May 20, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

What Is “Sin” Anyway?

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51
Romans 7

I am lucky to have had a wonderful upbringing in the church. My youth minister played a big role in that: he was a good and trusted friend, and he made Christianity relevant by talking about things that mattered. He was relevant in his willingness to allow me and other teenagers to ask real questions and express real doubts about faith. I have a lot of significant memories about being at church as a young person, so for me, it is no small thing to tell you that the passage I read to you tonight from Romans 7 was one of the first Bible passages I cared about. “I do not understand my own actions” writes Paul, “for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Really, is there any idea more common to human experience than that one? Whether you ate or drank too much last night or spent more than you should’ve yesterday at the mall or verbally abused your coworker or lied to your spouse—when the feelings of guilt and remorse set in and you realize that you had the very best of intentions but you just messed up, this is what we say to ourselves: I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

It’s been a long time since I first read those words, and I’ve evolved in my thinking about them; I expect I’ll continue to evolve in my thinking about it in the future. I used to really take it very personally, thinking that Paul’s intention was to get me to think more about all of my little sins, all of the ways I had messed up, and that the point was for me to feel guilty. I thought the point was to get us to take seriously the things that we’ve done wrong and work to reform our lives. I still think it is important to take our mistakes seriously and try to learn from them, but I’m no longer so sure that this is the core of the message. See, Paul writes this passage that we all connect with so readily, and the reason we all connect with it is not because we’ve all made the same particular mistakes—certainly we haven’t. We all connect with it because what we share is the experience of not being able to do the things we want but, instead, doing things we dislike. That common experience—the disconnect between the person we are and the person we wish we could be—that, I think, is what Paul is talking about when he uses the word sin. So when we in the church throw around the idea that everyone is a sinner, that as Paul puts it “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” what we’re talking about is this common experience, this tension between the ideals we hold for ourselves and the reality of who we are.

This tension or anxiety of being caught in sin, was described by a theologian named Reinhold Niebuhr in a way I find to be visually helpful. He said it is like being a sailor on a ship, climbing one of the masts. At the top of the mast is the crow’s nest, and from there the sailor will be able to see and comprehend everything going on around the ship. Up there, you can see everything; up there it all makes sense. But on the way up, the sailor has to contend with the fear that at any moment he may lose his grip and fall into the sea.

The common misunderstanding about sin is that in this analogy, falling into the sea is sin, but that isn’t the point. We are all limited human creatures who are, by our very nature, capable of falling into the sea. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. By definition, human beings are limited creatures, and failure is a part of life. But also, by our very nature, we will never, in this life, get all the way to the crow’s nest where all of the mysteries of life can be seen and understood. Human life means that we live halfway up that mast. Sin, as Niebuhr explains it, is that we spend our lives either unrealistically thinking that we can get to the crow’s nest all by ourselves or dropping off into the sea below and giving up on purpose, when what we should do is call upon God to give us the strength to hang onto the mast.

So what are we to do? This tension I’m talking about is a human problem lots of religions have tried to respond to, and Christianity has its own response. As I get into talking about that, I want to tell you a story.

The story is one of the best known stories in the Bible. It’s the story of David and Bathsheba. David is the king of Israel, and as the story goes, one day David is on the roof of his palace. From that vantage point, he sees the beautiful Bathsheba, and he decides that he wants her as his wife. So he sends for her to come to the palace; he seduces her; and once it is discovered that Bathsheba is pregnant, he becomes worried, for Bathsheba is married to another man, Uriah, who is one of the finest soldiers in David’s army. Intending to fix this problem he has created, David calls Uriah back from war, hoping that he will go home and sleep with his wife and cover up their affair. When that doesn’t work, David gets himself into even deeper trouble by sending Uriah to the fight on the front lines so that he will be killed, and Bathsheba is once again a single woman. The wise prophet Nathan, who advises King David, discovers this sordid affair and confronts David, and David has one of these moments Paul is talking about: David looks back at this tangled web of deceit he has woven and he can hardly believe the man that he has become—so different, so much worse, than the man he had hoped to be. You can almost hear him uttering the same words we hear from Paul: “I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

I told this story because, as tradition has it, the psalm we heard tonight, Psalm 51, is written by David when he finds himself in this horrible place. He cries out to God in anguish, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” David realizes how far he has fallen away from who he wants to be, and he realizes his need to start over.

There is a line in Psalm 51 that ministers are a little afraid of: it’s the one that says “the sacrifice acceptable to you, O God, is a broken spirit.” Ministers are always a little skeptical about including that line in worship because it sounds an awful lot like God wants us to suffer; isn’t that what it means to have a broken spirit? Well, maybe, but let’s think through this from David’s perspective, assuming he is the one who wrote the psalm.

We know that David has made a horrible mistake, several actually, and that he has fallen off track so far that he doesn’t know how to get back. An interesting thing about messing up is that usually we have to mess up a lot before we really do anything about it. Climbing out of a hole doesn’t usually start until you’ve fallen far enough to have to admit that there is a problem. This is why when friends or family try to help someone who is struggling, say, with addiction, it usually doesn’t matter much what anyone else says or thinks unless that person decides they want help. Well, David is finally there. He makes the initial mistake with Bathsheba, and thinking that he can “solve” the problem himself, he sends Uriah off to battle, only to discover that he has dug himself a deeper hole. By the time he writes Psalm 51, David has finally messed up enough to realize that he is not going to be able to fix it, and he goes to God and says he’s sorry and asks for help. This is what it means to have a broken spirit: not that God wants us to be in some kind of horrible condition with no hope and no future; it means that God is waiting patiently, nudging us a little like the wise friend of the addict, and hoping that we will soon stop fighting a losing battle to control our lives and admit to God that we need help. God doesn’t want us stuck in an endless cycle of not being who we want to be. God wants us to be able to start over and get back on the path to recovery.

Paul writes about all of this because, for Paul, Jesus is the one who can help us out of this impossible place. When we affirm in the church that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, we mean by that that Jesus has lived a human life, so he knows how it feels to be stuck in this situation of sin, but because he was from God, through faith in him we can hope that we will one day go home to God and escape this cycle of sinfulness that is a part of what it means to live a human life.

I mentioned that I have evolved in my understanding of this passage; another way in which that has happened is that I don’t think sin is most importantly a conversation about our personal mistakes. It takes no particular wisdom or insight to see that many things in the world much bigger than ourselves are not the way they should be, and there are systems of human sinfulness that are a part of that. You don’t need to look any further than this weekend’s NATO Summit and the G-8 Summit happening at Camp David and the people who are protesting both events to see a long list of troubling problems in our world and a variety of different strategies to solve those problems ourselves. These problems are evidence of what Paul is talking about in Romans. Poverty, military action, problems with the food supply: none of these things are the world we want to create, but humans, as individuals and in groups, make decisions all the time that perpetuate these problems. Sometimes our leaders even admit to the fact that the decisions they make are heart-wrenching because they acknowledge that their decisions have created suffering. When you consider the scope of problems like war and poverty, our individual mistakes with substance abuse or personal relationships suddenly seem pretty small. I like to think that God cares as much about the problems of the world as about our personal behavior. I think one of the greatest errors of the church over time is that we tend to talk about “sin” as just having to do with the personal stuff because that stuff seems more manageable or at least is easier to name and understand.

We clearly need God’s help, both individually and as a world; sin is the way we so often resist acknowledging our inability to fix things; sin is our resistance to ask God for help. The miracle of Jesus is that, in him, we see that God wants to understand and help us. Every week we say a prayer of confession as part of our hope that we can begin to acknowledge our need for God. As we prepare to come to the Lord’s Table tonight, the table where God offers forgiveness and help to us, let us reflect: Where have we failed to fix things ourselves? Where have we hit bottom? Where are we ready to turn to God for help? Amen.