ENTERING THE DAYS OF AWE
Religious Liberals & the Problems of Sin

5 October 2003
James Ishmael Ford

Today in the spirit of Yom Kippur I want to reflect on sin. Let’s take a little time to explore some facets of the idea and, if you will, practices of sin. Let’s look at original sin, the seven deadly sins, with some closer attention to pride. And then with all that in mind, take a glimpse at atonement and what it might mean for us as contemporary Unitarian Universalists.

Considering the subjects we’re addressing, perhaps it would be best to start off with a joke. The pope dies. St. Peter greets him, shows him the palace that has been assigned, and then takes him on a tour of the neighborhood. While everyone in the area mostly saints of various sorts who have overcome various sins all have very nice palaces there is one especially spectacular building, on ten acres, and on top of a large hill at the center of the grounds with a commanding view of half of heaven. The building itself was easily twice the size of the pope’s own palace.

“Who’s there,” asked the pope, half expecting to learn it was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. However St Peter replied, “The Unitarian minister.” The pope was astonished. “Why?” he asked incredulously. “Well,” said St Peter. “She’s the only Unitarian minister we have. So we want to treat her nicely.”

If heaven is about sin and overcoming sin, then there are likely to be few Unitarian Universalists there. After all, for the most part we don’t acknowledge the reality of sin. I’m sure nearly everyone in this room knows that famous assertion of Thomas Starr King, the mid-nineteenth century Universalist minister who served the Unitarian church in San Francisco and was a central leader of the anti-slavery moment in California. When asked the differences among Universalists and Unitarians, Starr King replied, “The Universalists believe God is too good to damn humanity. While the Unitarians know they’re too good to be damned.”

But. Then we look around at the world, and perhaps we’re caught with that uncomfortable feeling things are little more complicated. While there are good reasons for rejecting the idea of an objective evil in the world, some malign personality directing the ills around us and in our own hearts, while we can take umbrage with the idea of original sin, of the horrendous idea we are born condemned, we’re still confronted on a daily basis with small and great evils, indeed evil sometimes great enough to threaten to engulf the world. So, what is this?

Sin in religion is generally understood as an unethical act. It also implies disobedience to God. As such religions which do not appeal to divine intervention at their foundation such our own modern Unitarian Universalism often find the term problematic. But, then, there are all the problems of the ills of the world, a fact impossible to ignore. So, I think it’s worth revisiting sin and seeing if there isn’t some guidance for us within this ancient idea.

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam sin is usually considered a transgression against the will of God. In Hinduism and Buddhism sin is usually seen as those intentions and actions that have negative consequences for the individual or society. What is common to the religions of the world is there are things we do or refrain from doing that have terrible consequences for ourselves and others. And those actions or holding back from actions are named sin.

While Judaism has no concept of original sin, it does acknowledge no person is perfect, and so, I should think obviously, all of us have sinned any number of times. There appear to be three basic kinds of sin in Judaism, the first is an intentional act in defiance of God, a second includes those sins of lust or unfettered emotion committed knowingly but without any intention of defying the divine will, and third are those things we do unknowingly that cause hurt.

Yom Kippur provides the ritual opportunity for people to reflect on these things and to take steps to make right. In Islam sin is anything that harm’s God’s creation or defies the will of God. Christian understandings of sin are similar to both of these, but further complicated by that idea of original sin, that somehow in our very birth we are sinful.

Most of us in the liberal religious camp are particularly put off by the idea of original sin. But as unpleasant as it is, and freely acknowledging how it has been used as a whip against people over the ages, nonetheless it contains a seed of truth. And I think we should parse that out.

So, during the Second World War my father was a combat medic. He was particularly close to his platoon’s lieutenant. During a battle somewhere in Italy the lieutenant was shot in the face and fell to the ground, dying. My father crawled through the gunfire to try and help. But there was nothing to do; it was obvious the lieutenant would die, and soon. However, with what little mouth he had left the lieutenant begged my father to shoot him to end it, quickly. Weeping for the terror of it all, my father fled, leaving his friend to die alone.

After the war ended my father gradually slipped under the deep seas of alcoholism, a rip tide which would eventually drown him. There were many times after a bout of particularly heavy drinking he would begin to tell this story. I heard the story so many times. So many times that that battle, and that dying, and that fleeing have become my own memory. The sins of the fathers visited upon their children, even to the third and fourth generation. A passage from the scriptures that I hate, but which, unfortunately, I understand.

The problem many of us, particularly within our liberal religious tradition, have with the idea of original sin, has to do with personal responsibility. We, quite correctly, see ourselves as responsible for ourselves. And true enough. But, and there is a rather large “but” in all this. But, the world is in fact more complicated than our sense of self-identity and desire for autonomy might lead us to think.

I believe one of the great gifts we receive from our contemporary Unitarian Universalist theological image of the interdependent web of existence is how it points to our essential connectedness. We are a mix of many things. And we are the inheritors of many things. So, I may not like all of it. There may even be a sense of injustice about it sometimes, but unjust or not, I carry that memory of my father’s fear and running away as my memory, as my history, in some sense as my sin.

The good news is that’s not the whole of who I am. All the good of my encounters, also whether earned by me or not, also shape me; some vastly more important than that sad memory of a distant battle field. The whole which shapes me includes real hurt from beyond my memory, and ancient hope birthing constantly, and just as real. The tiny seed of truth in the idea of original sin is that we inherit things. Unfortunately that tiny truth has brought forth a larger misunderstanding which also has obscured our more important confrontation with actual sins.

There are the things we actually do, or that we refrain from doing which cause harm. And here we get to the meat of sin, to the real subject at hand, and what Yom Kippur is about. So what is sin? Frankly I’m not particularly taken with the classical understanding of sin as “missing the mark,” as in an arrow shot and missing its target. I find that a slippery concept which tends to let us off the hook a bit too easily.

Rather I see sin as actions or refraining from actions, as moments of discord, lack of harmony, unbalance. At these moments we act or refrain from acting based upon a false idea of who we are and how we fit into the cosmos. Sin is a turning away from our deeper knowing. Real actual sins, I find, birth in our forgetting the connections, forgetting the web of relationships and intimacy, making us strangers in our own homes. Sin is less about some idea of the will of God and more about simple, ordinary relationships, and whether we remember we really are all family or really think we’re only in it for ourselves.

Perhaps most of us in this room are familiar with that interesting list called the Seven Deadly Sins. They include pride, avarice, envy, wrath or a sustained anger, lust, gluttony and sloth. They are a post-scriptural list, which were in fact the culmination of various lists compiled by Catholic thinkers over the ages.

I find it interesting these earlier lists were hierarchical, moving from lesser to greater, or rather from lesser to worse. It was Protestant thinkers who introduced the idea that one sin was as great as another. And so I remember my grandmother, our family’s spiritual guide, and a ferocious protestant teaching how telling a lie was just as great a sin before God as murder.

Today I don’t believe that. There are differences and distinctions that need to be made. And there are worse things than others. And there is, like with the older lists, a hierarchy of ill. There are, for instance, root sins, sins that feed out into others, leading to a cascade of evils, of hurt that can spread from individual to individual, and out into our communities. For instance, pride. And, by the bye, I suggest the greatest of sins for us as religious liberals may well be this one: pride.

I spent a lot of time searching for a humorous illustration of spiritual pride. And I find it very interesting that there are very few jokes on the subject. There is one good one, however. Unfortunately I’ve already told it. Fortunately it is one used in various versions and the one I told originally had Episcopalian players. This one, told by the psychiatrist and spiritual writer Barry Magid takes place in a synagogue and as such is perhaps most appropriate for a reflection inspired by Yom Kippur.

“Once, during the High Holy Day services, the rabbi suddenly was possessed by a wave of mystical rapture, and threw himself onto the ground before the Ark and proclaimed, "Lord, I'm Nothing!" Seeing the rabbi in such a state, profoundly moved the cantor to have the same experience and he too, threw himself down before the Ark, proclaiming, ‘Lord, I'm Nothing!’ Then, way in the back of the synagogue, the janitor, threw himself to the ground, and he too shouted, ‘Lord, "I'm Nothing.’ Whereupon, the rabbi turned to the cantor and whispered, "Look who thinks he's Nothing."

For many of us pride is probably the greatest of sins. Indeed, pride might well be the root sin for many of us. I think pride makes us think somehow we’re better than others, and that profoundly separates us from one another. It is the sense of the economically successful that we earned it all and that those who have less are poor because they didn’t work hard enough. Pride is not remembering the connections, and the mysterious ways things fall together, and how we actually earn very little of what we have.

Georg Buchner, the old German playwright and revolutionary once observed, “The sin is in our thoughts.” I believe this is true. So, a first step in addressing the sin of pride might be acknowledging its possibility. Second, might be a little unraveling of where pride is good and where pride is not. So, there is a sense of pride in a job well done. That’s not the pride I’m speaking of. Here we are acknowledging pride as a sense of being better than.

In the spirit of Yom Kippur here’s a list of questions each of us may ask ourselves about pride. (I should also acknowledge I culled it from a Fundamentalist Christian website. To be authentic to our path, we have to be willing to take wisdom where we find it.) So, the checklist:
Do you consider yourself better than others?
Do you have trouble admitting it when it’s obvious you are wrong?
Do you almost always consider yourself right?
Do you get angry when someone doesn’t agree with you?
Do you look down on others on the basis of creed, education, position, or appearance?
Do you habitually interrupt people in conversations to give your own comments?
Do you enjoy being the life and center of attention at a party?
Do you enjoy talking about yourself in front of others?
Do you try to empress others with your possessions, appearance, professional ability, athletic ability or humor?
Do you often criticize others?

If you recognize any of these things as characteristic of you, perhaps you want to deal with it in this time of Yom Kippur, in this ancient moment given to us by the ancestors to reflect, to repent, and to renew. This is the way of atonement. Now the steps of atonement are simple, but not easy. First confess. That means acknowledging what we have done and refrained from doing that have caused harm, that have separated us from each other and the great world. Second, repent. Decide to reform, to renew, to seek atonement, at-one-ment. By the bye, I looked it up, atonement really means at-one-ment, recovering from our false sense of separation, remembering our connections within the web.

Robert Hardies, senior minister at All Soul’s UU church in Washington D.C., who says he hopes there is the possibility of that palace in heaven reserved for a UU minister, speaks of all this, of sin original and otherwise, of the various ways of engagement, of how we, you and I might step up to the plate and take personal responsibility, and what it can mean, should we choose to do so, ends his reflections with an observation and a prayer.

“The good news is that, unlike the lonely soul on Judgment Day…, we do not have to do this alone. We can call on our friends, and loved ones and church for help, and together we can say the (great prayer):

“We ask for forgiveness. We ask for the gift of remembering. We ask for the strength to change. May forgiveness and remembering and strength be yours and mine, now and always.” On this day of awe, on this day remembering our failures, as well as our possibilities, may this be our common prayer.

Amen.