Lent Four

Do you believe you are sinful? Do you? Do you really? Do you really think that you are the sinful one? Or do you kind of think you are? “I am kind of sinful.” “I am not that bad.” “I am OK with the kind of sin I commit.” “My sin is small in comparison to the other sin going on.”

Well, we are not talking about the other sin going on, we are talking about your sin, all of you. Do you believe you are sinful? Sin filled. Sinning? Right now, do you think you are doing it? On your way here to church this morning did you? Maybe later will you? By sin, I mean, will you not be able to see the goodness of God, not be able to be close to God, because of some pathology, some thing that you relish, some thing you adore, some thing that you find too precious to part with. And by sin I mean those things that block you from the altar. Sin is anything that keeps you from being able to sacrifice to the Lord. Whatever that thing is, whatever blemish, impurity, malady, whatever it is that keeps you from approaching the altar of the Lord and offering a sacrifice, a physical act to make your life sacred. A sacrifice that acknowledges your small and finite place in the universal mystery. A Sacrifice that humbly gives a moment of your esteem to the entity we call God. Do you believe you are sinful? And if you do what are you doing about it?

I happen to believe that I am sinful. Very much so. There are things about me I do not want you to know. Dark things, very dark things that haunt me, drive me, and often get the better of me. But I am not alone. I bet you are the same way. I bet you allowed your narcissism to get the better of you just a few seconds ago when I asked you if you were sinful. I bet your mind went through a laundry list of possible sins, all superficial ones, not big ones, like hatred of someone, or your qualified opinion about someone else’s personality. I bet your darkness was on display last night. I bet some of you were enjoying the company of someone else who is not your spouse. The company of someone who makes you feel younger, more alive. Someone who helps you forget how compact and stilted your life has become. I bet some of you yelled at your child with comments that would shock even you if you were to hear them recorded and played back to you. I bet some of you allowed your fury to get the best of you and you physically hurt someone, maybe not with your fists, but with your words, lashing out in a way that would seem unduly cruel and even mythical to the casual observer of you. The darkness is there in you, in me, in us.
We are capable of sin and, indeed, we are fallible creatures. We are blind to see our selves as we are, as we truly are, in our darkest selves. We fail to see us in our violent words, in our ugly actions, in our desire to be someone else, just not ourselves. In our mean and spiteful ugliness, we are blind, we are hypocrites, we are grotesque, deformed, relentless in our pursuit of goals that please only one god, the god of our selves, a home grown god, a god of reattachment to things, material angels, idols, status, immaturity, displaced lust, forgery of spirit, rage filled souls that scream at the innocent, defile the pure in heart, lob sarcasm at the young, and deter the spirit of the true God from every growing inside you again. You love the dark, you stay there, it is a place of comfort, of ease, you know the dark, like dust that settles on the sanctuary of our hearts, at first it is simple to wipe away, but as it settles you get used to it and it builds up, ultimately covering up the truth. You can see it in this sanctuary right now, dust of many years covering the true color of our souls.

Yet, for two thousand years, men and women have dared to stand up in front of the others and tell the world over and over again that Jesus Christ came into the world to save. Jesus Christ came into the world to make the world safe. Jesus Christ came into the world to save the world, to save the world, the cosmos, the whole of us, that we might not be condemned by our sin and by the things that keep us away from God but that we might be transformed by the light. We have stood up here and we have stood on street corners, anywhere where anyone might be passing by, and we have yelled, cajoled, implored, demanded, lauded, prayed, hoped that each generation might listen and understand, might have their eyes opened and believed that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. We have said this in as many ways and in as many languages as has ever been known. God loves the world, God made the world, God loves the world, loves the whole world, loves you. God loves you. God loves you, the way you are, the odd way you are, the way you turned out, the way you are right now, God loves you, loves you. I do not know of any other way to tell you, no tricky allusions, no literary devices, no fancy terms, God loves you. And it is this love that is infused into the life of Jesus. If you want to know what God is up to look at Jesus, look at his life, look at what he did. To be a Christian is to look at the life of Jesus, see the people he healed, see the sinners he took in, see the way he fed, and loved. See the way he lived and the way he died and in that story, in those Gospel moments, see yourself. See yourself in the blind beggars, in the ill and the infirmed. See yourself in the self righteous. See your self in Peter, in James and John, in Mary, and Salome, in Mary Magdalene, in Elizabeth. See yourself in Bartemeus and in the unnamed recipients of the grace of God. See yourself in the Gospel of Jesus, and see all of that sin literally wash away. See it fall off of you like scales, see it disappear. See your heart turned from one way of darkness to another place of light. See the weight of anxiety and despair and habitual behavior fall off of you in the name of Jesus. See the beginning of exploring your way out of a cave of darkness and into the light of the creation. Those of us who look for the light, desire to find it, waking up from our sin, suddenly find something that was true the whole time, God loves us, and that we are not condemned. God asks us to turn and be found in a new spirit of love. The old self goes away, and we are a new creation. A resurrected thing. Do you believe you are sinful? Yes I do. But I also believe that my sin is not a natural part of me. God created me and called me good. God created you and called you good. You are a created thing and you are a good thing.

Lent comes from a word that means lengthen. The light lengthens during the time from Ash Wednesday to Easter morning. The earth rotates to a place where there is more light, and we say that during that time we too rotate to a place where there is more light. We are in our fourth Sunday of Lent, and the days have grown longer, and there is more light to be found. That light shows us our darkness, our deepest darkness, our condemnable darkness. But that light also reveals a truth, a truth that we will celebrate on Easter Day. The trouble is, to get from here to there, we must travel even deeper into the darkness that is within us, we must see an even more dismal picture of ourselves in the Gospels. As we move to the light, we will try and destroy it, keeping ourselves in the dark. This is the sad part of our sinful selves. But there is hope in our lives, that we will overcome the darkness. This is the hope of the Christian message, the Gospels, a hope beyond our darkness and our sin. A hope that calls us into a new place, an Easter place at the end of the dark. A place of love in the place of sin. A place where those who do what is true come to the light, a place where it may be clearly seen that our deeds have been done in God. Amen