UU Takes on Sin
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
October 14, 2001

	You may not call it sin, but haven’t you had time that you did something you just acutely regretted?  You knew you shouldn’t have done it, and you went ahead and did it anyway.   Maybe you did like I did and bought two pounds of carob-covered almonds at the whole-foods store.  You think of yourself as such a rational creature, such a good kind and loving person, and here you’ve gone and gossiped about your best friend or you’ve caught yourself using a racial stereotype or you gave in and bought that SUV even though you know it’s bad for the environment or you cheated on your spouse or significant other or at least thought about doing so.
	It is often said that we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in sin, but what do we call it when we fall short of the mark?  It’s not as if we don’t have definite moral values.  Sometimes I think UUs are almost as moralistic as more conservative Christians, just moralistic about different issues.   You can prove this for yourself simply by telling a racist joke around this church: you will immediately feel the weight of righteous condemnation.
	In many contexts these days, it is not cool to talk about our moral feelings.  There is a great song by folksinger David Roth which has a refrain, “Don’t should on me and I won’t should on you.”  This is a good rule for many relationships.  Yet we do have moral feelings even if most of us are quite properly reticent about laying them on others.  We can at least lay them on ourselves.  I should do this, I shouldn’t do that.
	Now the term sin is freighted down with all kinds of associations for many of us, and it might be good at the beginning to try to state just what it is I am talking about.  I think that each of us has some kind of set of morals, codes or standards of conduct.  I will provisionally define sin as those occasions when our actions don’t conform to our own standards of conduct.  
	Notice three things about this definition: it is first-person, it is universal, and it is theologically neutral.  First person, because it looks at sin from the inside, from my perspective or yours.  We are not talking this morning about whether the destruction of the World Trade Center or the bombing of Afghanistan are sins, though perhaps some of you would rather talk about that.  Universal because it states a truth about human life which is inherent in having moral codes at all, that is that none of us lives up to them completely.  Theologically neutral because the definition doesn’t include anything about where the moral codes come from or what are the consequences of sin.
	Stated this broadly, I think you can see that I’ve delimited something that is relevant to our lives even if we have thoroughly rejected a more narrow definition of sin based in Christian thinking.  What I’d like to do now is to go back and explore that more narrow conception, to describe what it is that a lot of us have left behind, and then see what concepts and what language is useful in describing and dealing with the broader picture.
	I grew up in the Episcopal church, as you know, and every time we took Communion, we would say a prayer confessing our sins.  I can’t remember exactly how it began, but it said something like this:
“We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep.  We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.  We have offended against Thy holy laws.  We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.  Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults.  Restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit be all honor and glory. Amen.

Pretty heavy, huh?  “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”  That pretty much sums up Protestant guilt, and those of you who grew up Roman Catholic probably had it even worse.
	Many of us left more orthodox branches of Christianity because we didn’t feel like “miserable offenders” most of the time and certainly didn’t want to feel like it.    When we left, we probably chucked out most of the notion of sin, at least in our conscious minds.  That was part of the belief system we were leaving behind.
	And now from the perspective of a liberal religion, we have the luxury to look back and see whether what we chucked out was baby or bathwater. Was there something to this notion of sin after all?
	Sin in the orthodox view came into the world with Adam and Eve, the serpent and the apple.  This is of course a Jewish myth, but it was the Christians who really exploited it.  For most of the mentions of sin in the Hebrew Bible are wrongs committed against the commandments of God, sins of action.  
	It was the Christians who elevated sin to a state, to an ontological category.  First there was Paul with his idea that the crucifixion of Jesus atoned for the sins of the world.  Then three centuries later, along comes Augustine, who was the first to really enunciate the idea of Original Sin.
	Original sin takes the Garden of Eden story and spins it so that it reflects a fall from a state of grace into a state of sin.  This one act by the first man and woman has condemned the entire human race thereafter to live in a state of permanent damnation.
	It was Augustine also who gave sex its central role in the Christian concept of sin.  And not sex itself, not the means by which humans reproduce, but sexual desire.  Poor Augustine’s struggles with his own lust got inflicted on generations after him through his doctrines.  For the condition of sin, the only way out was Jesus.  For the condition of lust, the only way out was cold showers.
	By the time of the Reformation, the church had found other ways out of the permanent damnation, ways which incidentally swelled the church coffers: the selling of indulgences.  In reacion to this corruption, John Calvin came up with the idea that Augustine had been right about original sin, but hadn’t gone far enough.  Not only was almost everyone damned for good, but those few who were eventually to escape damnation were pre-ordained to do so.
	It was against Calvin’s system that our spiritual forebears rebelled.  The Universalists said that everyone wold be saved.  The Unitarians said everyone wasn’t tainted with sin from the get-go.  Both of them firmly rejected the doctrine of Original Sin, with the Universalists perhaps more fervent in their rejection than the Unitarians.  
	OK, so we reject Original Sin or sin as a state.  What about what theologians call “actual sin,” that is, the individual acts which do not measure up to how we say we should behave.  Do we reject those as well?  What would it mean to reject those?
	One thing it might mean is that we don’t believe that people actually fail to live up to their moral codes.  That might be logical but it would be wanting in common sense.  The evidence of our own lives as well as the history in whose midst we live gives powerful testimony that people, yes even UUs, fail constantly to live up to the high aspirations they set themselves.
	Another thing it might mean is that though we acknowledge that such failure are a part of life, there is no good reason to call it sin.  The term imports too much baggage.
	This is apparently the view of the compilers of our hymnbook.  If you look in the topical indices for hymns and for readings in the back, you will not find an entry for “sin.”  Instead, you will find a topic in both called “failings and frailties.”  I don’t much care for “frailties” as a description of a moral state, but failings might have some merit.
	Particularly for what are called sins of omission.  We didn’t go visit Aunt Hattie before she died.  We didn’t give a generous check to the church.  We failed in our duties.  We left undone those things which we ought to have done.
	But what of the positive sins, the sins of commission?  If I’ve gone out and had an affair with a woman I wasn’t married to – just hypothetically, you understand – it is rather awkward to describe that as a failing.  I did what I shouldn’t have.  It’s a positive act.  I think we need a word for it.  We can call it a wrong or, if we want to get legalistic, a tort, but that doesn’t quite capture the essence of the ethical infraction.
	Now I am talking great generalities here and you are probably asking yourselves the question, why does any of this matter?  And the answer I would give is that it does matter what we call something.  What we call it shapes how we conceive of it, and how we conceive of it will dictate what kind of treatment we give it when it makes us sick.  
	And I think Unitarian Universalism tried to get off the hook too easily on the underside of human behavior.  We emphasize the positive, as we should.  Those of us who use the concept of God tend to conceive of her as a beneficent force, a force of goodness or love.  We are inclined to believe in human progress and in the value of education and science.   We want to make good things happen.
	And sometimes we deal with the bad by simply ignoring it, in the world and in our own souls.  I am guilty of this.  I’ve told the story before about my first encounter with a psychological assessment before I went to Divinity School.  I took something called the MMPI, Minnesota Mutiphasic Personality Inventory, a series of some 550 yes-or-no questions.  Afterwards I had an interview with a psychologist in which he explained that the personality scores themselves were normal enough, but the validity scales were too low to use the results.  By that he meant that I had answered the questions as I thought I ought to be, not as I really thought I was.  It was in that interview that I told the psychologist that I had had a normal and happy childhood, there was not divorce or addiction or suicide in my family – and then stopped dead, amazed by what I had just said, for my own father had committed suicide in 1977.  That was the first glimmering of a syndrome which I have explored extensively ever since, that I tend to look at myself through rose-colored glasses and ignore the parts that don’t fit in with my own highly moral conception of myself.
	I think we all do this, and we ignore these parts at our peril.  I am keen at scoping this syndrome out in others, particularly in criminal clients, where often the acute consciousness of guilt produces labyrinthine layers of denials.  But I have been less perceptive when it comes to myself.
	Thus I look for vocabulary not as an idle exercise but to allow me to come to terms with the gap between “ought” and “is” in my own behavior.  That gap is there in each of us, wider in some than in others.
	We had a chat on this subject on the UU minister’s chat list a few months ago.  Some people favored the term fallenness.  We humans are fallen, we are lower than the angels in Shakepeare’s words.  But to many of my colleagues, that was too close to the Garden of Eden story and Original Sin.  Albert Zeigler, a former Universalist minister of this church, says the problem with the Garden of Eden story is that it encourages us to measure down, from a presumed primordial state of grace. Measuring down is just a way of making us all feel bad.  We should instead measure up, taking account of the real progress that the human race has made in moral terms since the down of history.  This is consistent with evolution.
	Other ministers on the chat favored the term “brokenness.”  We are broken by our failings, by our sins.  We are not whole.  This implies that there is some state of wholeness towards which we can move.  And in fact Jungian psychology tells us that our whole lives are spent trying to overcome the primal separation between self and other that we experienced as infants.
	Whatever term might be most comfortable for you, I submit that we need some way of keeping in mind our flawed nature as we go about our lives.  It is not only arrogant, it is dangerous and stultifying to behave as if we have no flaws.  Sometimes I have felt that I carry the attitude, “I’m perfect and you can’t be my friend unless you’re perfect too.”
	At the opposite extreme, some of us some of the time are so conscious of our flaws that we are overcome with guilt and shame.  It’s common for people to drop out of seminary because they feel they aren’t “good enough” to be a minister.  But Henry Nouwen came up with the concept of the “wounded healer,” the person who is able to minister effectively to those in pain because of, not in spite of, the minister’s own failings and frailties.  I came to this church a recently divorced man, very conscious of my own brokenness.  I think I have been able to minister to those whose own relationships are in turmoil out of my own experience with such.
	What about the Buddhists?  Here is one authority I got from the Internet:
“Its idea of sin differs somewhat from the Christian idea. Sin to the Buddhist is mere ignorance or stupidity. The wicked man is an ignorant man. He doesn't need punishment and condemnation so much as he needs instruction. He is not regarded as 'violating God's commands' or as one who must beg for divine mercy and forgiveness. Rather it is necessary for the sinner's friends to make him reason in the human way. The Buddhist does not believe the sinner can escape the consequences in prayerful attempts to bargain with God.” 

I think the position that sin is basically ignorance is very akin to Universalist positions, and I’ll return to this in a minute, but I need to note that Buddhism as it is practiced has a very active concern with sin in the doctrine of Karma.  Karma is the notion that all our actions will have consequences.  Good actions produce good consequences and bad actions produce bad consequences.  The consequences can be delayed until a future lifetime.  
	This has an advantage over the Christian doctrine of sin in that it spreads out the accountability.  In the Christian scheme, I am probably going to hell anyway as I sin, and this may make me be fatalistic and just go on a sin rampage since I’m damned anyway.  But for the Buddhist, the more bad acts he commits, the more trouble he’s going to reap, individually, either in this life or a future one.  Gives us a good incentive to be good.
	And this points up the aspect of sin in which UUs stand out in starkest contrast to orthodox Christian doctrine, not in the nature of individual sin, but in its consequences.  Most of us firmly believe that the good or bad consequences of our actions will be felt in this life, not in heaven, hell or in a reborn soul in a
different individual.  Some might go so far as to agree that as virtue is its own reward, vice is its own punishment.
	But at any rate we believe in the value of awareness and wisdom.  Much if not all of what we account as sin arises from ignorance.  In striving to be aware, to be mindful, we strive to understand the ways in which our own conduct and the conduct of others does not measure up to the standards we set for ourselves.  This avoids the arrogance and ignorance of thinking that we have no flaws.  But once we have identified our areas of failing, we put them into perspective.  Not only does every one else have flaws of their own, but there are whole dimensions of human existence other than the moral one.  Perhaps God actually occupies one of these niches.  Perhaps God is not in the punishment mechanism.
	So we balance, taking our sins seriously but not letting them overwhelm or paralyze us.  And in the end, we can appreciate their contribution to our growth.  Oscar Wilde says in the quote in today’s bulletin that evolution is not possible without sin.   I said last week that it wasn’t possible without sex or death either.  As we fail to meet our own standards, and become aware of that, the awareness prompts and examination of our standards and an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and thus to grow.  And in such growth that the UU finds a release from her sin, and that is as close as we get to salvation.
	Amen.