The Dirtiest Word

I'll bet several candidates come to you as you consider the title, but I suspect the one I have in mind didn't make the top ten: sin.

In in the mind of many progressive or liberal Christians, sin has come to be a dirty word.  Instead, they speak of lessons and mistakes and human failings.  Those are very gentle ways to refer to the Actions Formerly Known as Sin.  Such words do not damage self-esteem, criticize, or condemn.  They do not alienate people.  Jesus, however, never told anyone their 'human failings' were forgiven; he spoke of sin.

The problem is not with the word sin or even the concept of sin.  We recognize actions as right or wrong with ease.  We all know very well when someone has 'sinned' against us. Why, then, the reluctance to admit that sin exists and that we are all guilty of it, when we readily acknowledge that we all fail to live up to the Christian ideal?

Perhaps the reason for our rejection of sin lies less in any unwillingness to admit we err than in the way sin and forgiveness have been presented by the traditional mainline Catholic and Protestant churches.  Often, I was taught that because we were sinful human beings, we were unworthy of God's love.  Instead, we merited only God's disdain, and the fact that God loved us at all was only testament to the goodness of God rather than any lovable aspect of us lowly humans.

Even now, after years of prayer and study, I can feel myself grow tense just typing those old teachings.  Such power has the condemnation of the church - and what the church condemned was, well, our humanity.  Nothing of us was good.  Any good in us was God's spirit dwelling within.  Our job was to root out our humanity as much as we could, chiefly by denial of anything that gave us pleasure.

Such teachings gave rise to barbaric practices.  Pain became viewed as a gift from God to help us burn off the punishment due our sins - this despite Jesus having suffered for our sins on the cross.  And if God didn't gift us with enough pain in life, we were taught to make sacrifice by forgoing innocent joys and pleasures.  Religious were urged to use the discipline - which was a small belt, whip, or flogger - regularly.

These ideas sound medieval, but they persist in the modern day.  Pope John Paul II seems to have used a belt as his personal discipline and is rumored to have slept on the hard floor rather than his comfortable bed.  On Good Friday, some devout Christians take to flogging themselves, even crucifying themselves as penance for their and the world's sins.  Even today, some segments of Christianity see this as pleasing to God.

We don't understand a loving God taking delight in our pain any more than a loving human parent enjoys watching a beloved child suffer, and that's what we are:  God's beloved children.

More tomorrow.