Christians are obsessed with sin. But what do we even mean by the word sin? And what are we trying to do with it?
Episode 15 of the Make Saints podcast: “Sin”
Lent is the season of mercy.
And yet that is probably the last thing we talk about when we talk about Lent. But I can’t even talk about Lent until we talk about mercy. And we can’t talk about mercy until we talk about sin.
So here we go. Let’s talk about Sin.
Sin
I grew up hating the word, sin. It not only felt foreign, but like something I am supposed to reject.
Sin is bad.
People who sin do bad.
Hating sin means we hate all the bad things.
But…
The teachings about love and forgiveness: even to the point of loving your enemies: made the hate irreconcilable.
Of course, at that time I was…10, maybe. Concrete sequential thinking. Loved the binary. All is good or else it is evil.
The way we talked about sin, though…I’ve come to believe it is the first thing that broke the binary for me.
Because I can’t love enemies and hate sin without something else going on in the equation.
I started to think of it like constructing the equation as this: x + y = 0.
Whatever x is, y is its opposite.
This is the flaw of that phrase “hate the sin, love the sinner”: that you are inviting us to love through hate or hate through love which means none of it is truly love.
The trouble with sin
What my younger self was intuiting was a fundamental confusion in our understanding of sin and mercy, redemption, love: the whole Kin-dom Project.
It was a flaw that allows certain arguments to proliferate and develop throughout history that look nothing like love. Like the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials. To the modern murder of abortion doctors. It is found in just war theory and Pax Romana. Killing for peace. Hating for love.
Doing something “out of love” doesn’t always look (or feel) like love. Which is why we have a hard time articulating the difference between an intervention that painfully separates an addict from their drugs, say, and whipping your kids with a belt for disobeying.
And those looking for absolutes, guardrails, or universal understandings have no way of truly dealing with the differences between these many different expressions when there is any pain associated with loving another person.
Hate and love. Sin and mercy. We really struggle to know what we’re supposed to do with any of it.
So let’s now turn toward figuring out how to make sense of it.
What then is sin?
Here are two traditional responses to that question. The first is definitely familiar.
Sin as bad action.
This is the idea that there are specific things we ought not to do. And sin is doing one of the things on the bad list.
And for this to work, there needs to be a concrete list of bad actions to avoid.
The most famous concrete list is the Ten Commandments. And because it even comes to us in Scripture as a kind of list, it is for many the de facto sin list. Break this junk and you deserve to be punished.
It also shows why, after thousands of years, some people of faith want to post this list everywhere. Because it is the only identifiable list!
Defining sin as bad action is itself concrete and definable. Which makes it way easier to enforce. But notice that leap in logic: from a don’t-do list to something we assume we are supposed to enforce. By creating new laws to make the actual laws work.
The slippery slope of defining sin as bad action is that its very concreteness actually makes the system less useful for the management of sin than it does the behavior. This is how we come to believe killing people who kill people will somehow prove that killing people is wrong. Because the laws we make to enforce God’s laws often break God’s law. And worse: we often break God’s law to protect our laws.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Jesus had some things to say about it.
Sin as separation.
The second traditional view of sin defines sin as separation from God. This is far less specific and concrete. It is not predicated on a list of actions that we must use to populate our lives. And it isn’t about rules that we are called to enforce. It is the attempt to understand why sin matters at all. To understand what God is trying to tell us.
Given all the problems with so narrowly defining sin as a bad action from a list, seeing sin as the activity of turning away from God or putting something in the way of our relationship with God attends to the moral side of sin. It helps protect us from sliding down the slippery slope of justifying the rules that conflict with God’s commands.
And it is more in line with the way Jesus describes sin.
But sin as separation isn’t a doctrine that answers all of the questions itself. It, too, is limited. In part because our vision of sin is clouded with the assumption that we must also be responsible for judgment.
We can’t be trusted with judging sin.
Why? Because we’re terrible at it. We are the worst!
Think about it.
How often do people do something wrong? It is constant, isn’t it? If a friend comes to you and tells you that they lied to their boss and you said…just tell them what they want to hear. Or they said something to someone else that was of genuinely little consequence, but it made them feel better. What do we call that? A little white lie. To make a lie sound pure and good?
These are still lies, though. So even as we know that lying is wrong (sin), we then also say these are too small to count as real lies, right?
So notice what we’re doing. We are saying that there are a whole bunch of things in the general category of sin that get to be exceptions to the rule.
In a very real way, we are presupposing that there is sin that doesn’t even count as sin. Notice this isn’t ranking. This is actually a preclearance to sin. When we say to one another tell them what they want to hear, we are not only advising them to sin, we are saying you can sin and it doesn’t matter. In fact, you are doing good by sinning!
This same thinking is behind our views of self-defense and just war. So it isn’t “only” stuff like lying. We are telling each other here are the times when killing is OK before they have themselves done it.
We do this because we don’t want people to feel bad about sins we don’t think are as bad as others. That is where our ranking of sin comes in. But in our collective behavior around these kinds of sins, we are actually telling people they aren’t even sins.
So, let’s say that accounts for a third of the sin out there. The not-so-bads and the justifieds. Now let’s talk about the other end.
The Unforgivables
We often describe a certain collection of acts as particularly heinous and egregious. These are the ones that trigger our disgust. So we can’t help but be revolted by this sin. These are also the kinds of things we easily regulate and write laws around. So extreme violence, murder, and sexual crimes.
When we define these in traditional terms of sin, these tend to be the first things we think about. Which also means that when we talk about forgiveness, we immediately jump to the most difficult example. So as we’re reading about Peter asking Jesus how many times we’re supposed to forgive, we’re probably not thinking about a person who tells us we look good when we’re feeling terrible. We’re thinking of rapists and murderers.
In that context, forgiving once is just as impossible for us as 77 times.
We even have a phrase for it: unforgivable sin. A way we can refuse to forgive. And we’ll even defend killing them, because, we say “they deserve it.”
So let’s pan out now and see what we’re doing at the highest level.
We’re saying there’s a third of sin that God doesn’t need to deal with and a third of sin that God isn’t allowed to deal with. So about a third of the stuff in the middle, like insider trading, I guess: that’s what’s left for God.
I might be making light of it, but we are literally playing God with our vision of sin. But that isn’t even the half of it.
We’re stealing and rejecting God’s greatest power: mercy.
The gospel argues mercy is as powerful as sin.
Mercy, as a concept, is dependent on overcoming any sin. Which means it must be at least as powerful as sin.
I think we have too high a view of sin and too low a view of mercy.
There is no sin too small to be in need of mercy. And there is no sin too great for which mercy isn’t an antidote. Mercy, not sin, is the driver of God’s heart.
Which means that our obsession with sin puts us on the other side of the equation from God. It puts a barrier between us and God: separating us from God.
Our view of sin is…sin.
Thank God for mercy.