Lent 1A, March 1, 2020. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Romans 5:12-21. As sin came into the world through one man.
Matthew 4:1-11. And suddenly angels came and waited on him.
O God of Forgiveness, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
The season of Lent has begun in the Church, a period of 40 days, not including Sundays, set aside for Christians to examine our personal, individual estrangement from the love and mercy of the Holy One, and to return to right relationship with one another. Although each person is doing their own Lenten practice, as a congregation we come together for mutual support and encouragement as we go through a this period of intensified self-examination with a call to increased generosity in almsgiving, praying, fasting, and studying the Bible.
Knowing that the interfaith dialogue group, Sisters in Spirit [1] would be here for our worship service today, I was thinking about similar kinds of practices in Judaism and Islam. The eight Days of Awe focus on repairing relationships with one another and with God. The lunar month of Ramadan is for reflection, generosity and sacrifice, self-control, prayer and devotion. I wonder if perhaps Christians get a longer period because we need extra help and extra time.
It’s customary to begin our season of Lent with focus on sin. Our opening prayer on the first Sunday in Lent is the Great Litany, a recitation of a comprehensive list of what can separate us from fully participating in the Love of God. It’s an expansion of Paul’s rhetorical question in his letter to the Jesus followers in Rome: Will hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword separate us from the Love of God? “No,” Paul says, “not death nor life nor angels nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation is able to keep God’s Love from seeking us out, because that Love has already been poured into our hearts through the breath or spirit of God.”
But in the passage we read today in Paul’s letter to the Romans, is a line that always trips me up. It became the prooftext for the doctrine of original sin. “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned” The Apostle Paul wrote these words as a personal letter, as a message to a troubled community, not as a systematic theology. It would be bad enough that the whole doctrine of original sin relies on this one verse, but wait, there’s more. Biblical translator, David Bentley Hart, notes that last part, “because all have sinned,” was “notoriously defective [in its] rendering in the Latin Vulgate [and] constitutes one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history.” The mistranslation led Augustine to conclude that Adam’s casual disregard of the will of God, Adam’s abdication of moral responsibility, somehow changed his DNA and the DNA of all people after him. (Of course Augustine didn’t know anything about DNA, but his argument was that sinfulness was seminally transmitted to all humans as an inherited condition.) About four hundred years after Paul wrote his letter, Augustine engaged in a six-year-long argument about this with another theologian, a British monk, named Pelagius.
By the way, Judaism and Islam do not have doctrines of “original sin.” The Jewish tradition in Paul’s time was that each person becomes their own Adam by choice and not by inheritance. Paul knew that social context puts enormous pressure on people to behave unkindly or unlovingly, but he would not have recognized the concept of “original sin,” as it was later developed by Augustine and then Martin Luther. Islam doesn’t have a concept of original sin either: the first humans made a mistake and asked for forgiveness and God showed them mercy.
Back to Pelagius and Augustine. Augustine believed that because of the sexual transmission of original sin, all human beings were, as he wrote, “a lump of sin,” and were constitutionally incapable of leading a sinless life. Pelagius taught that humanity did have the capacity to live a sinless life with God’s help. Why, he wondered, would a righteous God create sinners and then condemn them for sinning? Leviticus teaches “you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.” Pelagius balked at the idea that infant baptism was needed for the salvation of a child (although he was fine with infant baptism as an initiation ceremony into the Christian family). According to Pauline scholar Calvin Roetzel, Pelagius “saw the Christian life as a cooperative affair: one half of the responsibility belongs to God, who gives people the ability to do right; the other half of the responsibility belongs to individuals, who exercise that ability.”
The Synod of Carthage in 418 condemned Pelagius and he disappeared from the scene. The doctrine of original sin took a fierce grip on Western Christianity, that grew even stronger with Luther’s teaching that humans were born depraved and that faith in the grace of God was everything. That grip didn’t begin to loosen until The Enlightenment when Western Christian confidence in human progress and capacity grew exponentially, and the perceived power of the Holy One began to wane. Yet, even now, the concept of original sin is something most parents considering baptism for their children want to talk with me about. What I tell them is my conviction that children are not born as sinful creatures who require a purification to get right with God. I stand with the condemned Pelagius on this one.
Still, we must not fail to fully appreciate either the power or the mystery of human sin. In the Episcopal Church, we understand that sin is more an issue of contagion than heredity. We are born into societies where sins are already present: sins of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, rapacious materialism, and other forms of disregard for the goodness of God’s creation. These are collective moral failings. We are socialized into structural and institutional sin that distorts our relationship with God, that leads to divisions and enmity. The Episcopal Church teaches that “sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God [Who is Love], thus distorting our relationship with God [or Love], with other people, and with all creation,” and that “sin has power over us because we lose our liberty when our relationship with God is distorted.” Sin is what separates us from God and from one another. Imagine if we focused all our attention on this teaching from the First Letter of John: “if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” and “Beloved ones, let us love one another because love is from God…Whoever does not love has not known God because God is Love.”
I don’t read anything in the Gospels that suggests that humans are inherently or “born” sinful. In fact, I read Jesus’ teachings as being about cultivating practices of compassionate and merciful behaviors toward other human beings, cultivating the essential good, in response to remembering that God is faithful, that God loves us all. According to my Torah commentary, there is an ancient rabbinic teaching that without a mitzvah, a good or godly deed, a human being is truly naked. Doing mitzvot, good or godly deeds, is a way to clothe oneself with righteousness – with right relationship, which is the only clothing that matters.
Although sin is mentioned nearly 2000 times in the Bible, the word for sin doesn’t appear in Genesis until the story of Cain and Abel. The word is nowhere in the story we heard this morning. Disobeying God and hiding from God, whether because of pride or shame or indifference, isn’t described as sin in Genesis. By the way, there is no mention of marriage, or of an apple in this story either. And to use this story to assert exclusively binary gender assignment or heterosexual pairings is completely ridiculous to me. Our reading from Genesis stops two verses short of a beautiful and important part of the story: that is, the part in which Adam, the dirtling, and the dirtling’s companion hide from God and the voice of God says, “Where are you?” and it is God who makes clothing for them to replace their leafy loincloths. Although they seem to not have gained the knowledge that they needed God, the story teaches that they did need God and that God is all loving and all forgiving.
Do you know what happens after our Gospel story of Jesus alone in the desert, where he has resisted three temptations to imagine that he doesn’t need God or other people? Jesus goes out to find help. And the helpers he finds are not necessarily the most skilled bunch of people when it comes to the work that Jesus needs help with – but Jesus finds a way to work with them – and they do indeed help Jesus, clumsily maybe, but still they helped. The first humans needed God. God, through Jesus, needed help from others – Jesus needed prayers of others, and the ministration of angels, or messengers of God. We humans need God. God needs humans. And God needs us humans to need each other’s help and need each other’s prayers. It’s a hard message. I don’t know any of us who would like to be described as needy, and yet, that is what we all are. We are born needy and that is not a sin.
If it’s your practice to give up something in Lent, try giving up the idea that you can manage without help from God and from other people. If it’s your practice to take something on in Lent, try taking on the idea that you need help from God and from other people, especially the least likely people you would ever want to help you. This Lent, turn around, turn more toward grace, toward mercy, toward love, that is, toward God and turn toward other people. Turn toward God who simply adores you and who will do whatever it takes to free you from the bondage of sin. Turn toward those who love you and turn toward those from whom you can’t imagine getting help. It is my job as your spiritual doctor to recommend diet and exercise – and I’m recommending it again. This is your annual check-up. Easter is coming and Lent is the time to get ready for it. As the sun sets each day during Lent, I encourage you to review the day for acts of kindness that you witnessed, especially any of which you were on the receiving end. Maybe they were magnanimous; maybe they were ever so slight. Resist the temptation to think that any of them were entitlements. Then think of what kindnesses you may be able to offer in the next day – to family, to friends, to strangers, and even to your enemies. As you move through this season of Lent, be increasingly bold and generous in your offerings, and in your compassion for others. Focus on loving kindness because Easter will be here before you know it!