Sin, sin, what is sin...

 My latest beef with every vision of Christianity I see practiced in the world is regarding what I expect is just its shallow understanding of "sin." I'm told again and again and asked to confess to the fact that I'm essentially worthless. Sin consists, I'm told, of actions contrary to God, to disobedience, to doing things I'm not supposed to do, breaking commandments, putting myself above others and above God. I am not convinced that this is a healthy, proper, full way of thinking about sin. It leads me to see myself as unlovable. God has to do the extraordinary, miraculous thing of loving me despite the fact of my worthlessness. But I don't need religion to make me think I'm unlovable. And I don't need to think of God as a being whose love is so great that he loves beings that are utterly unlovable.

God doesn't love us because we are evil. He loves us because we are good, good as Augustine defines human nature, as a corrupted goodness, not as most of Christianity today sees it as fundamentally evil. All of God's world is good. It was pronounced good according to the creation myth and must be understood as good. We are good people. God loves our goodness.

But then there is sin, hamartia, tragic flaw, missing the mark. The image that helps us understand sin is not about disobedience; it's about trying and failing. I can't miss the mark if I'm not aiming at it. I can't make it on my own. I can't find God unless God helps me. Sin is the distance between my farthest shot and the target. Sin is the mark of the need for more than my body or senses can compass in reaching God. God came into the world because we can't make it to God on our own. 

We are, it seems, always trying to reach God, whether we know it or not. That's the ultimate goal, whatever other goals distract or intervene. And in trying to reach God we often do terrible things. We also often do great things. We kill each other, but we also heal each other. We murder the Christ and we spread the gospel of love. We are all these people. Each has his, her, their own distance to cover. Some try to cover it via the denial of God and the persecution of faith. They will fail, though good may now and then come of even that, as murdering Christ made the spread of  his gospel possible. All of that is the subject of other meditations. Today, I want to say that the gospel contains this:

God loves us because we are good. We who strive for unity with God, which is being what we were made to be, need God to get there. I don't believe in the total surrender of the will--the vision of Edward Taylor. I could be wrong about that. But I prefer to think that God did not give us the gifts he gave us to fust in us unused. Both Taylor and Hamlet miss the mark. We're always missing the mark. But we're always improving our aim, if not necessarily our results.