Sin and the Christian Tradition
I was driving south on Highway 23 when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw police car behind me with the lights flashing. I looked to the speedometer. No I wasn’t speeding. Hmmmm, what was I doing wrong? I was genuinely curious to know, and I was also wondering where I could pull over on that curvy road. I found a safe spot, pulled over, and the policeman approached me warily.
Most of the time when we are stopped from anything we are in the midst of doing, there is anger, irritation, a bunch of ugly stuff that surfaces and points itself towards the one who stopped us, without our even being aware of it. Policemen, teachers, and all sorts of “authority figures” who have to stop people are constant targets of our unconscious resentment and anger. It’s a tough job. Like being a parent. And then there are the folks who might actually get violent when they are stopped.
“I wouldn’t want to do his job,” is what I was thinking as he approached cautiously, on the alert for any signs of aggression.
I did my best to let him know I was friendly. And that I really did want to find out what I had been doing that he had noticed and I had not.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I’ve been following you for several miles and I put my lights on because I noticed that you have a nasty habit of crossing the center line on the curves.”
He wrote me a warning. I thanked him. He had just alerted me to a very dangerous habit, one that could do serious harm to another person in another car, to my own children riding in my car, and to me. I put the warning where I would see it each time I got into the car and started to drive. I need those sorts of warnings. I forget very easily, and I am easily blinded to the dangerous habits I’ve practiced over a lifetime.
In terms of sin and repentance, the Christian tradition has a lot to teach us about receiving warnings, recognizing dangerous habits and seeking to repent, to change our ways of thinking and acting, and constantly seeking the forgiveness of God and the grace to change. This is at the heart of our tradition – and it is fast being lost in a world where people do not want to see that there is any such thing as sin, that evil forces will prey upon us in our ignorance and blindness, and serious harm results for our own souls and the souls of other people.
But this is the truth. We go through much of our days on autopilot, and not really noticing what thoughts are taking us over, what fantasies preoccupy us, what negative emotions consume us. Instead of looking at what is going on with our own minds and hearts, if we feel bad or fall into a nasty mood, we blame somebody or something, and never even think to examine our thought patterns, our behavior patterns, our mood swings. There are all sorts of warnings when are on a dangerous road, and often they are right there in our tone of voice, repetitive phrases we use, gestures, bad habits. We all do a lot of things that others notice and we do not. In fact, our must harmful behaviors are usually things we do not even notice we are doing. And if we stay identified with the ego at the expense of the soul, we are never going to learn about these things, never have a real chance to see them, and try to repent, try to change our course. The ego seeks praise, and seeks to blame others for any problems that come us. The ego wants to be right all the time, and make others wrong. The ego is a very bad driver from the point of view of heaven. We can’t get there if we let this precious life continue to be ego-driven. Someone who watches and then tells us what they see gives us a gift that is better than all the flattery in the world. Flattery is what the ego thrives on, yet it is useless, and worse, it can be quite harmful to us spiritually. On the other hand, a true critique from an objective person is incredibly helpful. People who truly care for what is good do not flatter us. They might observe something positive about us, they might observe something negative. And whatever they tell us about those observations is for the purpose of growth in goodness. Such a wise person, however, is very rare in this world.
Jesus was talking with people who assumed they knew themselves very well, and assumed that they were very much right, and in right relationship with God. Jesus could see that that was not the case. If someone is in right relationship with God, they are surrendered in humility to a higher power: inner peace is the fruit, strength and compassion are evident, as well as a great love of the truth. Instead of the fruits of the spirit, Jesus could see the presence of pride, envy, malice, and resentment … fruits of the seven deadly sins, not the Holy Spirit. And in the blindness of sin, they were judging other people – sure that those people over there, the ones Jesus ate and drank with, were the sinners. As if there are any of us who are not sinners.
You see, the beginning place for a Christian is not to project his sin onto others, but to turn and acknowledge his sin, to really examine it, observe how these states work on us, and seek to repent, to turn away from, such thoughts and behavior, as well as learn how to resist them. If we never do that, or only rarely do it, the baptismal covenant is not something we take very seriously. That covenant begins with renunciation of sin, and it expects us to be growing in this practice. There are some amazing teachings in our tradition about this, and some very real guides to how it is done. However, we live in a world that sees no value in this central teaching of Christianity because people in our world think we have progressed beyond the notion of sin or the idea that there is such a thing as evil. So it is pretty hard to teach about any of this when people think it does not apply anymore.
I think it does apply. I think it can change us when nothing else can. I am amazed at the treasures in this tradition, and how profound an understanding of human psychology is reflected in the teachings of Jesus. I am sad when I see and hear and recognize a lot of misery in a lot of people’s lives, and I wonder how on earth to bring to the table the teachings of a way of life that really can transform all that.
My children were in the car with me when the policeman stopped me. They expressed surprise that I was calm, that I was not angry, and that I thanked the policeman sincerely for what he had done. They could tell I wasn’t pretending. And really, I actually wasn’t. Although if I had to pretend, if I had to act “as if” in order to do the right thing because my inner state was not clear, that would be okay too. Then I’d need to observe the inner state, and not indulge in all sorts of self-righteous resentment building. Instead, I’d need to refrain from complaining, go to a wise spiritual elder for guidance, and repent of the inner sin.
I talked with the children about what it is that makes us think we are too important to be stopped and corrected by another person. I explained to them that the ego is not a good guide for living – the ego is not watchful of the common good, but it is on hyperalert as to whether it is getting enough praise and attention (and honestly, for the ego, there is never enough) and so, the ego gets offended all the time. The ego is concerned about building up its fantasies about how good it is, how important, etc., and it is not a good thing to go along with its sense of being offended or insulted or hurt. It just isn’t real, even though it feels so real when we identify with it. Okay, so how do I know this? I’ve read it in spiritual literature for years, of course, but that only makes sense because I’ve seen it in my own experience of this personality. I’ve watched a little bit of how it works with my personality, enough to I realize what a blessed relief it is when I can observe the ego getting offended and not go along on that fruitless journey. That journey does not go anywhere good, and it harms along its way. It is a waste of time. Most of the time, I go right along, and so I waste a lot of time. I really do not want to continue wasting this precious life in such a way, so I’m trying to learn and practice what Jesus taught, what the early Christians taught, and what they have handed on to us about this, about sin.
Is it easy? No. Every day these things come up, and every day I fail. There is no success on this path.
Why do it then, if it is not about success?
Because it is about seeking what has been lost. And what has been lost but our soul’s capacity for loving and seeking God. Trying to succeed just gets in the way, trying to succeed is all about our own agenda, not God’s agenda. God doesn’t care if the world holds us in high esteem or low esteem. God doesn’t care how righteous or great or kind or rude or whatever we are. God wants us to seek for what we have lost, not stay trapped in what we think is our own.
To be ready to seek and serve God is to be ready, the moment we realize we have lost the truth, to turn away from all that we have worked so hard to achieve and succeed at, and go humbly to search for what is lost to us. We might leave the whole herd to search for the one lamb. We might leave the big bank account to search for the one lost coin. We might leave a whole crowd that praises us to seek the one sincere friend who will tell us the truth, the one friend with whom we can truly praise God because we are not burdened with putting ego first instead of the soul in the relationship, which leads us to try to please one another with flattery, or to try to escape self-observation with blame.
In the early church, such a person was a real teacher of the spiritual life, and an authentic spiritual director or confessor. If you met someone like this and you genuinely wanted more than the dead-end life the ego has to offer, you would take their guidance to heart, you would entrust them with your confessions of sin, and with the confused state of your soul. They did not offer false comfort; they did not flatter or blame and evade the truth. They pointed beyond the ego to the possibilities of finding the lost life of the soul, and the beginnings of a journey that leads us into Eternity, and the song of a love that does not sour into its opposite, a love that has no opposite, a love that is seeking to lead us back to our lost life in God.
Such people were rare then, but they are even rarer today. But we still have their teachings.
We are fortunate. Here in the mess of the modern world, we still have their teachings and we have a way to seek what has been lost through the deep traditions of the church. We can seek what has been lost if we are willing to see that it has been lost. We can seek it, and we have wise guidance from the tradition as to how to begin.
The Rev. Edie Bird
September 16, 2007
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