Talking about sin, in large part because we don’t really know what it is even though it’s kind of the big deal of Lent.
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Psalm 51:1-17; Joel 2:1-2,12-17
I had a really tough time coming up with what to preach on this evening. I mean, it’s Ash Wednesday. It happens every year, and it’s almost always the same readings. There’s only so many ways to say “Lent is a time of repentence where we reflect on our sinfulness in preparation for Jesus’ death and resurrection and the subsequent forgiveness of sin and gift of eternal life with him.” See?! I just preached every Ash Wendesday sermon in one sentence!
Then, as I was reading through the texts, I keyed in on this bit from the 2 Corinthians lesson: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is likely the single most important thing to know about Lent, and really the whole Christian life, because out of this comes everything else.
So let’s talk about sin, namely, what is it? We often misunderstand sin; we create a list of acts that are “sin” and counter it with another list of acts that is not “sin”. While thinking of sin like that is a little easier to deal with, it also causes issues, like defining what actions are “sin”. It gets more complicated when you think that the Bible sometimes contradicts itself on actions are “sin”. My favorite example of this is pig. For half the Bible (or just under three-quarters if you go by number of pages), eating pig is a “sin”. God said not to, therefore if you eat pig, you become a “sinner” and need to take specific steps to stop being a “sinner”. But for the second half (or quarter, depending again on how you think about it), eating pig is no longer a “sin”, and therefore one can eat pig and not have to worry about unbecoming a “sinner” afterwards.
So what is it? Is eating pig a “sin” or not? If you go by the amount of time involved, it’s definitely a “sin”. If you go by something later superceding something written before, then it’s not. This is rather a silly example, and intentionally so, but it highlights the difficulty of treating sin as a collection of actions.
Instead, what if sin isn’t about an act, but about an attitude. I contend that sin has little to do with actions taken, but everything to do with why you’re doing that action. When you get down to basics, sin is trusting ourselves more than we trust God. It’s not a coincidence that the fruit Adam and Eve ate is from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the temptation was to be like God. Sin really comes down to deciding that we know what is good and what is evil better than God.
It makes understanding sin both more complicated and simpler all at the same time. It’s simpler because we no longer have to stress about is action X “bad” or is action Y “good”; it’s more complicated because we don’t have a list of things that we can or can’t do: we have to actually trust God.
All this is background to show that sin isn’t about what we can see, it’s about what only God can see – where our heart really is. So back to 2 Corinthians 3:21 – “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Why bother, you might be wondering? One of the consequences of sin that popped up way back in Genesis is that death was going to happen. I think it’s pretty fair to say we’re not huge fans of death. We don’t like it very much at all, so God created an “out” – a way for people to “un-sin” and therefore avoid the death that sin brings, at least for a time.
Remember back in the explanation of sin how I mentioned that if someone sinned they had to go through a procedure to “un-sin”? Well, for the first half (or three-quarters) of the Bible, the way to “un-sin” involved an animal being used as a surrogate for the person who “sinned”. The animal became a symbol for whatever it was that made the person a sinner, and killing it rid the person of their “sin”.
That process reached its completion in Jesus; a human, though also God in the flesh, who lived a perfect life without sin; becoming our surrogate. His death “un-sinnered” us, to verb an already awkward not-word, buying our forgiveness for when we decide we know better than God – and ultimately destroy the power of death and give us eternal life.
But we’re not just forgiven so that we can go out and carry on deciding we know better than God. That’s where the second half of 2 Corinthians 3:21 comes in. We’re forgiven to become “God’s righteousness”. Ok, so now what does that mean? To put it simply, it restores us to the original role humanity had – to be God’s representatives on earth. Since not-sinning is trusting in God, as we go about our lives trusting Him we show the world what God is really like: not a just cosmic judge with a scorecard (because if he was we’d all be doomed), but someone who wants everyone to know and love him because it’s the healthiest choice.
Now to bring it back around to Ash Wednesday and Lent, we always talk about giving something up for Lent, but this year I want to challenge you to add something on. It’s something that I’m planning on doing, and I’d like you to join me. I want to be a better example of God to the world – not by compromising who I am, nor by condemning those around me (both things that Christians have had a lot of trouble with in the past), but by trusting God more and showing that there is a better way to live.
Paul goes on in 2 Corinthians to talk about this better way of life, how in the midst of good events and bad events, knowing God is there makes everything worthwile, but I’ve gone on longer than I originally intended as it is, so I encourage you to read and pray with the rest of that reading throughout Lent. In this season, let’s show those around us who God really is – and truly be his representatives – by trusting in Him and following his example in Jesus.