"Sin?"
Isa. 6:1-8(9-13); Ps. 138; 1 Cor. 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
Dr. George R. Sinclair, Jr. Pastor
February 7, 2010
With Mardi Gras a week away, I thought it would be good to talk about sin; to get us ready, get us prepared. So I did some research on sin. I read Eddie Curran’s new book, The Governor of Goat Hill.
Theologian is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of Eddie Curran. And in fact, 82 pages into his book, Eddie himself disclaims any philosophical interest. Still, he makes a keen theological observation, one about sin. Sin, according to Eddie, is like garbage. And confessionals, like landfills, are where our sins get buried.
Eddie does a great job describing landfills. He seems to know a great deal about how they work, the politics behind them, the money they create, environmental problems and so forth.
When I was in high school, I learned something about landfills. I worked for a cotton mill and one of my jobs was collecting construction debris. I’ll never know why they didn’t just back up a dump truck when they were working on a project and throw the scraps in, but they didn’t. Instead, the boards and shingles or bricks were thrown on the ground, and then we’d come along and pick them up. I didn’t like picking up junk, but I did enjoy driving to the dump because it gave us a break.
Have you ever been to a landfill—I mean in July-August? There is no other smell quite like it—kind of sweetly sick and rotten all at once. And you can see some nasty stuff. Forty years ago dumps weren’t regulated like they are today—so you had household garbage mixed in with construction debris and hazardous waste. Back in the day, most counties had one landfill and that’s where we went, one site for everything.
That’s all changed now, more regulation and better for the environment. Still, a landfill is a landfill. It’s where everything we don’t want ends up. As Eddie observes, it’s where our milk cartons go, the molded cheese from the back of our refrigerators, poo-filled diapers—and there’s a bunch of those. The average child will run through (no pun intended) up to 10,000 disposables before potty training. Nationally, that comes to 18 billion poo-filled diapers a year or 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp. And those 10 billion diapers cost around $350 million—not to buy, but to bury—and the thing is they’ll be around here 300 years from now. Which brings up another interesting comparison between garbage and sin: sin, like garbage, sticks around. It doesn’t go away easily or quickly. What’s more, sin infiltrates other things. Sin doesn’t just muck up my life; it mucks up the life of others, think leachate, you know the ooze created by landfills.
Eddie has a wonderful image for leachate—morning coffee. You’ve got to hand it to Eddie. You begin with clean water, coffee grounds; you add hot water, a little compression, gravity and soon enough you’ve got a “dark noxious liquid.” That’s leachate which is why landfills are lined with thick plastic—kind of like a diaper for the diapers, only we hope these never leak. Likewise, sin leaches into everything we do, mucking up not just our lives but those around us.
I’ve been reading Eddie’s book now for about a week—it takes awhile, 631 pages not counting end notes. While Eddie’s no theologian he sure enough gets it right about sin—sin sticks around and infiltrates everything and everybody, not just governors and their beneficiaries, cronies, allies, and opponents, but also reporters, editors, publishers, and people who read the news, which means all of us. Sin, like garbage, is universal.
A few years ago, reformed theologian Neil Plantinga published a book titled, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be. Neil’s book was about sin. I think maybe Neil and Eddie should collaborate and write a book about how or where our garbage or sin ends up. Every life piles up a lot of both.
I know this was not Eddie’s point but we’d all like a world without landfills. Think about what the world would be like without empty milk cartons and poo-filled diapers. Can you imagine such a world? Babies make poo and milk cartons get emptied. You can’t have babies or milk without consequence. Where do you put that stuff? Well, we get rid of it. We throw it away. What are you going to do with empty milk cartons, much less 10 billion dirty diapers? I know, recycle and use cloth, but even then you’ve got waste. There is always waste and some of it is not only noxious but toxic. Things are not the way they’re supposed to be. There’s not supposed to be any waste, we can imagine a world like that, but wherever two or three gather, wherever there is one, there is waste.
Paul expressed our predicament in these words: “I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
Paul didn’t mince words—sin was not only something he did, sin was the condition that defined his life, call it inevitability. Try as we might, we cannot live garbage free lives. Not that we can’t imagine a garbage free world: we can. We can “will what is right.” We know things are not the way they are supposed to be, only, we can’t pull it off. There is always waste, there is always garbage no matter what we do.
I just made a crib for my grandson. I gave it to his parents yesterday. It’s a nice crib and I expect it will last several lifetimes. I hope it will last several lifetimes so that one day maybe a great-great-grandchild will sleep in it and his parents will say, “My, what a fine crib grandpa made. I slept in it as a child and my father before me.” That would be nice. It’s a nice crib and it will be around for a while and it will serve a useful purpose and bring some joy. It’s a nice crib, but I also saw what came out of my shop to make that crib. I saw the waste.
I’m pretty stingy when it comes to sawing up mahogany and take measures, if not pride, to use it efficiently. Ok, I’m cheap! But even with my best efforts, I waste lumber. In fact, I made one part for the crib that had to be trashed. I made it the wrong size and there’s no stretching lumber, so it had to be tossed. A perfectly good piece of mahogany ended up in the scrap box, along with bits and pieces of cutoffs and odd width leftovers that were good for nothing.
Okay, so life’s not perfect. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Milk gets spilled. It’s not pretty watching sausage made. We all know life’s not perfect so no need in crying or not for long. But sometimes things happen that are not so easy to clean up or get over. Sometimes more than eggs get broken. We get broken and the people we love get broken. We not only produce waste, lives get wasted. What do you do with the broken fragments, life’s leftovers? Where do you put the waste? Even the best lived life leaves broken pieces; even the best produces leachate. We can image a world where things are not supposed to be this way. We can imagine we will never say an unkind word or be the recipient of one, but unkind words are spoken.
We can imagine a world where people are judged not by the “color of their skin but the content of their character” as King dreamed, but that world is yet to exist. We can imagine a world where children don’t go to bed hungry or one where children are happy and safe. In the real world, which is the only world we have, we know that’s not true. Some children are not safe. They get abused. Likewise, people are judged by the color of their skin, unkind words are spoken. There is waste. There is garbage. Things are not the way they are supposed to be.
Where do we put that stuff? What do we do with the garbage? Do we dig a hole and bury it? We can dig some very deep holes and cover them up. We’re good at hiding, at pretending. But even then, even when we dig very clever holes, lined with impenetrable plastic, stuff oozes out, stuff leaks. Even when I take responsibility and I own my own stuff, even then my garbage poisons other people.
We all write checks our bodies cannot cash. Of course the illusion is we will somehow manage to be the exception—our waste won’t stink or at least not as bad as some others, or we’ve buried ours so well that it won’t come out, it won’t leach. We labor with false notions of accountability. We’ve cleverly changed sin to errors in judgment, indiscretions, mistakes and we all make mistakes; nobody’s perfect and surely God grades on a curve? Where did this untruth come from? What happened to sin and repentance? What happened to God’s righteousness and our need for mercy? Just this. God has become very small. To quote pop singer Joan Osborne, God has become “a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home.”
The theological note sounded by this Louisville song writer reflects a widely held belief: God is not holy. God is not Other. God is not righteous. God is not just or demanding. God is “a slob like one of us . . . a stranger on the bus trying to find his way home.”
The Bible teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. In our dumb-downed flattened world, fear of the Lord is written off as childish superstition, more likely to be parodied than admonished. What’s to fear? After all, isn’t god like George Burns in O God or Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty? God is not the Burning Bush, Cloud Rider whose glory fills the earth but rather a quivering mass of availability anxious to please always needy and well-deserving children.
What happened to the God Isaiah saw, the One in the Temple—“high and lofty,” the God before whom the prophet was “lost?” Has that God retired? What happened to the God Peter met in his fishing boat: “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinner?” Has God changed? Is God’s wrath no longer revealed against ungodliness? Have we gotten over that god, laying that deity to rest with the Tooth Fairy and other childish ambitions?
Maybe Hollywood’s myth makers and pop singers are right—maybe God is no longer holy, no longer righteous, wrathful, Other, but a “slob like one of us trying to find his way home.” After all, aren’t we supposed to love God rather than fear him? Doesn’t the Bible teach that perfect love drives out fear? Isn’t God a kind, heavenly father, a welcoming mother and not the fire-breathing, hell-threatening deity we’ve worked so hard to rid ourselves of? Isn’t God a non-judgmental, sweater-wearing father who shakes his head at little boys and girls being little boys and girls—those darn kids?
So, which image is right? Do we get to choose? After all, isn’t God a projection of our fondest hopes and deepest longings? Shouldn’t we just choose the Father who knows best?
The Bible tells a rather different story. We don’t get to choose. In fact, choosing is our greatest temptation. We don’t get to make up our favorite image of God and overlay it with gold. Not that we don’t try. But God breaks all of our puny efforts to mold him in our image. God shatters our idols and only this God can help. We don’t need a “slob just like the rest of us,” we need a Holy, Righteous Redeemer. And we need a Holy, Righteous Redeemer because we’ve got a deep landfill full of toxic, noxious stuff that no amount of dirt or plastic can hide.
“Christ died for our sins.” A death like that doesn’t demand an apology, but repentance. “Christ died for our sins.” A death like that doesn’t demand trivial tips of our hat, but a cross taken up.
“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” Amen.