by Lauren F. Winner
Psalm Reading: Psalm 51
For Sunday, Sept. 15, 2013: Year C—Lectionary 24
“My mistakes are always before my eyes” reads Pamela Greenberg’s translation. “I am deeply conscious of my guilt; my sin is almost unbearable. My heart is breaking with remorse and the shame of what I have done,” translates Stephen Mitchell.
A clergy friend of mine once told me that sin is intuitive: that everyone on some level knows that they have transgressed, that they are sinners, that the world is riddled with sin—with not-as-it-should-be.
Is Sin Really Intuitive?
I don’t agree with my friend. I think some people have an intuition of sin’s twisting pervasiveness, and some people learn or are taught about sin, and some people go through their whole lives without an inkling of not-as-it-should-be.
I was in my mid 20s and had been a Christian for about 5 years before I began (and only then it was just a beginning, in a process of learning about my own sinfulness that will probably continue forever) to realize anything about sin— sin’s creeping through the world; that I was a sinner.
The Event
The event that prompted this awakening—and I do believe than a dawning awareness of one’s sinfulness is an awakening—is something I still feel ashamed about whenever I think of it (and I literally mean feel ashamed—my skin warms, my back muscles tense, my stomach clenches).
The beginnings of my understanding of sin came one afternoon at the hospital; I was there have lunch with my mother, who would die six months later. I was walking down the corridor, on my way to her with a pair of sandwiches from Cville Coffee, walking past room after room of illness and dying and maybe healing, too, rooms of worry and bodies crippled and families hovering, bodies failing, bodies torqued with pain, and I thought: This is not how it is supposed to be.
Later, I understood that those words marked the beginning of my understanding. This was my first tentative grasp at the truth the Christian lexicon names this with sin—the truth that something is very wrong with the world.
That first glimmer in the hospital was politely philosophical. But I was still a step or two away from the heart of the matter. Start your reckoning with sin with a calm, 9-word, observation about an oncology ward, about the world, about the grand cycle of life and death, illness, malignancy. Move later, only later, to make the same observations about yourself.
Cville Coffee had just recently opened when I had my hospital epiphany, and I thought it was just about the best sandwich shop ever; I especially loved a sandwich with red peppers and mozzarella and cucumbers, thick bread, drenched with tart vinaigrette. This is not what my mother had asked me to get—she’d wanted turkey and cranberries, the Gobble Gobble sub—but I brought her the mozzarella and cucumbers nonetheless, and she couldn’t eat it, it didn’t taste right to her, she couldn’t eat it.
I remember a brief feeling of rage when she didn’t eat the sandwich. I remember frustration, and a feeling of sulking, and also I remember a feeling of power. Standing in line for the sandwich, I had persuaded myself she would like mozzarella more than the turkey; in healthy days, roasted red peppers and lip-pickling vinegar was some of her favorite tastes.
But underneath that persuasion there was something else: there was cruelty in what I was doing, which was withholding from a sick woman at whom I was angry the lunch she wanted to eat.
That was the beginning of my realization that I am riddled with sin. It a shames me still.
My mistakes are always before my eyes.
I am deeply conscious of my guilt; my sin is almost unbearable.
My heart is breaking with remorse and the shame of what I have done.
Learning in the Church
I believe that those five years in the church that preceded this sandwich situation were one of the things that helped make me able to see my own sinfulness for what it was. (The church also gave me some language for penance, and confession, and absolution.)
What is the responsibility of the preacher to help people become able to see their own sinfulness? And—assuming we have some responsibility to do just that—how do we do it? What words do we use?
Speaking of Sin
In the reflection on the Gospel passage for this week (a passage that also speaks of sinners repenting), I share a remarkable sermon by Rabbi Maggie Wenig—remarkable in part because it is all about repentance, but it never uses the word “repent.”
Here, let’s consider the other side of the argument, with the help of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful book Speaking of Sin —a surprisingly winsome book given the title, and the topic which is “a small cluster of [religious] words that seem hard for people to pronounce…’Sin’ heads the list, followed by ‘damnation’ ‘repentance,’ ‘penance’ and ‘salvation.’….Fewer and fewer of us use the[se] words in our prayers or conversations. Some of our churches have stopped using them as well.” Why should we use these words, wonders Taylor. Why not just talk of grace and love? Why speak explicitly of sin?
“The only reason I can think of is because we believe that God means to redeem the world through us,” Taylor writes. Using the language of sin might help us come to see more clearly what it is we are turning from, putting away, and casting out as we participate in the work of God’s renewal and redemption of creation. “Abandoning the langue of sin will not make sin go away,” Taylor notes. “It is easier (and less painful) for us to rely on God’s forgiveness of our sins than it is to believe that God might support us to quit them. But how can we quit them if we have forgotten what they are called?”
I suggested above that Taylor offers the other side of Wenig’s argument—but of course, it’s not really an argument: it is a conversation, and both Taylor (with her call to name sin and repentance) and Wenig (with her imaginative parable that images repentance without ever naming it) are right.
The Hardest Question
Maybe Psalm 51 is issuing you an invitation to name sin in the pulpit this week. If so, how will you go about doing that—truthfully, faithfully, pastorally, fearlessly? What words will you use to preach about sin and repentance?
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
