My husband Peter and I get The Sun Chronicle newspaper delivered to our home in Foxboro each morning, and I especially enjoy reading it on Saturdays, when it carries an extensive Religion section.  One of the regular columns in this Religion section is entitled “Sermon Topics,” and a variety of churches in the greater Attleboro area list the name of the next day’s preacher, the title of his or her sermon, and the scripture lesson on which the sermon focuses.

 

I read this column each week with a sense of admiration and relief – admiration that my colleagues have their acts together enough to have their sermon title figured out before press time, and relief that this church is just outside the paper’s geographic area, so I don’t have to. 

 

And this week, I’m also relieved that you didn’t get a “sneak peak” of my sermon title.  After all, those first three letters, S – I – N, are a major turnoff, and if you had seen them ahead of time, who knows how many of you might have decided that this was a really good morning to sleep in.  I mean, who wants to come to church and hear about how bad you are? 

 

Peter Gomes, the preacher at Harvard’s Memorial Chapel, tells the story of an encounter with one of his secular friends.  “Sin,” sniffed the friend, “what a tiny, nasty little word.  That’s all you Christians can talk about.  Why don’t you talk about people?”[1]

 

And Gomes’ perfect reply?  “I do talk about people, all of the time; it is called ‘sin.’”[2]

 

Ah yes, sin – that tiny, nasty little word.  It immediately makes us think of misbehaving and breaking the rules.  We in mainline churches don’t really like to use the word “sin” because it comes across as old-fashioned, judgmental and negative, the primary focus of preachers whose one and only sermon topic is “you’re all going to hell.” 

 

Every week in this church, we say as a congregation a unison Prayer of Confession, and I’ve actually had parishioners complain about having to join in on this prayer, saying that they don’t much like having to confess to things they didn’t do.  A preacher relates the story of a church member who approached him after one service, pointing to the Prayer of Confession in the bulletin, and announcing, “I don’t like it.  It makes me sound like a sinner.”  The parishioner’s solution was to rewrite the Prayer of Confession for himself before worship started, tempering it each week with words such as sometimes, and occasionally and some of us.[3]  But it is our tradition to make corporate confession, “corporate,” meaning as the body of Christ, the Church.

 

In the 1970s, psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book entitled, What Ever Became of Sin?  The word “sin,” Menninger felt, had disappeared from the vocabulary not only of the country but also of the Church.  Nothing was a sin anymore, he noted.  The bombing of Vietnam wasn’t a sin, just bad foreign policy.  Rape, murder, lying, and cheating weren’t sins, just unfortunate or misinformed or inappropriate choices. 

 

But Menninger argued that by not using the word “sin,” we had lost the moral dimension of what it means to be human.  We had lost our understanding of human beings as creatures with personal responsibility and accountability.  We make moral choices every day, some of them right and some of them wrong.  Sometimes we knowingly and willingly choose what we know to be wrong.  And when we make those wrong moral choices – that is sin. 

 

Well, it is no more fashionable to talk about sin today than it was in the 70s.  In a gathering of national church leaders, a speaker talked about the need for acknowledging sin in the world and in our lives, our to repent for those sins.  Sitting in the front row was the television preacher Robert Schuller, who at that point got up and walked out.  Holding an impromptu press conference in the hall afterwards, he said people are feeling too guilty today, and instead of talking about sin, we need to talk about self-esteem and personal fulfillment.

 

Well, certainly self-esteem and personal fulfillment are more pleasant to talk about, but as much as we may want it to, sin isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  And even though we’d prefer to leave the subject to our brothers and sisters in the of fire-and-brimstone branches of Christianity, it doesn’t mean that they alone get to define it. 

 

Sin is commonly thought of as committing a transgression against God’s law, such as the Ten Commandments.  In Hebrew, one of the words for “sin” literally means “missing the mark.”  In the Lord’s Prayer we recite together every week, we say “forgive us our trespasses,” which conjures up the image of wandering out of bounds, of going where we ought not.

 

The understanding of sin that I use in my ministry and in my preaching comes from Paul Tillich, one of the pre-eminent theologians of the 20^th century.  Tillich defines sin as estrangement or separation – separation from God, from God’s creation, from God’s people, and from God’s purpose for one’s life. 

 

I think that most of us, probably all of us, know – at least subconsciously – that there are times when we do turn away from God, when we do push others away from us or distance ourselves from others; when we do turn our back on what we know we should do and instead do what we want to do.  As much as we don’t like talking about sin, we can’t run away from the fact that we do make bad, unhealthy, harmful choices – lots of them, over and over again – choices that increase not only our own suffering but the suffering of others.  And that is sin.

 

And I think it is common for people who know they have made bad choices to separate even more from God because they feel so unworthy.  They feel that they must clean up their act before they can start coming to church – it’s like saying, “I’ll start going to the gym after I lose some weight.”

 

But listen again to these words from this morning’s Scripture lesson: “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.  Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account” [Hebrews 4:13].

 

In other words, we can’t hide anything from God.  And the good news of our Christian faith is that Jesus sees us as we are and does not turn away.  When our instinct is to retreat, God reaches out to us.

 

Our scripture lesson continues: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.  Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” [4:14-16].

 

At the heart of the Christian faith is the One who knows our sin and sympathizes.  Sympathy is entering into someone else’s situation, understanding and still loving them both in it and beyond it.  And that’s what Jesus does.  Jesus knew temptation; he was tested by temptation in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry, and tempted again in the garden of Gethsemane to avoid the cross; he knew the temptations of anger and power, and the temptation to doubt himself and his God. 

 

Yes, we have a high priest, a friend who knows everything about us and loves us just as we are, warts and all.  Christ doesn’t check first to see if we are faultless, deserving, or worthy.  He loves us even before we try to do anything to make amends for our actions.  And when we realize that God knows us fully, and loves us and forgives us any way, no matter how estranged, separated, disconnected, and sinful we may be – that is when we can receive the gift of God’s grace that takes away our guilt. 

 

We can’t earn this gift of grace that God offers, and we don’t have to get our lives in shape, looking nice and clean and shiny, before we can go to God to receive this gift of love.  Grace can only be received when we know we cannot merit it, and have no pretense or self-deceptions about who we are.  It is only when we know we are not worthy to receive God’s love that it can be ours.  That’s why it’s called grace -- the free, unmerited gift from God. 

 

And to know that we are loved by God is to know everything worth knowing.

 

Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.  Amen.