Grace

This is the text of the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, February 17, 2019.

The choir just sang what is easily one of the most recognizable hymns ever composed.  (And the arrangement was by our own Scott DeVeaux.)  “Amazing Grace” was written in the mid-1700s by a preacher named John Newton.  As a young man Newton served as a mate on a slave ship where he, “gained notoriety for being one of the most profane men the captain had ever met. In a culture where sailors commonly used oaths and swore, Newton was admonished several times for not only using the worst words the captain had ever heard, but creating new ones to exceed the limits of verbal debauchery.”  (Wikipedia)

One day the ship was caught in a storm so violent, that everyone was certain the ship would be capsized.  Newton and another mate actually lashed themselves to the ship’s pump so that they could keep working – which they did for hours – without fear of being washed overboard while doing so.  This was a realistic concern.  Newton had watched a fellow crew member swept off the ship from the spot where he, himself, had been standing just a few moments earlier.  When Newton told the captain his plan to tie himself to the pump, he reportedly said, "If this will not do, then Lord have mercy upon us!"  He later said that it was during that storm that he began his turning from the life he’d been living, to the one which saw him ordained a priest in the Church of England and author of “Amazing Grace.”

The turn was a long, slow one, though.  He continued to serve on slaving ships, eventually becoming a captain, and never saw nothing wrong with this abominable, abhorrent trafficking in human beings.  “He admitted that he was a ruthless businessman and [an] unfeeling observer of the Africans he traded.  Slave revolts on board ship were frequent.  Newton mounted guns and muskets on this deck aimed at the slave quarters.”  [Excerpted from the essay about Newton on the website The Abolition Project.]

Many years later, though, after he had left the slave trade and had become a committed Christian, he also became an ardent abolitionist fighting against the he had, himself, both participated in and profited from.  The lyrics of the first verse offer something of a personal testimony to the salvific power of grace.

Now, “grace” is one of those words to which some UUs have an almost allergic reaction.  Perhaps that’s because it’s so intimately connected to two other, for some, problematic words – “sin,” and “God.”  I’m going to set “God” aside for a today, but I do want us to consider the word, “sin.”  And I want to talk about “sin” because I think that the Christian concept of “Grace” can’t really be understood without understanding the concept of “Sin.” 

Ready?

If there’s one thing that many UUs have as much problem with as we do the idea of “God,” it’s “Sin.”  That’s because we know what “Sin” means; we know what being called a “Sinner” means.  It means that we’re a “loathsome insect … ten thousand times as abominable … as the most hateful, venomous serpent.” 

Those phrases come from a sermon delivered by the ever-cheery Johnathan Edwards titled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  Here is perhaps the most famous passage:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.”

I told you he was cheery.  I’ve really got to read a little more:

“You have offended him [and that’s God, again] infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not got to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God provoking his pure eye by your sinful, wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.”

Hearing this kind of rhetoric from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit, it is possible, of course, that some of you think you have done so.  See, we don’t talk about “sin” because we “know” what it means:  It means that God – the ultimate Pater Prosecutorial – is constantly watching for us to make the slightest slip so that he – always “he” –  can come crashing down on us with all the authority of … well … of God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and all Things Visible and Invisible.  It means that we are not only “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” but that we’re, “worthless in the eyes of a judgmental God.”

 

And we “know” that “sin” is not just an existential state, it is also a laundry list of things – both general and very specific – that we shouldn’t do.  (Because it would make us even more loathsome and abhorrent, I guess.) 

I came across a blog post this week with the title, “A List of Sins from the Bible.” 

“Idolatry, greed, covetousness, love of money, gluttony, complaining, not loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, tempting God, high-mindedness, disobedience, witchcraft, lover of self, putting family, friends, job, or anything else above God including food, money, sports, inter [sic], TV, Internet pornography, movies, cars, attachment to riches or material goods and dozens of other things.

”

The author, Jack Wellman, an Evangelical Pastor, was just getting started.  He goes on to list a a great many more things that God is on the look-out for, more than a few of which I am sure we here this morning, “sinners” that we are, are now or have been engaged and entangled with.  It’s worth mentioning, that there are several things on Pastor Wellman’s list which we, good UUs that we are, would consider virtues, things to be proud of.  Yet for most of us even those that we’d aren’t good aren’t things we think should condemn someone to the eternal fires of hell – if we believed in “hell,” of course.

I want to be really clear here – I’m not for a moment suggesting that this is how all Christians understand the concept of “sin.”  Yet there’s no question it is precisely the way that word is often used.  But whenever I hear that word being used that way I want to say, “Hello.  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my fa …”  No.  Wait.  It’s that other great line.  I want to say, “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

There are actually seven different words used in the original Greek of the Christian scriptures which are translated into the single word, “Sin.”   Each has a different meaning, nearly all of which have gotten lost in that unfortunate simplification and which, together, paint an entirely different picture than we have been led to believe.

One is a term from archery that means, “to miss the mark.”  Sinning can be understood, then, simply as missing the mark.  Nothing “abominable” about it at all.  We all do it.  We try.  We try our best.  And sometimes we just don’t quite hit what we were aiming for.  We don’t keep our cool as much as we’d hoped we would have; we forget that we’d meant to give someone the benefit of the doubt; we join in when others are speaking snarkily about someone even though we’d promised ourselves we’d stop doing that.  We miss the mark.  We “sin.”

Some of the other Greek words mean, “diminishing what should have been given full measure,” (or, maybe, not giving it our all).  Then there’s “ignorance when one should have known;” “refusing to hear and heed God's word,” (or, let’s say, ignoring that still, small voice of inner wisdom even when it’s more like shouting at us).  My favorite of them all is, “lying down when one should have stood.” 
Is there anybody in here this morning who has never behaved in ways that could be described in at least one of these ways?  Oh man, I surely have.  I’ve missed the mark; I’ve held back and not given everything I had; I’ve done things that I should have known not to do; and oh how many times I’ve lay down when I should have – and could have – been up and doing something. 

You see … the concept of “sin,” when properly understood at its spiritual core, is not all that much about judgement.  It’s really an observation.  I have two eyes, one nose, and one mouth.  I have a tattoo on my right arm.  I breathe air and can’t breathe under water.  I often miss the mark.  I sometimes do things when I really should have known better.  I don’t always give everything I can.  I sometimes drop down, out of sight, when I really should be present and counted for.  And except for the the tattoo, I’d wager that’s true for just about all of us, true for just about anyone we might ever meet.  That’s really what it means to say that we’re all “sinners.”

Well … what about “grace?”  “Sin” and “Grace” really go hand in hand.  They should, at least, because each is needed to make sense of the other.

I don’t know about you, but I know that I struggle with “Imposterism.”  That’s the psychological condition, sometimes called “Imposter Syndrome,” in which I look at myself and all of my accomplishments and am afraid that I’m really just a fraud one slip from being found out.  A few years back, we brought in a facilitator to lead a weekend retreat as the kick-off to a multi-session program called “Beloved Conversations” that was designed to help groups deepen their ability to talk about how racism plays out in the world, and in our own lives.  At the end of the first night of the retreat all of the participants sat in here – which is actually a really powerful thing to do at night.  We sat in here and went through a process that led us to our deepest, core, most fundamental fear.  There were some really impressive people here that night – if I were to read off a list of them, those who’ve been around a while would recognize a veritable who’s who of the best and brightest.  The room was full of really highly successful people, and just about every one of us said pretty much the same thing when we were asked to share – some version of, “I’m afraid that if people really knew me, knew the real me, that they wouldn’t love or respect me anymore and that I’d be abandoned.”  Just about every … single … person.

I’m not good enough.  I’m just not good enough; I don’t deserve this good fortune.  I’m not good enough; I don’t deserve this success.  I’m not good enough; I don’t deserve to see my dreams come true.  I’m not good enough; I don’t deserve to be happy.

Yes?

The deepest spiritual understanding of the concept of “sin” says, essentially, “Okay.  So what?  Nobody’s good enough!  Everybody is fallible!  Everybody’s flawed!  Everybody fails!  What makes you so special that you think you’re the only one who secretly isn’t a good enough friend, or lover, or parent, or racial justice warrior, or whatever.  Get over yourself!  We’re all in that same boat.” 
The concept of “sin,” no matter how twisted it has become through the years, is simply telling us that we’re right, that we’re not perfect, and that no one else is either.  This means we can stop wasting energy comparing ourselves to somebody else who we’re convinced is somehow better than us.  We can let ourselves off the hook, because nobody’s got it all together.

That’s the lesson of “sin.” 

The lesson of “grace” is that none of that matters, because we live in a world of beauty even with our flaws.  People love us even with our imperfections.  In the theistic context from which these terms come, “grace” means that God loves us not because we’re good enough to deserve it, but because God is good enough to casually and extravagantly exude love like the sun just shines.
“Grace” tells us that we don’t need to earn our place in the Universe.  As the well-known poem “Desiderata” put it, “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

Sin and Grace.  We aren’t perfect, but we don’t need to be perfect to be happy.  We miss the mark, but we don’t need to hit the bullseye every time to be “worthy” (whatever that means).  We don’t always give it our all, don’t always show up, don’t always listen to our own inner wisdom, but we don’t need to do any of that to be loved.  We are sinners, among sinners, but that’s not a judgement, just an observation.  And it’s okay, because grace doesn’t require us to be anything other than what we are. 
Now … isn’t that amazing?

Pax tecum,

RevWik



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