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In the hope that some of you might take your vacation in New England, let me tell you about one of its features, Stonewalls. Riding down a New England road one wonders at the mile upon mile of unending stonewall. But you see only half the story. More hidden are the miles of stonewalls that run through woods, up hillsides, down into valleys. These are the monuments of untold hours of forgotten labor. The labor of farm families who struggled to win from that hard and rocky ground a living. Stonewalls now lost in the woods once divided fields and pastures, small farm from small farm. You know of course that those stones came from the fields. You may think that the farmer cleared his fields piled the rocks in these fences and that was that. Not so. Yes, the farmer cleared the field, piled the stone, but the next spring he would have to be right back at it, removing stone after stone from his field and piling them on his wall. And the spring after that; and the one after that. It is still happening. Those fields still in production, after three hundred springs, still yielding up new crops of rocks. It has to do with ancient glaciers, and the freezing and thawing of winter and spring. New England farmers have claimed that their main crop is rocks. Some of you who are native Californians maybe descended from families that saw the futility of it, and move to the lure of easy living in the west. You may at this point be checking your orders of service. Where’s the sin! Has there been a mistake? No, I have been talking about sin. It just is not yet apparent. The title this morning, THE DELICIOUS SUBJECT OF SIN, is of course an enticement, a come on, if your prefer, a seduction. Which is to say it is probably a sin itself, on my part that is. I fell to the temptation to appeal to that side of you that is, well, easiest to appeal to. I am not under the least illusion that any of us need to be persuaded that sin is delicious. Most of us are thoroughly convinced of it. To try to persuade you would be redundant. Those ancients, who first penned the proverb that virtue is her own reward, were confused. It is sin that is its own reward. It's delicious, why else would there be so much of it. I am not speaking to you here just of the sin of gluttony, where the adjective delicious so obviously applies. I am also thinking of all of the other seven deadly sins: Lust was delicious for you, or I hope it shall be. Anger, oh a righteous anger can be very delicious; pride, who has not tasted the sweet nectar of feeling better than other people? Nothing takes the flavor out of procrastination and sloth like not really having anything to do. The whole joy of lazing around derives from savoring the thing that you really should be doing. And covetousness, envy can be a sweet thing to get one's tongue around, sort of like a sourball. Greed and avarice have a hunger to them that is only excited by the taste that cannot fulfill them. I know your mother or the church warned you against sin. I won't this morning; you would expect that. I take warning from The Diary of a Country Priest, "He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it." I will merely tell you about sin and me this morning. You can draw your own conclusions about sin and you yourself. Sin is actually in very short supply these days, or at least knowledge of it. I was raised a nonconformist in religion. Unlike many of you I was not steeped in knowledge of sin. I have had to pretty well explore the subject for myself. From time to time I have immersed myself in it, getting hands on experience. But my book learning was so weak that I never memorized the seven deadly sins. To make up for my lack of knowledge in this area, I asked a friend who was raised a Presbyterian what the seven deadly sins were. I figured anyone who once attended a church named "Shady Side Presbyterian," should know. She didn't. But she consulted a Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic didn't know either. But she called a priest. He didn't know. You can see that this was getting worrisome A nun was then consulted. She said she knew and rattled them off. But she was wrong. She included envy and covetousness as two separate sins and left off avarice or greed. I finally got my list of seven deadly sins from the library reference room, good people there. The seven deadly sins are: pride, envy, anger, sloth, gluttony, lust, and greed. The Librarian found the list of seven deadly sins where you would expect to find it these days, in a book of trivia. That's what sin has become trivia. Trivia, only I keep sinning and find after the taste is gone, my life is a little worse. Dietrich Bonhoffer once stood before a group of prisoners that he was preaching to in a jail and said, "I am a greater sinner than the greatest sinner among you." Bonhoffer was a deeply religious man, truly humble and very Lutheran. I am not going to stand before you this morning and tell you that I am a greater sinner than the greatest sinner among you. While I may be religious, I am not that humble; and I secretly hope that among you, are worse sinners than I. I was raised not Lutheran but as a New England Unitarian. I do not want to be grandiose about my sins or Gods interest in them. I recognize that for some of you who were raised Lutheran or other orthodoxies, being a sinner is a trauma that you have had to get over. Living in fear of a celestial Peeping Tom whose whole agenda was to catch you off guard doing something that was a "no-no", is something that you have spent a lot of time growing out of. I appreciate that need. To always be fleeing the wrath, is to miss moving toward the good. My definition of sin is quite simple. I stole it from M. Scott Peck. He got it from someone else. Sinning is "missing the mark." I am a pragmatist in these matters; Sinning is missing the mark in a way that injures ourselves or other human beings, or indeed the whole web of existence. Unitarian Universalism with its Purposes and Principles, (the interdependent web – the inherent worth and dignity of every person) has become set it feet firmly on the side of normative religion. These are the norms up to which one is expected to live. To miss them is to miss the mark. They are easy to miss a lot. I do all the time. The darkest and most pessimistic word I have for you today is: given the nature of that web of existence, its extensiveness, and given that our choices are often fraught with ambiguity where we are choosing between lesser evils or goods; and given our own fallibility, our own self-preoccupation, we are going to sin. Saint Paul was right, "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do." (Repeat) I expect that the fishermen on Lake Michigan if confronted with their cruel act of getting two gulls entangled on either end of a short piece of fishing line and watching there dance of death – might understand St. Paul as well. Theirs is evil, sin. Let me be straightforward about the case. I was divorced many years ago. The choices were to remain in a marriage that was not good and raise the children in that atmosphere, or to be divorced and be absent to my children at least part of the time. I know that some of you have faced the same dilemma. I know that some of you chose as I did. I cannot answer for you. But for me I know that in the real world, my children were harmed; that whatever we did, it was possible that they would have been harmed. I, we, missed the mark. To understand that these were hard choices is not to miss that there was sin even in what we felt we had to do. I have tried to say the children were fine, to lie about it, to others but mostly to myself. They were not. "The good that I would do, I did not: but the evil which I would not do, that I did." For many of the orthodox, the conviction that there is sin, is excuse to bring in a rescuing God to free us from the consequence of what we have done, the same God who was only lately peeking to catch us in our wrongs. I do not believe in such a God who sets up a trap to catch us so that we can be forgiven. But I do know enough of what I have done in life, of the many ways and times that I have missed the mark, to know that the power behind this creation, this universe, is gracious and forgiving, and perhaps a little forgetful (which is what forgiveness is all about). There has been ample time and more than enough opportunity, and reason enough to do me in. Yet the future has been given back to me over and over. That is what forgiveness is, not changing the past but breaking the chain of causality, making a different future possible. Thomas Mann wrote, "The scientific superiority of liberal theology.... is indeed incontestable, But its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the demonic character of human existence." For many years as a child of liberal theology I had myself convinced of my own goodness until the pain of what I was doing to myself and others broke through. It is amazing what we can put over on ourselves when we believe we are good: justify a lie (it wouldn't hurt them not to know); cover up a theft (they probably didn't want it any way); tell only part of the truth (they didn't ask did they?), hurt someone (that will teach them): tell a confidence (every one knows anyway); stand in judgement (someone has to); betray a trust (I'm only human). There is in me a voice that wants to say "not me", "I wouldn't, I didn't, I won't do that." I have learned that, just when I am most certain that I am right, on the right side, I am most likely to be about to get in trouble. Just now I stole an idea for this sermon, (if you do it from enough places we can call it research, right). It is from this that M. Scott Peck comes to speak of "The people of the Lie", people who run away from their own responsibility for the way things are, in a web of lies. You might think it a little embarrassing for me to stand here and say these things about myself. But you see I have studied you also and I know that there is little difference among us. Accept that some are better at lying to themselves about themselves than others. On the average we share in about the same sinfulness. There are those in the world who are demonic to be sure. And I have know a few who were not without sin but without lying to themselves, were genuinely naive about sin, their own and others. And I have known one or two who seemed to be genuinely freer of sin than the rest of us, whose goodness shone. But for the rest of us, well, in Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad says: "The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense: it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush - from weakness that may lay hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe. We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged.... And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are completely undone." I want to disabuse you of any notion that I find this depressing. I have known guilt, pathological guilt. Its origin is I believe rooted in not facing up to lies we are telling ourselves about our lives and about ourselves. That is not a healthy guilt. Its solution is in getting honest with ourselves, meeting the real world and the reality of our own lives. In admitting where we are. I have also known appropriate guilt. Guilt that says, "You were wrong; make it right." It is a dangerous guilt to ignore, for ignored it can become a lie and the lie can become pathological guilt. It is the kind of guilt that defends me from my darker side. Now we can go back to those stonewalls that started this sermon. Not the walls exactly but the fields that produce those stone. Perhaps it is because I am descended from some of those New England Farmers, but I have begun to understand my life a little like those fields and my sins a little like those stone that seem to grow in those fields. I believe that my life can and does yield a good crop, even bountiful harvest that I am very grateful for. But I must be forever also pulling out those stones that I grow there. Never surprised to find more, always being as willing as I can to deal with them. As I say I am not pessimistic, I struggle to accept the reality of who I am and what I do. But I also know that each miss of the mark that we accept, is a miss that can lead us to aim better, to do better another time. I do not ever expect to stop sinning in this life. Although I do notice as I get older, some of the more common sins get easier to resist. And that I do regret. What I do aim for is not repeating the same ones over too often. I believe in a little creativity. (Incidentally the term original sin is a terrible contradiction in terms; most sin is very unoriginal, pale copies of what others have done before with such style. If more people would pay attention to style if they are going to sin, life would be more interesting). And while I have repented a good many of my sins, I should confess that there are a number that while repented of, I look back on with a fond nostalgia, re-live in my memory with a little delight. And there are even a couple of sins that I didn’t commit that, well, are still nice to ponder. Phillis McGinley once wrote, Angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly. (Repeat) One of my most common sins is to take myself too seriously. Nothing that I can think of leads to more lying, both to ones self and others, to more sinning. In letting go of our self-important posturing about ourselves, we can see who we really are and our sins, what they really are. When we know the shape of our own darkness, then we begin to find real freedom, the freedom of those who live in the truth. For only when we know our own darkness, are we free to begin to do real good. Sins that I do not know, that I lie to myself about, will prejudice any good I attempt perhaps destroy all my efforts. You see I have come to know, believe, that Walt Kelly was right, when he wrote "We have met the enemy and they are us." The battles for good that we shall win are only with ourselves. We shall win or lose in little acts. The goodness of the world is not made up in grand gestures, in great moments, but in the, as some one said, minute particulars. That is nice, for it is only in those minute particulars that we live. Amen and Amen. |
