I once saw an old cartoon of a pastor preaching a fire-and-brimstone sermon. He yells, “Congregation! We have to stop our lying and cheating!”
The church shouts, “Amen!”
“And we have to stop all our drinking and gambling!”
“Yes!” shouts the church!
“And we have to give up our slothfulness with our TV’s and VCRS!”
The church is silent.
A thought bubble appears over the preacher who thinks, “Must have touched a nerve there.”

I don’t talk a whole lot about sin. There are a few reasons for this, but there’s only one reason why. I don’t do a whole lot of fire-and-brimstone preaching. There are a few reasons for this, but I think there’s only one reason why. I don’t really call us out on our sinful behavior and actions privately and mainly stick to the corporate. There are a few reasons for this, but it all rests on one big reason.

One of my smaller reasons is that I don’t think guilt and shame are the way to go. So many churches try to control through guilt and shame. When folks find out I’m a pastor, they often tell me what they’re guilty about. “I should go to church more.” “I should do this or that.” These kind, well-meaning folk end up “should’n” all over me. At this church, we don’t “should” on each other.

The church universal seems to be known for guilt and shame. At the Thursday Dungeons & Dragons Library game I lead with middle schoolers, two of the party were severely injured in the game. The closest place to go was our church, which is a setting in the campaign. Our own Elijah Walker’s character lives in the church, and he’s the leader of the party. And the kids didn’t want to go into the church. This wasn’t actually going to the church in real life, this was pretend. THEY WOULDN’T GO INTO A PRETEND CHURCH! Why? The guilt. The shame. Most of these kids are LGBTQ+ and they don’t go to church because of the judgment. They wouldn’t even go into a pretend church.
That’s a reason, but it’s not the main reason.

Another reason is that I might get the sin wrong, which would be a sin. My beloved Father Bird, the priest of my youth once stated that divorced women are going to hell. No statement about divorced men. No further discussion. He treated it as a foregone conclusion, like everyone knew this and it was a fact. He got it wrong. There are lots of reasons to get divorced. Many churches treat divorce like it’s a sin across the board, no matter what. And Jesus did teach against getting divorced. Yet put in context, Jesus reminds the Pharisees of the ideal in marriage, and he explains that divorcing one person in order to marry another person is immoral and adulterous. Jesus is talking about Herod’s divorce and marriage to his brother’s ex-wife Herodias, which John the Baptist also spoke out against and was beheaded.

I don’t want to inflict the same harm that Father Bird did. If I were to say that any divorce is a sin, that would be wrong and harmful. It would also live in the realm of idealism and not reality where all sorts of things can affect a marriage, and sometimes the best thing a couple can do is divorce and try to start anew. I try to be careful about what I call a sin because if I cause harm, that’d be a sin and we’d all be worse off for it. That’s a reason, but not the main reason.

I don’t like the individualistic nature of talking about sin. Preachers often stop at the individual level and engage in something called therapeutic moralistic deism. Therapuetic moralistic deism or TMD was defined by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. This is the belief that God is in heaven, God wants people to be good and happy and have positive self-esteem, and believe in Jesus so you can go to heaven. That’s it. A “Good” person then is often not biblically-defined but defined by what a culture considers “good.” God is predictable and wants you to shop at Approved Christian stores and engage in Approved Christian activities and not question where the list of Approved and Branded Christian stores and activities comes from. In fact, questions are frowned upon. Answers are the stock and trade. Thousands and thousands of people apparently love being told what to believe and how to behave.

I have no interest in preaching that way. I don’t think life works like that, and I don’t believe Jesus taught like that. Jesus showed up and answered questions with questions. Or he’d tell really bizarre stories. “What’s the kingdom of heaven like?” And Jesus said, “It’s like a woman who lost a coin and then found it. Or it’s like a sheep who runs from the 99 and the shepherd leaves the flock and finds the one.” The response to such stories are, “WHAT?!”
God in Christ didn’t show up and tell us about the iPhone, or to stop sinning like that and give us a list. Instead, Jesus makes the rules harder, questions whom the religious exclude, and tells crazy stories. I think the poet Rilke summed it up best when he said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

If your personal faith or denomination can’t handle questions, run. Leave. Get away from there. Jesus deals in questions so that you can live into the answer.

TMD only deals with the personal. It never talks about the corporate. The prophets talk about the corporate more often than the individual. They call out the collective sin of Israel. Even Jesus calls out the corporate, calling the religious “White washed tombs.” He calls out the entire city of Jerusalem when he states, “Jerusalem, oh Jerusalem! you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” TMD dismisses any corporate responsibility, which shows its foundations aren’t biblical, but firmly Western in our individualistic culture. Our culture is not the culture that wrote and produced the bible. It’s not the language of the prophets. The idea of an individual disconnected from a community or context would be foreign to Jesus, who lived in a culture which primarily focused on the corporate life.

The tension of how to live an ethical individual and corporate life is summed up in the parable about the village by a river. Every day, the people of the village would pull people from the river. They fell in upstream and had to be saved. While it’s good to focus on saving the individuals who fell into the river, eventually one might want to go upstream and see what’s causing folks to fall in the river in the first place. We can ask how we can help our Garfield families, and we will also have to address the social and political implications of generational poverty and how to address it.
That’s yet another reason but it’s not the real reason. The real reason is that sin isn’t the final word. Sin is the sandbox we play in. Sin is what we know. Sin is what we’re used to and what we’re used to doing. But it’s not the final word.

Sin, at least in my mind, is a break in a relationship. Sin is a break in your relationship between you and your neighbor, between you and God, and you and the ethics and morals you set for yourself. When you get in an argument with someone else and you are bitter and you hold onto a grudge, that’s a sin. When you lie, cheat, and steal and leave a lot of hurting people in your wake, that’s contrary to what God desires for us. When we spend more on weapons of death, more than the next 16 countries combined, while we gut social programs and do nothing to curb climate change, and we have an economic system where the average CEO pay is 271 times the annual average pay of the typical American worker; those are corporate sins against God and our neighbors. We are leaving the next generation a crippling national debt, the least we can do is make sure the seas aren’t rising and our children aren’t drowning in plastic while they have to figure out how to pay off the trillions we owe.

Sin isn’t the final word. Grace is. Forgiveness is. Happy are those (see the corporate nature of this psalm) whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sin is covered. Rejoice, o righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart! We talk more about sin because that’s the sandbox we’re used to. On the other hand, we don’t understand grace at all. The mystery of grace is confounding. So confounding that we preachers sin by focusing on sin because it’s what we know.

I have no idea how grace works. I have faith that it does. I know that when I know better, I try to do better. I try to question my motives, my ethics, my actions and make sure I’m not causing more harm than good. And when I find I’m not living my fullest, I rest in the grace of God and others and hope I can do better. Hope I can repent, which means less “Sinner change your cheating ways” and more “To think differently after.” Repent means to discover how you’re off and live into how you want to live. To think differently.

I don’t know what issue faces you. I don’t know what change you need to make in your life. I’m coming up on two years here as your pastor, and I’m just getting a vision of what we need to change for our corporate life. We can think differently on how and who we welcome, love, and serve. We can take a look at those values we say we hold, and think differently about them. We can ask for grace for those whom we didn’t show our full welcome and love, or maybe didn’t fully serve.

Don’t settle for the same sandbox of sin you’re used to. Enter into the mystery of grace. You’ll find more joy there than in the sandbox of sin. “Live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” What joy we shall have when we arrive on that distant day. Amen.

Works Cited

TMD comes from Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005)

Facts about CEO pay:  Economic Policy Institute: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/heres-how-much-ceo-pay-has-increased-compared-to-yours-over-the-years.html

The definition of sin comes from the theologian Paul Tillich, but I can’t recall which book or paper.

The facts about climate change come from our world and the fact we don’t have as many glaciers as we used to. Live into those questions and do your research.