Sin and Love [Proper 19C - I Timothy 1:12-17]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
I Timothy 1:12-17
Sin and Love
So many sinners this Sunday – and not just in the pews. There are sinners all over these Scripture
passages. Sinners making golden
calves. Sinners singing psalms. Sinners writing letters – presumably to other
sinners. Sinners eating lunch with
Jesus. And sinners grumbling about the
sinners eating lunch with Jesus. That’s
a lot of sinners. And where there are
sinners there is bound to be sin.
I grew up in a Pentecostal church and there I heard enough
sermons about sin to last me a lifetime.
I knew our list of mortal sins well: strong drink, bad language, naughty
thoughts, anything related to rainbow flags, and also voting for Bill Clinton. By the way, a lot of you folks would really
scandalize the Pentecostals I grew up with.
Of course there were many other sins as well, ones that we didn’t talk
about quite as much. I found out later,
unfortunately too late, that joining the Episcopal Church, for example, is one
of the lesser known sins. And that there
are people who knew me as a child who are very sad that I am now going to
Hell.
Every Sunday, as the lengthy sin sermon ended, the lights would
go low, and the keyboard would softly sound – a gentle synthesized string
setting. The altar was open because,
apparently, or so we were told, there was a bus waiting outside hoping to run
us all over. And if you did die tonight,
if you walked out of this building and were hit by a bus, are you sure you
would go to Heaven? You really had to
stay on your toes because even one of those sins, committed in between altar
calls, could lose you God’s love and cost you eternally.
And so, perhaps it goes without saying, I grew up with a
complicated view of sin. Rather than try
my best to love God, most often I tried my best to avoid the bad stuff, to
follow the rules, to never mess up. The
stakes were so high. And so then was the
shame. I took it all very
seriously. I tried not to sin at
all. Relatively speaking, I think I did
a pretty good job. But I wasn’t perfect,
not as perfect as I was told God needed me to be; and I was terrified that
someone would find out. I would repent
to God often but I would never tell anyone in my church. I couldn’t let anyone find out that I was
sinner.
In the many years since I left that tradition I have come to
think of sin differently. Though I still
try to avoid oncoming busses, I’m no longer worried about them separating me
from my eternal salvation. I find that I
now profoundly trust in the unconditional love and abundant grace of God. I believe what the Prayer Book says: that the
bond God forms with us in the sacrament of baptism is indissoluble. I believe what the Apostle Paul says in his
letter to the Romans: that nothing in all of creation can ever separate us from
the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I believe what is written in today’s excerpt from first letter to
Timothy: that the grace of our Lord overflows for us.
And I have come to agree with what Barbara Brown Taylor asserts
when she writes, “the essence of sin is not the violation of laws but the
violation of relationships.”[1]
I’ve come to believe that mostly because
it is all over the Gospels. It is this distinction
that is at the heart of Jesus’ conflict with the religious leaders of his time. Jesus ruffles a lot of feathers in the
Gospels because he is fast and loose with the letter of the law. For instance, many times in the Gospels Jesus
heals people on the Sabbath, even though he is repeatedly reprimanded for this
practice because, his opponents claim, it is a violation of the law. But Jesus doesn’t see it that way. Early in Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus is
challenged, he says, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to
save life or to destroy it?”
In the centuries since Jesus’ earthly ministry, we, in the Church,
have developed a number of doctrines about Jesus. One of those doctrines is the sinlessness of
Jesus. But it is important to remember
that during his earthly ministry, there were many people who questioned Jesus’ moral
priorities and his character; we see that in today’s Gospel. Jesus knew the laws, but he wasn’t hung up on
the letter of the law. He was hung up on
love. It is no surprise that when he was
asked to name the greatest of the many commandments, Jesus chooses love – and then
claims that it is love that fulfills the entire law.
St. Augustine of Hippo, in one of his sermons, explains this
well. He says, “Once and for all, I give you this one short
command: love, and do what you will. If you hold your peace, hold your peace
out of love. If you cry out, cry out in love. If you correct someone, correct
them out of love. If you spare them, spare them out of love. Let the root of
love be in you: nothing can spring from it but good. …”[2]
And if that is the case, if love does fulfill the law, if nothing can
spring from love but good, then there is really no need to obsess over a list
of rules and regulations. Love is the
compass that allows us to navigate the moral, ethical, and spiritual complexities
of this life. You don’t need to walk in
fear of messing up. You are called to
walk in love. Paul Tillich claims that, “[The
one] who needs a law which tells [one] how to act or how to not act is already
estranged from the source of the law.”[3] We do ourselves no favors if we are more
preoccupied with our sins than we are with our God. A flawless life without love is nothing
compared to a messy life deeply rooted and grounded in the abundant love of Jesus.
Ultimately, a fixation on individual sins, whether pharisaical,
puritanical, pentecostal, or even personal, is a form of sanctified perfectionism.
And perfectionism (and I say this as an Enneagram
One, the Perfectionist) including perfectionism in the spiritual realm, is
founded in the fear that we are essentially unlovable, that unless we do
everything just right, follow all of the rules, we will never truly be
accepted. When we cannot believe in the
unconditional love of God, we spend our lives looking out for busses,
terrorized by the idea of Hell, haunted by shame, convinced that we have not
yet earned enough of God’s favor. That’s
no way to live.
Those of you who know me, know that I am married. And I don’t want my wife to live her life
walking on eggshells, always afraid of messing up, thinking she has to continually
and constantly earn my love. I want her
to be happy, to live her best life; I want her to bask in the love that I have
for her. I want her to love me – to treasure
our relationship, to see the best of me, even when I am at my worst.
Now I’m not God, obviously. But I
do think that that is what God wants too.
God doesn’t want us walking on eggshells, always afraid of messing up. The God who repeatedly says, do not be
afraid, does not want us living in constant fear. God wants us to have the freedom to fall more
and more deeply in love. God wants us to
trust that God’s love is really and truly unconditional, to be willing to place
our hearts and our lives in God’s hands, to rest in the knowledge that we
cannot lose love, that nothing in all of creation can ever separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing.
And I think that security, that security we find when we are able to
accept God’s unconditional, perfect love, is what finally sets us free from
sin. Because it unlocks our heart to
love others and to love ourselves. And
love, Jesus reminds us, fulfills the law.
In my life, I’ve heard a lot of sermons about sin. But all I really needed to hear was this one
short command: Love, and do what you will.
Comments
Post a Comment