Are There Any Original Sins?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House
on Nantucket, Sunday July 27, 2003
***
I thought I'd start out today by telling you all how I became a Unitarian Universalist Christian without even knowing it. One sunny afternoon in the Autumn of 1998, I came home from the golf course and found a message on my answering machine from my friend and colleague Suzanne Meyer, asking me whether I would be willing to serve as a member of the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship. Curious about how my name had happened to come up in this context, but knowing from past experience that no good deed goes unpunished, I called her back immediately and left a long message on her answering machine telling her how flattered I was, and then carefully spelling out all of the reasons why I would be a terrible board member and why she really ought to get someone else for the job. Not, of course, that it did me a speck of good. It's a lot easier to fool strangers than it is to fool your friends.
Now admittedly, I've been a member of the UU Christian Fellowship, on and off, for over 20 years. Their journal, appropriately named The Unitarian Universalist Christian, is one of the most intelligent publications our denomination has to offer, and since membership in the UUCF and a subscription to the journal are basically the same price, I hadn't really given it a second thought. Likewise, I'm enough of a historian to know that our roots are liberal Christian even if our denomination has branched out considerably from that now, but even so, it felt a little odd to be "outed" as a Christian by someone who has known me as long as Suzanne has, especially since I hadn't particularly thought of myself in those terms at all. In my own mind, I was (and remain) a "broad church" Unitarian Universalist: rational, yet mystical; a "Naturalistic Theist" strongly influenced by Transcendentalism, and deeply sympathetic to Buddhist thought; a pragmatic existentialist; an advocate of the Social Gospel, comfortable perhaps with the label "Christian Humanist," but at bottom basically what one might call "Zen Baptist" — just another iconoclastic, low church, highly independent, sudden enlightenment kind of guy.
If anything, the label "Christian" left kind of a sour taste in my mouth. It's a word that reactionary, right-wing neo-Fascist fundamentalist televangelists and their ilk have corrupted almost beyond redemption, and I certainly hate even to be mentioned in the same breath as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And in many ways, that bothers me quite a bit, because the style of religious faith I hear expounded by these Televangelists really bears very little resemblance whatsoever to the intellectual understanding of Christianity that I've developed as a result of my own academic study of religion. There are lots of things I find objectionable about it (somebody really ought to pass a "truth in labeling" law) but I think the one thing I find most objectionable is the sanctimonious way they tend to deal with the notion of "sin."
As best I can tell, a "sinner" is anyone who doesn't conform to a rigid standard of "Biblical" morality, but this standard actually seems to move around quite a bit depending upon what part of the Bible one happens to be reading at the moment. Drinking, dancing, smoking, sexual activity of just about any kind, voting for the wrong candidate, talking back to your parents, taking the Lord's Name in vain, playing cards, eating meat on Fridays or candy during Lent — these are just a few of the things that I've heard since childhood described as "sins" — while lying, cheating, stealing, even killing, might sometimes be OK if it was actually "God's Will." About the only constant seemed to be that the sins of Christians are somehow forgiven, provided of course that you are the right kind of Christian, who has accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. In other words, just about anything you might actually want to do is wrong, but that's all right, because there are no consequences, provided simply that you believe whatever you are told to believe.
It was stuff like this that used to drive me nuts when I was younger. Still does, really. But the most confusing thing of all was something called "original sin." According to my childhood friends, because Adam and Eve had sinned in the Garden of Eden, all of their subsequent descendants (including me) were tainted with the guilt of that sin, and were going to be punished for it even though we hadn't actually done anything wrong ourselves. Now to my childish mind, this was clearly unfair. Moreover, as my friends started to go into a little more detail about this story, things became even more confusing. Adam and Eve's sin was that they had disobeyed God and eaten a piece of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now clearly, disobeying God was wrong. Even a child could see that. But how were Adam and Eve supposed to know it was wrong until after they had eaten the fruit and could tell the difference? To my way of thinking, knowing the difference between right and wrong was a good thing — and the serpent was the hero of the story, someone like Prometheus, who had stormed heaven and stolen fire from the Gods as a gift to human beings. I could understand why the Gods would be angry. But as human beings, shouldn't we feel gratitude rather than guilt? This equation of innocence with ignorance really bothered me. What kind of a God would punish two people just because they didn't know any better, and then punish all of their descendants as well just because now they do? It just wasn't fair. And God, if nothing else, should always be fair.
Of course, now that I'm older, I know a lot more about sin than I did when I was a child. I understand that life isn't always fair, and I also understand that Adam and Eve were not real people — that their story is a myth, a metaphorical allegory which contains within it a more subtle, spiritual truth about the nature of human existence. But I'm getting a little ahead of my story. By the time I entered Divinity School, I had pretty much rejected Christianity as a meaningful religious pathway for myself. I was much more attracted to the Buddhist perspective on the world. According to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, the basic condition of human existence is one of Dukkha, which means "sorrow" or "suffering." This suffering is brought about by tanha or "thirst" — our attachment to the world, our craving for things that are impermanent, which "come into being and pass away." But fortunately for us, there is a way to escape this affliction and extinguish the craving, which involves giving up our constant striving to satisfy our appetites and following instead the "Noble Eight-Fold Path," — Right Thought, Right Understanding, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness — a combination of spiritual wisdom, mental discipline, and compassionate ethical conduct which leads to a state of enlightened liberation, in the world, but not of it.
Buddhism seemed like such a rational religious worldview compared to the rantings and ravings of born-again televangelists. And it had an added attraction in that there was absolutely nothing miraculous or supernatural about it: no virgin birth, no vicarious atonement, not even a belief in God, at least in any conventional sense. But the most amazing thing about the Buddhist religion was its ability to cast a different light on the more traditional Christian theology I was studying at Harvard. And this was particularly true when it came to the notion of sin.
In the Bible, there are several different words that are sometimes translated into English as "sin." There are words whose literal translation would be something like "trespass" or "transgression," another which means "disobedience," still others which mean "wicked," "evil," "dishonest," "unclean." But the most common word for sin, at least in the New Testament, is Hamartia which means, literally, to be off target or to make a mistake, to take the wrong path or be headed in the wrong direction. Its a word that appears outside of Scripture in contexts like missing the bull's-eye in a javelin-throwing contest, or making a procedural mistake when conducting a ritual, like letting the groom kiss the bride before he's given her the ring. But in the context of the New Testament, which reflects the usage of the Hebrew Bible, Hamartia refers to activities or behaviors which cause an individual to stray off of the path that leads to God — which is to say, to Truth or Ultimate Meaning. In a more general sense, it means being alienated from the creative power that gives life purpose, being "aimless," misdirected, ignorant, and confused. It means chasing after false goals which we think will make us happy because they temporarily satisfy our appetites, but which ultimately only leave us disappointed and hungry for more. Buddhism helped me to understand what it was these early Christians were really talking about, despite the way in which the Televangelists had twisted those words to their own ends.
If you look again at the story of Adam and Eve, you can see how these dynamics play out there within the drama of the myth. Because Adam and Eve were ignorant of the difference between Good and Evil, God had given them specific instructions intended to preserve their innocence. They were "naked and without shame," the Scripture tells us, but once they had given in to temptation and tasted of the forbidden fruit, what did they do next, now that they knew better? They covered up! They pointed fingers, and blamed everyone but themselves, they even tried to lie to God in order to avoid the consequences of their actions. There's nothing particularly original about that, is there? — except that if we take the story literally, they were the very first: the Original Sinners, who set the pattern of denial, shame, blaming and rationalization for all the rest of us.
When we look at the story in this light, we see that sin is behavior which is essentially self-destructive in and of itself. And it grows out of one of our innate shortcomings as human beings: our shortsighted tendency to look first at what we think will gratify our most immediate desires, but which actually often work in opposition to our more broad and enlightened interests. It's something that we're born with, but which we can eventually outgrow. A baby thinks only of it's own hunger when it cries, and is essentially incapable of understanding anything else. But where would we be as a species if we did not eventually learn how to be mature and loving parents, able to care for and nurture screaming, helpless infants? The point of the story is not that God is out to punish us for our shortcomings. The point is that God recognizes our shortcomings, and wants to guide us on a path that will allow us to transcend them. But to follow that path, we need to get focused on the target, rather than wasting a lot of energy trying to think up new excuses.
It might interest you to know that, historically-speaking, controversy about the true nature of sin stands at the center of both the Unitarian and the Universalists traditions. For the Unitarians, it was the rejection of John Calvin's notions of Predestination and the "Total Depravity" of humankind in favor of a belief in the necessity of free will for human Moral Agency, along with the conviction that human beings were born with the potential for either good or evil, and that it was the role of religion to guide them toward the good. And Universalism takes its name from the belief that ultimately All Souls will be reconciled to God, who expresses omnipotence not by the power to condemn the wicked to eternal damnation, but rather by the ability to bring them to the truth.
I suppose this may have been what caused my friend Suzanne Meyer to nominate me for the Board of the UU Christian Fellowship in the first place. Perhaps it was because she knew that I wouldn't be ashamed to preach the Gospel, at least according to my understanding of it, despite my many shortcomings as both a minister and a human being. Or maybe it was simply because she knew that I owned a Bible, and that I occasionally even opened it. What worries me is the thought that between two part-time pulpits, a half-time teaching assistantship, and my efforts to write a half-way decent doctoral dissertation, she merely figured that I didn't have enough to do already, and wanted to make certain that I didn't stray too far from the path of my vocation.
Vocation is a funny concept. It comes from the Latin word for "calling" — it's not simply the means by which we make our living, but the purpose which gives meaning to our lives. And in my particular line of work, it demands a peculiar combination of arrogance and humility: the arrogance, if you will, to claim to speak the Word of God; and the humility to recognize one's own fundamental limitations and shortcomings when it comes to meeting that challenge. I guess this is why I still feel so reluctant even to think of myself as a "Christian," even though it doesn't bother me so much now to hear others speak of me in those terms. Because whatever I am, the substance of it ought to be apparent from the way I try to live my life, regardless of what people choose to call it.
And the same, of course, is true for all of you as well. In an 1866 letter to his wife Henrietta, the Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot observed "Christians think me an infidel, while infidels and spiritualists find me too Christian." And it seems to me that this is exactly where we ought to be, recognizing at the same time that whatever "Truth" may stand at the center of Christian faith would be just as true by any other name, true even if Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, and is no doubt contained as well, in some form or another, in all of the authentic religious traditions of the World.
And what is this Truth? Well, that's what we come here every week to talk about, isn't it? But it probably couldn't hurt, from time to time, to begin where Jesus began, with his first public words after returning from his fasting in the Wilderness. You'll find it in the Gospel of Mark, chapter one, verse fifteen: "The Time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand, Repent, and believe in the Gospel." Or to paraphrase this in a slightly different idiom: "Open your eyes and look around you, the benevolent power that created everything you see is still in charge this very moment. So get your mind around this fact, and get yourself headed in the right direction, and trust this Good News that I'm about to give you: no matter how big a screw-up you may be, there is still a place for you at the table if only you can learn this one, simple lesson — stop worrying so much about "getting your share," and start worrying instead about how best to share what you already have with others.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House
on Nantucket, Sunday July 27, 2003
***
I thought I'd start out today by telling you all how I became a Unitarian Universalist Christian without even knowing it. One sunny afternoon in the Autumn of 1998, I came home from the golf course and found a message on my answering machine from my friend and colleague Suzanne Meyer, asking me whether I would be willing to serve as a member of the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship. Curious about how my name had happened to come up in this context, but knowing from past experience that no good deed goes unpunished, I called her back immediately and left a long message on her answering machine telling her how flattered I was, and then carefully spelling out all of the reasons why I would be a terrible board member and why she really ought to get someone else for the job. Not, of course, that it did me a speck of good. It's a lot easier to fool strangers than it is to fool your friends.
Now admittedly, I've been a member of the UU Christian Fellowship, on and off, for over 20 years. Their journal, appropriately named The Unitarian Universalist Christian, is one of the most intelligent publications our denomination has to offer, and since membership in the UUCF and a subscription to the journal are basically the same price, I hadn't really given it a second thought. Likewise, I'm enough of a historian to know that our roots are liberal Christian even if our denomination has branched out considerably from that now, but even so, it felt a little odd to be "outed" as a Christian by someone who has known me as long as Suzanne has, especially since I hadn't particularly thought of myself in those terms at all. In my own mind, I was (and remain) a "broad church" Unitarian Universalist: rational, yet mystical; a "Naturalistic Theist" strongly influenced by Transcendentalism, and deeply sympathetic to Buddhist thought; a pragmatic existentialist; an advocate of the Social Gospel, comfortable perhaps with the label "Christian Humanist," but at bottom basically what one might call "Zen Baptist" — just another iconoclastic, low church, highly independent, sudden enlightenment kind of guy.
If anything, the label "Christian" left kind of a sour taste in my mouth. It's a word that reactionary, right-wing neo-Fascist fundamentalist televangelists and their ilk have corrupted almost beyond redemption, and I certainly hate even to be mentioned in the same breath as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And in many ways, that bothers me quite a bit, because the style of religious faith I hear expounded by these Televangelists really bears very little resemblance whatsoever to the intellectual understanding of Christianity that I've developed as a result of my own academic study of religion. There are lots of things I find objectionable about it (somebody really ought to pass a "truth in labeling" law) but I think the one thing I find most objectionable is the sanctimonious way they tend to deal with the notion of "sin."
As best I can tell, a "sinner" is anyone who doesn't conform to a rigid standard of "Biblical" morality, but this standard actually seems to move around quite a bit depending upon what part of the Bible one happens to be reading at the moment. Drinking, dancing, smoking, sexual activity of just about any kind, voting for the wrong candidate, talking back to your parents, taking the Lord's Name in vain, playing cards, eating meat on Fridays or candy during Lent — these are just a few of the things that I've heard since childhood described as "sins" — while lying, cheating, stealing, even killing, might sometimes be OK if it was actually "God's Will." About the only constant seemed to be that the sins of Christians are somehow forgiven, provided of course that you are the right kind of Christian, who has accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. In other words, just about anything you might actually want to do is wrong, but that's all right, because there are no consequences, provided simply that you believe whatever you are told to believe.
It was stuff like this that used to drive me nuts when I was younger. Still does, really. But the most confusing thing of all was something called "original sin." According to my childhood friends, because Adam and Eve had sinned in the Garden of Eden, all of their subsequent descendants (including me) were tainted with the guilt of that sin, and were going to be punished for it even though we hadn't actually done anything wrong ourselves. Now to my childish mind, this was clearly unfair. Moreover, as my friends started to go into a little more detail about this story, things became even more confusing. Adam and Eve's sin was that they had disobeyed God and eaten a piece of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now clearly, disobeying God was wrong. Even a child could see that. But how were Adam and Eve supposed to know it was wrong until after they had eaten the fruit and could tell the difference? To my way of thinking, knowing the difference between right and wrong was a good thing — and the serpent was the hero of the story, someone like Prometheus, who had stormed heaven and stolen fire from the Gods as a gift to human beings. I could understand why the Gods would be angry. But as human beings, shouldn't we feel gratitude rather than guilt? This equation of innocence with ignorance really bothered me. What kind of a God would punish two people just because they didn't know any better, and then punish all of their descendants as well just because now they do? It just wasn't fair. And God, if nothing else, should always be fair.
Of course, now that I'm older, I know a lot more about sin than I did when I was a child. I understand that life isn't always fair, and I also understand that Adam and Eve were not real people — that their story is a myth, a metaphorical allegory which contains within it a more subtle, spiritual truth about the nature of human existence. But I'm getting a little ahead of my story. By the time I entered Divinity School, I had pretty much rejected Christianity as a meaningful religious pathway for myself. I was much more attracted to the Buddhist perspective on the world. According to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, the basic condition of human existence is one of Dukkha, which means "sorrow" or "suffering." This suffering is brought about by tanha or "thirst" — our attachment to the world, our craving for things that are impermanent, which "come into being and pass away." But fortunately for us, there is a way to escape this affliction and extinguish the craving, which involves giving up our constant striving to satisfy our appetites and following instead the "Noble Eight-Fold Path," — Right Thought, Right Understanding, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness — a combination of spiritual wisdom, mental discipline, and compassionate ethical conduct which leads to a state of enlightened liberation, in the world, but not of it.
Buddhism seemed like such a rational religious worldview compared to the rantings and ravings of born-again televangelists. And it had an added attraction in that there was absolutely nothing miraculous or supernatural about it: no virgin birth, no vicarious atonement, not even a belief in God, at least in any conventional sense. But the most amazing thing about the Buddhist religion was its ability to cast a different light on the more traditional Christian theology I was studying at Harvard. And this was particularly true when it came to the notion of sin.
In the Bible, there are several different words that are sometimes translated into English as "sin." There are words whose literal translation would be something like "trespass" or "transgression," another which means "disobedience," still others which mean "wicked," "evil," "dishonest," "unclean." But the most common word for sin, at least in the New Testament, is Hamartia which means, literally, to be off target or to make a mistake, to take the wrong path or be headed in the wrong direction. Its a word that appears outside of Scripture in contexts like missing the bull's-eye in a javelin-throwing contest, or making a procedural mistake when conducting a ritual, like letting the groom kiss the bride before he's given her the ring. But in the context of the New Testament, which reflects the usage of the Hebrew Bible, Hamartia refers to activities or behaviors which cause an individual to stray off of the path that leads to God — which is to say, to Truth or Ultimate Meaning. In a more general sense, it means being alienated from the creative power that gives life purpose, being "aimless," misdirected, ignorant, and confused. It means chasing after false goals which we think will make us happy because they temporarily satisfy our appetites, but which ultimately only leave us disappointed and hungry for more. Buddhism helped me to understand what it was these early Christians were really talking about, despite the way in which the Televangelists had twisted those words to their own ends.
If you look again at the story of Adam and Eve, you can see how these dynamics play out there within the drama of the myth. Because Adam and Eve were ignorant of the difference between Good and Evil, God had given them specific instructions intended to preserve their innocence. They were "naked and without shame," the Scripture tells us, but once they had given in to temptation and tasted of the forbidden fruit, what did they do next, now that they knew better? They covered up! They pointed fingers, and blamed everyone but themselves, they even tried to lie to God in order to avoid the consequences of their actions. There's nothing particularly original about that, is there? — except that if we take the story literally, they were the very first: the Original Sinners, who set the pattern of denial, shame, blaming and rationalization for all the rest of us.
When we look at the story in this light, we see that sin is behavior which is essentially self-destructive in and of itself. And it grows out of one of our innate shortcomings as human beings: our shortsighted tendency to look first at what we think will gratify our most immediate desires, but which actually often work in opposition to our more broad and enlightened interests. It's something that we're born with, but which we can eventually outgrow. A baby thinks only of it's own hunger when it cries, and is essentially incapable of understanding anything else. But where would we be as a species if we did not eventually learn how to be mature and loving parents, able to care for and nurture screaming, helpless infants? The point of the story is not that God is out to punish us for our shortcomings. The point is that God recognizes our shortcomings, and wants to guide us on a path that will allow us to transcend them. But to follow that path, we need to get focused on the target, rather than wasting a lot of energy trying to think up new excuses.
It might interest you to know that, historically-speaking, controversy about the true nature of sin stands at the center of both the Unitarian and the Universalists traditions. For the Unitarians, it was the rejection of John Calvin's notions of Predestination and the "Total Depravity" of humankind in favor of a belief in the necessity of free will for human Moral Agency, along with the conviction that human beings were born with the potential for either good or evil, and that it was the role of religion to guide them toward the good. And Universalism takes its name from the belief that ultimately All Souls will be reconciled to God, who expresses omnipotence not by the power to condemn the wicked to eternal damnation, but rather by the ability to bring them to the truth.
I suppose this may have been what caused my friend Suzanne Meyer to nominate me for the Board of the UU Christian Fellowship in the first place. Perhaps it was because she knew that I wouldn't be ashamed to preach the Gospel, at least according to my understanding of it, despite my many shortcomings as both a minister and a human being. Or maybe it was simply because she knew that I owned a Bible, and that I occasionally even opened it. What worries me is the thought that between two part-time pulpits, a half-time teaching assistantship, and my efforts to write a half-way decent doctoral dissertation, she merely figured that I didn't have enough to do already, and wanted to make certain that I didn't stray too far from the path of my vocation.
Vocation is a funny concept. It comes from the Latin word for "calling" — it's not simply the means by which we make our living, but the purpose which gives meaning to our lives. And in my particular line of work, it demands a peculiar combination of arrogance and humility: the arrogance, if you will, to claim to speak the Word of God; and the humility to recognize one's own fundamental limitations and shortcomings when it comes to meeting that challenge. I guess this is why I still feel so reluctant even to think of myself as a "Christian," even though it doesn't bother me so much now to hear others speak of me in those terms. Because whatever I am, the substance of it ought to be apparent from the way I try to live my life, regardless of what people choose to call it.
And the same, of course, is true for all of you as well. In an 1866 letter to his wife Henrietta, the Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot observed "Christians think me an infidel, while infidels and spiritualists find me too Christian." And it seems to me that this is exactly where we ought to be, recognizing at the same time that whatever "Truth" may stand at the center of Christian faith would be just as true by any other name, true even if Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, and is no doubt contained as well, in some form or another, in all of the authentic religious traditions of the World.
And what is this Truth? Well, that's what we come here every week to talk about, isn't it? But it probably couldn't hurt, from time to time, to begin where Jesus began, with his first public words after returning from his fasting in the Wilderness. You'll find it in the Gospel of Mark, chapter one, verse fifteen: "The Time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand, Repent, and believe in the Gospel." Or to paraphrase this in a slightly different idiom: "Open your eyes and look around you, the benevolent power that created everything you see is still in charge this very moment. So get your mind around this fact, and get yourself headed in the right direction, and trust this Good News that I'm about to give you: no matter how big a screw-up you may be, there is still a place for you at the table if only you can learn this one, simple lesson — stop worrying so much about "getting your share," and start worrying instead about how best to share what you already have with others.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 7:20 PM
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