huh?

Sin.

It’s a funny little word.

To the saint it is the antonym of desired behavior.

To the sinner it holds little meaning.

I remember-albeit quite vaguely-finally hearing what this word that I had heard for quite a long time means.  At least, what it means in the eyes of the evangelical Christian: sin is anything that you do that is contrary to the will of God.

Whew!

That explains it!  I finally understand what ’sin’ is.  Now I can live a life as God intended.

There is just one minor problem: this definition of sin is dependant on an assumption.  Does anyone see what it is?  Look closely and you will see the problem.  “Sin is anything that you do that is contrary to THE WILL OF GOD.”

Now, I won’t claim to be some sort of an expert in history or theology or philosophy but I will say that it is my impression that centuries upon centuries of Christians have tried to understand what the will of God is and somehow or another we come up with vastly different answers.  In fact, it seems to me that this is the greatest dividing force in the Christian world.  We can agree on most anything else it seems but when we come to a point of disagreement we consider those of other opinions to be “living in sin.”

Makes it easy to silence your detractors doesn’t it?  Just announce them to be heretics and excommunicate them, oh, and remind people that the greatest sin against the church is to question the church.

I think that if we REALLY want to understand how to live a life like Jesus then we do need to do it as far from sin as possible.  In fact, I agree that the thing that distances man from God, the thing has severed our relationship with the Eternal Creator is, in a single word, sin.  So, sin is a very important point.  Perhaps that’s why there are so many disagreements over what is a sin and what is not a sin.

Looking at sin requires a bit of context.  Let’s try and define sin by looking at a few simple examples.

Example #1-A young minister meets a girl.  She is not a Christian.  She has a reputation that is not befitting of a minister’s wife.  She has been known to “get around” if you catch my drift.  In fact, it would seem that Nellie Furtado released a song about her, the title?

“Promiscuous Girl.” 

The young minister is smitten; he falls in love with her instantly.  To make matters worse, he is convinced that this is the girl that God has-as we say in evangelical circles-prepared for him.  They are wed.  A few years and a few children later, the girl returns to her promiscuous lifestyle.  The young minister is heartbroken.  The deacons of his church advise him to divorce her in order to save the reputation of his ministry.  Instead, he goes to the night club that she frequents disguised as another man.  She does not recognize him in the strobe lights and he convinces her to meet him in a room at the hotel across the street in one hour.

She agrees.

Upon arriving at the hotel she finds the bed, a single long stem rose on the pillow, the lights are low, and she hears the stranger in the bathroom.  A man walks out, only, she knows this man.  It is the minister.  He walks to her and kneeling before her, he presents her with a beautiful diamond ring and asks her to return to his side.  With tears, she returns to him.

Now, back to reality.  In today’s world, this beautiful story of redemption would never take place.  The young minister would have been stopped many times because, after all, we teach very firmly against being unequally yoked.  He never would have even considered the girl as a prospect for marriage.  But wait, this story sounds vaguely familiar…

Ah yes.  It is the story of the book of Hosea, one of the prophets of the Old Testament.  God told Hosea to marry a prostitute in order to demonstrate His love for Israel.  After they had been married for a few years and had had a few children, she returns to the streets to practice her trade again.  Being a man that loved his wife, Hosea risks his reputation, purchases her services for the evening, and restores his wife to his side.

The point?

We have a different slant on what sin is in the “church” world today than they did two thousand years ago.  In our day we assume things should follow a certain set of rules.  These rules, although they may be good, are not able to dictate what sin is.  Just think: if Hosea had followed our modern rules his wife would never have been restored.

Here’s example #2-A father and his son are planting a garden.  They plant corn, radishes, tomatoes, and various other vegetables.  In the midst of the garden though, the father decides that he wants to plant a tree.  He plants an orange tree.  The little boy LOVES oranges.

In order to keep bugs from eating the oranges though, the father frequently coats the tree with insecticide.  He tells his son “You can eat any of the vegetables that we have planted in the garden, but the oranges are not good for you, you need to tell me if you want one so that I can wash it for you.”

The little boy nods in agreement and goes about playing in the garden while his father goes inside.  As he’s playing the little boy gets hungry, really hungry.  He goes inside and sees that his dad is busy, so, not wanting to bother his dad he remembers that he can eat anything in the garden.  He goes outside and realizes that he doesn’t like eating vegetables.  He does, however, enjoy a good orange and the tree is filled with them.  He climbs the tree, picks one, and eats it while poised upon one of the branches.

Later on, the father walks outside to check on his son.  He calls his name.

There’s no response.

Worried the father begins looking through the garden only to find his son lifeless on the ground.  The insecticide on the oranges had gotten all over the little boys hands and so, as he ate the orange and licked the juice from his fingers he became sick on the insecticide.  He became light headed and dizzy and fell from his perch in the tree.  His father was hurt, not because he had eaten the orange, but because he could no longer enjoy his son.

Does this example look familiar?  It is kind of like the story of the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden.  The problem is the same though: the Father warned us about the fruit in the midst of the garden and yet we ate it thus, eliminating our relationship with Him.

I think that is the deepest cut caused by sin: it is a separation from God.  When we do things that cause harm to our relationship to God we have committed sin.

So, what is sin then?  And more so, what do I do to keep from sinning?

Well, it seems to me that these two stories illustrate two very important truths about sin: 1-sin is not bound to what might be the common opinion of right and wrong and 2-sin is more relational than it is “doing a bad thing.  Let’s call these two concepts the “deeper than I thought” and the “relational” principals of sin.  (I feel very accomplished coming up with my own names for these concepts, please don’t laugh at them…)

This may rub rough against your thinking, to be honest; at times it makes my mind feel like it is being scraped against a sheet of 80 grit sand-paper.  I have always been taught, as many of us probably have, that sins can be categorized.  In other words, that somewhere God has a list of do’s and don’ts that we must follow.

In fact, He does.  We call it the Old Testament.  Leviticus is probably the best example of these rules.

There is another list of rules in the Bible.  It is most commonly called “The Ten Commandments.”  This list of ten is a wonderful thing; in fact, it is a set of rules that I think everyone should follow.  And for that matter, all of the laws of Judaism are good too; in fact, they are so good that not a single one of us can fulfill them all.

I think that sin is a deeper issue than these lists of rules though, much deeper.  Sin is something that destroys relationships, namely our Relationship to God.  Think of sin as the “untold truths,” which are more commonly known as lies, in a marriage: the longer these things go unsaid, the more deeply they affect the person not saying them, until one day, that person asks for a divorce suddenly and without explanation.  Had these things been exposed, the relationship could have been saved.  That is what I think of when I think of sin.

Sin, in my mind, is simply selfishness: the more that I think of myself, the more that I sin; the less that I think of myself, the less that I sin.  I find this very strong relationship between (let’s call it a ratio) how selfless I am and how sinless I am.

There was a group of people that were interested in trying to entrap Jesus in His teachings.  These religious leaders knew something that we don’t think much about in the church; they knew that if they asked Jesus about sin that they would be able to find a point of disagreement with Him and in so doing they could easily ‘take people away from His following.  So, they asked Him what was the greatest of the commandments of God.  Jesus was too smart though, that is, you could say that Jesus, being God, was the only one there that really understood the nature of sin.

What was His answer?

Jesus looked at those religious zealots that were passionate about their status and not about the people they were called to serve, and He said: “I will give you two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  And the second is like the first:  Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Some time ago I became very determined to try and live my life in such a way that I would be fulfilling the will of God.  I tried a lot of things in the process: I stopped going to the movies altogether, even though I enjoy the movies; I stopped listening to “Non-Christian” music, even though I have yet to find a “Christian” match to The Eagles or U2; I would never say certain things, even though they were my honest thoughts; and I started to sound like your typical Christian saying things like “God Bless you” and calling people “brother” and “sister.”  (I should make a note that none of these things are bad, but if they are not authentic, honest, or sincere, isn’t that just lying?)  In my search for the will of God I came to realize that simple little sayings like “just trust in God” bore the most obscure meanings.  I needed something more tangible; I needed a Jesus-a faith-that although I don’t always understand, was bigger than the lists of do’s and don’ts that have divided people-of the same faith mind you-for centuries.

So I developed a test.  It has two steps:

Step #1-Does this help me love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Step #2-Does this help me love others as much as I love myself?

Sin is about selfishness (you could also call this pride).  Whenever you do something that causes you to put yourself before God or others, chances are that you are falling into sin.  The determining factor of sin: does what you’re doing/saying/thinking have an affect on your relationship with God/your neighbor?

If this is true, then there is only one way to be sinless.  You have to be selfless.  The ratio is simple; you will be just as sinless as you are selfless.  There is no list, sin is about relationships and as you know, relationships are far too complicated to be bound by lists.  That’s why Jesus came in the first place; He knew that we couldn’t meet every check box on the list, so he created a simpler way, a way that we could understand, to help us live before God.

In simplest terms, sinless is to selfless as green is to grass.  You can’t have the green without the grass but without the green, the grass is dead.  If the grass is green, then it is alive and do you know what the best part of live grass is?  Live grass is where life happens.  It is where we play, where we have picnics, where we lay at night to gaze up at the stars.  And it seems to me that THAT is the point of being sinless.  Jesus is the only sinless person that ever lived and He always invited people to be with Him, to experience life.

Let our picture of sinless become more welcoming than it is excluding because when we exclude, we break relationships and it seems to me that THAT is the greatest sin of all.