Advent is a time for sin

Well, that certainly limits the possibilities for the coming festive season, now doesn’t it.

What do you mean, no revelling and drunkenness, no debauchery...not even a little?

#ChristmasIsRuined

So, with verses like that, this sermon had to be about sin...you’re welcome.

Advent, btw, used the be more about sin, at least, it used to be more about preparation through penance.

Our letter writer Saint Paul wasn’t interested in overthrowing societal convention for socio-economic justice, or gender equality, or freedom of speech, or the abolition of slavery, etc, even if there was no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. All he wanted was for the Gospel message to be spread and preached and accepted as widely as possible. And the last thing you wanted was for that marketing strategy -if we can call it that- to be thwarted, to be sidetracked by rumours about the alleged bad behaviour of your early Christian congregants. Your personal flaws shouldn’t, couldn’t at any time distract from the mission.

Reputation, Saint Paul realised already in the 1st century, is everything.

This isn’t to disparage Paul and the urgency he felt and the passion he felt for sharing the redemptive message he himself had received and which had radically changed his life.

Our context is different than that of his time and place, where he insisted Jesus was going to return to earth soon, in his own generation, and people needed to be told, and to repent and sell off their riches and join the Jesus Movement, join the Way with capital -W. And they might get confused and repulsed from the Message, if you were found to spout nonsense like the equality of all people, or if you were caught preaching free love.

False rumours, fake news would indeed become a lethal weapon in the persecution of Christians: atheism, sedition and cannibalism were just some of the charges the Roman authorities would level at the growing Christian communities.

Sin, even alleged sin, was a liability for the cause.

Now, the list of what sin is may be short or long, depending on one’s own interpretations.

The examples given in our epistle text this evening are quite heavy duty, to say the least.

One of the criticism within the Church you’ll often hear, is that anything goes these days: it used to be a sin, now it’s not anymore; there are no more rules, everyone’s living their own truth, and in the good old days everything was much more clear cut and simpler.

It’s true that sin isn’t as ‘simple’ as a mistake or a crime: sin touches on the essence of our be-ing because it touches on our relationships.

Existence never happens in a void, we don’t exist on our own; and sin distorts the interconnection of existing.

This can happen at all levels, with our God, with our neighbours, and with ourselves.

A quick online search of the definitions of ‘a mistake’, ‘a crime’, and ‘a sin’ gives the following results, according to the Cambridge dictionary,

mistake

/mɪˈsteɪk/

noun

1. an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result.

crime

/krʌɪm/

noun

1. an illegal act, an action or activity that is against the law, or illegal activity generally.

sin

/sɪn/

noun

1. the offence of breaking, or the breaking of, a religious or moral law.

Interestingly, this last definition of sin is all about the verb and the ing-form; it doesn’t include the classical theological notion of a sinful nature.

Ever since Adam and Eve, sin has been described as being part of our human narrative, our family history. The details of the different theologies about this vary, but sin is here to stay, so to speak.

We are all sinners.

Are, not do, it seems.

So, when we claim that ‘we hate the sin but we love the sinner’, is that by our own definition even possible?

Because, if everyone is a sinner then shouldn’t we be loving them wholly, because how would we compartmentalise?

Is someone a criminal? Or are they a person who has committed a crime?

Is someone a sinner? (we seem to claim that they are) Or are they a person who sins? (as our online definition seems to suggest)

Is a person gay? Or are they someone who has sexual relations with others of the same gender? Or are they allowed to be gay but not act on these feelings, impulses?

Our approach to sin, our handling of sin if you will, isn’t honest nor is it just, because our approach ranges from the hypocritical, to the confused, to the confusing, both to Christians and non-Christians, because in the debate we conflate are and do, often just to win an argument.

As we said earlier, reputation matters, and the Church has a reputation for being obsessed with sin.

Circling back to ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’: never has so much truth been erroneously awarded to a cliché that both avoids and kills the conversation.

It’s bad theology and it’s lazy theology, complacent theology even.

And we all do it; even if we’re not formulating it exactly the same way, we all try to argue certain topics out of the Church, or insist people would just accept our opinion about them.

We all sin in our talking about, our argumentation about sin, in our treatment of sin.

We all sin, for better or worse, in our obsession with sin.

Of course we won’t settle the debate in one sermon, nor get to the bottom of the ontological, the existential meaning of sin.

So, then why bring it up?

The text from Romans was too enticing not to, obviously, but as we learned earlier, Advent used to be more about sin, more like Lent, with fasting and penance.

And it would make perfect sense to talk more about it in the season were we look forward to the birth of the Saviour come to redeem us from said sin.

Moreover, for this first Sunday in Advent we were encouraged to invite someone along to the service.

What will they encounter here?

Probably not debauchery, we’re not that exciting.

But what about the quarrelling and the jealousy?

Even though we cannot explain everything about sin, what it is, how it works, the nitty gritty theological minutiae, the impression we Christians often give is that sin is a weapon used for exclusion.

God excluded Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, and we’ve been very readily following that example ever since.

Sin has become a preferred go-to strategy, either to emphasise it to the extreme, either to downplay it and downplay those concerned by it.

We come back to what we said before: sin touches on the essence of our be-ing because it touches on our relationships; we don’t exist on our own and sin distorts the interconnection of existing, not just sin itself, but certainly also our handling of it.

Love the sinner.

Advent could probably do with a bit more sin.

And with more sainthood.

We are all sinners...and we are all saints as well.

Each a hundred percent, like Christ is the God-man, each a hundred percent; it’s a Chalcedonian creedal principle.

God knows about sin, and God knows about humanity, and that’s why in Advent we look for, long for the God-man to enter our lives and redirect the sin which we encounter as part of our nature to the sainthood which is just as much part of us too. That’s called grace.

In a fragment of a letter he wrote in 1521, Maarten Luther, the German reformer, says:

            “God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your  sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is  the victor over sin, death, and the world.”

Advent used to be more about sin in order to focus more readily and consciously on love and hope and grace.

Luther continues, with what might even serve as our motto this Advent:

            “Pray hard for you are quite a sinner.”

May love, mercy and peace abound with you always. Amen.