Sermon: What is Original Sin

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What is Original Sin?

By Charles Rush

February 15, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 6.9Mb) ]

rhaps, the overarching importance of the doctrine of Original Sin is to remind us that, left to ourselves, we can't get there from here. We are, at root, a confused and lost people. That should not surprise us on a spiritual level, since so many of us seem to be challenged on a mental level.

Take the man who called to scream at his travel agent about his hotel in Orlando because he couldn't see the ocean. The travel agent patiently explained that Orlando was in the middle of the state. Said the man “I looked on the map and Florida is a very thin state.”

Or how about this entry left on a pad for comments at one of our national parks. Said a confused camper “The places where trails do not exist are not well marked.” Let's get him out front to lead us to the promised land.

The IRS has published a few exceptional tax returns they receive. One was from a guy who enclosed his blank tax form, signed at the bottom. Paper clipped to his return was a recent electric bill, a bank statement showing his total assets at $18.47, 15 very soiled one dollar bills, and a receipt from 7-Eleven for six-pack of beer. Apparently, the beer was a deduction for stress over the complexity of the tax code.

Finally, this pathetic soul at the same national park who left their number and address at the Ranger station with the following message, “A small deer came into my camp and stole my bag of pickles. Is there a way I can get reimbursed?” I can see the legal case right now, “The People vs. Bambi.”

Can there be any question but that the vast majority of us are confused and lost?

I take it as significant that the first two stories of humans in the Bible are both accounts of people in disobedience, deception, attempting to avoid responsibility.

The very first independent thought in the Bible, is Adam speaking. God comes into the Garden of Eden and says “Human, where are you?”

And Adam says “I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid, because I am nude”.

God says “Who told you that you are nude?”

Silence… Long silence. One Thanksgiving we were driving down to Grandma's house in the big Ford wagon, all the kids piled in the back. Everybody appears to be sleeping as I drive. My number two son was barely walking. He managed to wriggle himself out of his car seat, slither into the rear of the wagon, where he found a delicious Pecan pie. He couldn't figure out how to eat it, so he just stuck his whole face in it and began reveling. He must have been back there for a very long time because most of the pie was consumed. I see his little head in my rear view mirror. Mom is asleep. His face is completely smeared with Karo syrup, pieces of pecan and pie crust stuck to his forehead, hair all matted.

I said, “Son, what have you been doing?”

He stuck his thumb in his mouth. “Who told you that you are nude?” Silence.

“From the tree about which I commanded you not to eat, have you eaten?” says God(Gen. 1:11).

Then comes the very first independent thought. “The human said: The woman whom you gave to be beside me, she gave me from the tree.” As though, somehow it is really God's fault… it is really God's responsibility.

“Someone left pie.”

God comes to the woman and says “What is this that you have done?”

She says “The snake enticed me.”

Something is dramatically wrong and no one is responsible. This is my life. You can't ever find the portable phone in our house, but no one has ever left it off the cradle. It is a mystery.

Cut to the second story. The second time, we hear humans speaking. God is again functioning as rhetorical conscience. God says “Where is Hevel, your brother?”

Hevel answers “Am I the watcher of my brother?” It is not untrue, just cannily evasive. This is the classic teenagers response.

“My child, do I smell liquor on your breath?”

“I was just over at Justin's house, where he was studying.”

“Yes my child. Do I smell liquor on your breath?”

It is oddly difficult to speak about the important reality of sin these days. Liberal religion and upper middle class cultural sensitivities to not want to a spirituality of guilt. I understand that. You've seen those Tee Shirts that proclaim “Recovering Catholic”. No question that the church participated in a guilt culture. Catholicism probably has a bit more guilt than other branches of Christian tradition because it was formed and flourished in the midst of a guilt culture, from 500-1100. Guilt gets to be part of tradition.

It turns out that guilt is a poor motivator to do anything, spiritually or otherwise. And even if you get them to do something, the situation is entirely complicated with guilt so that there is this divide between our external actions and our internal motivation. No question that many of us have had our sense of self-esteem muted because of religious manipulation of guilt.

My good friend Shai Goldstein, the head of the Anti-Defamation League in New Jersey, is a lawyer. When I first met him, I noticed he was wearing a yalmulke and was eating Kosher but his speech was, shall we say, very colorful. I said to him, “Shai, no offense, but it strikes me as surprising that a man like you would be Orthodox.”

He says to me “Oh Chuck, I'm not even sure I believe in God. I keep kosher… you know… just in case.”

There have been problems with the overemphasis on sin in the past. But the solution is not to throw out the concept altogether. That doesn't make sense of the world either.

Last week in the New York Times Magazine, (September 26, 1999, p. 51) Andrew Sullivan wrote a compelling little piece on “Hate”, if we might focus on but one of the deadly sins. He got to wondering about what John William's King state of mind when he tied James Byrd, Jr. to the back of his truck and dragged him to death.

Mr. King is a hardened man. When he was offered a chance to apologize to Byrd's family in court, he just cussed at them. I'm sure that went over well with the judge. Andrew Sullivan writes “But I am still drawn, again and again, to the flash of ignition, the moment when fear and loathing became hate, the instant of transformation when when King becamse hunter and Byrd became prey.

“What was that? And what was it when Buford Furrow Jr., longtime member of the Aryan Nations, calmly walked up to a Filipino-American mailman he happened to spot, asked him to mail a letter and then shot him at point-blank range? Or when Russell Henderson beat Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, to a pulp, removed his shoes and then, with the help of a friend, tied him to a post, like a dead coyote, to warn off others?

“For all our documentation of these crimes and others, our political and moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to their social meaning, we seen at times to have no better idea now than we ever had of what exactly they were about. About what that moment means when, for some reason or other, one human being asserts absolute, immutable superiority over another. About not the violence but what the violence expresses. About what-exactly- hate is” (p. 51).

Whatever it is, it runs very deep. That is why the bible tells it as a primordial saga, a primeval tale about two brothers, caught in a dispute that doesn't entirely make sense. It runs deep so the story is told in a saga whose truth lies not in the historical sense of truth but in the eternal sense of truth. Why is it that God accepts one gift and not the other? We are not told. Why doesn't Cain takes up his beef with the Almighty, who has spurned his offering? What is about Abel or Abel's gift that makes him more acceptable. We don't know.

The profundity of this ambiguity is that it is really unknown in our lives and not altogether relevant for understanding the situation. When Cicily Thompson's father died, she looked after her mother at the nursing home, living closer to her than her brother or sister. Her mother got dementia and was quite dependent on Cicily. At one point, Cicily hired a lawyer and got her mother to leave her a large part of the family estate. After her mother died, this new will was read, to the outrage of her brother and sister.

There were a number of screaming matches over the phone. People hung up on one another. There were threats issued. Old grievances from the sandbox and playground days came out. When she was finally pressed by both her siblings as to why she did what she did, she said “You got everything you needed from them when they were alive, now it's my turn.” Like that is a legitimate explanation for a 63 year-old-woman.

No, there is this irrational, sub-rational component to these things. We don't know whether someone was really slighted or they just perceived it that way. We can't remember really who got what kind of love and affirmation from significant others in the family. But, whatever happened back then, there are resentments and frustrations that we can carry around for decades, the corrosive effects etching their pattern into the character of our soul.

This runs deep in our species. Jane Goodall, the noted expert on Gorilla's and Chimpanzees, was criticized for publishing some reports on the behavior of adolescent Chimpanzees. Apparently, they are territorial and set up bounds for their clan. The young chimps lead the patrol of the border region. She observed several occasions when the chimps would viciously beat a lone tresspasser on their turf. She also noted that they were quite provocative and were given over to setting up confrontations with rival tribes, crossing into their territory from time to time to incite a group conflict.

People didn't want Goodall to report the straight facts for fear that others would conclude that since aggression and violence are so deeply ingrained in us, they are essentially ineradicable. Since that is the case, their expression is somehow legitimate, or, at least inevitable. Professor Goodall pointed out that compassion and caring are also deeply ingrained in Chimpanzees and Gorilla's, which is true. This aggression runs deep.

I pointed out last week, on a spiritual level, we humans are fundamentally created in the image of God. We are given these spiritual and moral capacities for healing and wholeness. That is one important pole. The other is that we are also sinful.

It is also true that we are born into a broken world and we participate in it before we are ever made conscious of the way that we are already acting. I remember seeing a documentary on tribe of Bushmen in Indonesia that has a deep ethic of retribution for trespasses committed against their clan. If a man from the clan is shot by someone from another clan, the entire clan will mobilize to find the killer and kill him. As they were filming this, they showed the elders of the clan teaching a 3-year-old to engage in retribution. Another 3-year-old had hit him and the adults were telling him. “Hit him back, hit him back twice.” What a great metaphor that is. The world was screwed up before we got here and we participate in its screwed upness, we learned to become screwed up before we are conscious. At root, that is what is meant by Original Sin.

Of course, it is true that we have made enormous strides towards becoming positive. I saw a book published in the last few years that details children's development in the first 5 years, what their issues are, and how you can meet their emotional needs in the parameters of the developmental phase. Man I wish they had published that book when my children were small. All we had was some notes on Piaget from college pyschology. No question that we have made great strides, but we have our foibles too, cultural values that we are teaching our children from the get go that aren't so spiritually healthy. Most of them are detailed in some novel by John Cheever, John Updike, or John Irving. I can only read their stuff about every other year. It is a little too close to home. The bushmen are quite simple, we are complex, but this theme of alienation from our higher selves is developed in both our cultures.

It is important to have an awareness of this if you have any hope of making a realistic assessment of human nature. Sin is part of the equation. Coming back to the specific issue of hate, Andrew Sullivan has a nice line in the middle of his article. He says “It is one of the foolish clichés of our time that prejudice is always rooted in ignorance, and can usually be overcome by familiarity with the objects of our loathing” (p. 55). He goes on to point out a rather long list of contemporary hatreds for whom that is not true: Blacks and whites in the South during Reconstruction, Hutu's and Tutsi's in Rwanda, Kosovars, Serbs, Croats, Jews and Poles, this list is very, very long.

Every time there is a fresh hate crime, the cry goes out across our land that we need more education, particularly of our young people, to educate them about the unacceptability of hate. There is nothing wrong with education of course. It is helpful and necessary but education is not enough.

Ever since, Plato, education has been the cry of those who have no doctrine of sin. When someone asked Plato why people do bad things, he replied that they did so because they did not know what constituted the good life, that if they had truly studied and understood what makes for excellence or goodness (they are the same word in Greek), that they would align their actions accordingly and they would achieve goodness. That is the only thing a rationalist can say, who has no doctrine of sin.

But, we know that is not true. It is not simply a question of education. St. Paul put the matter concisely when he said in Romans, “I do that which I ought not to do, and that which I ought to do, I do not do”. Or, as St. Augustine said in the Confessions “I have become a problem unto myself”. We do not think about this much because self-reflective work is exhausting, but it is still true. Reinhold Niebuhr once said that “sin is the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable.” It would be painfully self-evident to the vast majority of us if we could just have our lives taped for a week, like the movie Truman. We have professed intentions and disciplines and we have these odd actions when no one is around, no one is looking, that simply don't fit into our mission statement. We are a contradiction to ourselves.

Education is not enough because the problem is not rational, the problem is spiritual. Ultimately, in order to be moral people, we have to be redeemed. We have to be spiritually transformed by God. Jesus once said, we have to be born of the Spirit of God, in the gospel of John. We have to be reoriented by God, given character by God. This is the spiritual teaching of the Bible.

And we have been given the spiritual resources to be turned around. That is the great gift of scripture to point us in that direction, that is the great gift of Jesus who modeled for us spiritual wholeness. It is the great gift of the Spirit that moves through each of us, cajoling us back to our higher selves. It is the great gift of the table, where we partake of the Spirit of God together.

I invite you, as the author of Hebrews said, “to lay aside every weight and sin that clings to us so closely”. Come to the table and refresh yourself with the newness of God. My brothers and sisters, come and be made whole.”Amen.