the Resurrected Christ has appeared to everyone all at once. It is especially poignant because his presence among those who betrayed and deserted him is the most powerful form of forgiveness there is. He gives them his peace, eats with them, and then tells them to be his witnesses proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sin in his name to all nations. So we are made in infinite love, created good, and yet somewhere along the way, sin becomes a part of the picture. I want to share with you a couple of articles I read this week, because I think they can help us think about sin a little differently. The first is an NPR interview on All Things Considered with NY Times columnist David Brooks about his new book, The Road to Character. Brooks is talking about the lack of fulfillment of life composed of measuring success according to one’s career, and he speaks of the particularities of his own situation, in his own words, being “someone who gets paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am….I have to work harder than most to avoid a life of smug superficiality.” And he says to this, “I do think the turning point in a life toward maturity is looking inside yourself and saying, “What’s the weakness that I have that leads to behavior that I am not proud of?’ and I’d say, for me, it’s evolved. It used to be I just lived life on the surface thinking about politics only or thinking about sort of superficial success only. I think I’m a little better at that, but I still have the core sin of wanting everybody to love me and avoiding conflict. And so I have to look at that every day and figure out: How can I be a little better on that?” ii Now, I have a slightly different take on sin than David Brooks. I think that sin is whatever separates us from God and from each other, and I also believe that no matter how hard we try, we are not able to root sin out of ourselves. That is work that is only done by God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. We can certainly be more open to that work happening in our lives, by asking for it to be done, and paying attention to our own motives. That’s where Brooks’ suggestion of looking at what core weaknesses we have and how that leads to behavior (and maybe motivations) that separate us from God and from each other. The second thing I read was a blog post by Quaker writer and theologian Parker Palmer. He writes, in a blog post titled Heartbreak, Violence, and Hope for New Life, about how heartbreak and suffering are a part of human life. He writes, “What can we do with our pain? How might we hold it and work with it? How do we turn the power of suffering toward new life? The way we answer those questions is critical because violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.[emphasis is his]” He continues, “Sometimes we try to numb the pain of suffering in ways that dishonor our souls. We turn to noise and frenzy, nonstop work, or substance abuse as anesthetics that only deepen our suffering. Sometimes we visit violence upon others, as if causing them pain would mitigate our own. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and contempt for the poor are among the cruel outcomes of this demented strategy.”iii He’s talking about sin and the ways that our avoidance of our own suffering lead us to behaviors that create a rift between us and God and between us and our neighbors. What do you think? Can you ask yourself David Brooks’ question today: What’s the weakness that I have that leads to behavior that I am not proud of? Can you ask yourself that every day, and then offer it to God in prayer, asking God to forgive it and transform it? “From the very beginning, God loved us. The Holy Trinity gave itself in the creation of all things and made us, body and soul, in infinite love. We are fashioned most nobly.”i i. Fox, Matthew. Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations. New World Library: Novato, 9. ii. http://www.npr.org/2015/04/13/399391894/take-it-from-david-brooks-career-success-doesnt-make-you-happy iii. http://www.onbeing.org/blog/heartbreak-violence-and-hope-for-new-life/7476