A sermon given December 3, 2000

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

We welcome you to this house of worship today, the first Sunday of Advent.

Whether your hearts are heavy or you are filled with gladness,

Let us rest together in the spirit of love and renewal,

And may we find the hope we need this day.

Come let us worship together.

In the early 1970's, liquid eyeliner was all the rage, and Merle Norman liquid liner came in bright pink bottles with white caps. I know because those bottles of eyeliner were part of my first lesson about sin.

When I was four years old I knew where my mom kept her make-up. . . and I knew I wasn't supposed to get into her grown-up stuff. But I was a mischievous little girl. So, I threw caution to the wind and snuck into mom's bathroom, opened the makeup drawer, picked out a color with a tantalizing name, put it in my pocket, then crept out of the bathroom (careful to listen for people in the hallway) and then ZOOM I was down the hall in a flash and locked in the safety of my own bathroom. Right away I opened the bottle. Liquid eyeliner - hmmm, the goop felt cold on my eyelid as I struggled to apply it in a straight line the way mom did. I set the bottle down on the counter and looked at myself in the mirror. Big blue uneven streaks ran across my eyelids. Needed more, I decided, so I reached for the bottle with my clumsy hands and knocked the open bottle off the counter. As it bounced across the floor, liquid navy blue eyeliner started to pour out onto the white linoleum. First I felt shock, then panic and then my four year old mind started racing - what do I do to stay out of trouble??!!

Clean up the mess and get that eyeliner back in mom’s make-up drawer! So I grabbed some toilet paper and wiped up the navy blue gunk. . . never mind soap, water or a sponge which would have had some effect on the mess! Then I whizzed back up the hall to stow my stolen treasure back where it belonged.

It all went well for a time. Mom did not catch me on any of these trips into her bathroom, and I thought I had it made. Until bath time. When bath time came, she walked into my bathroom and took one look at the floor and said, "Jennifer, what happened here?" Well, when I told her I spilled her eyeliner, and she had to get out the bleach and the big scrubby sponge I knew I was in trouble. I hid out in the hallway.

For several weeks before this misadventure I had been going to church with the neighbor girl. Mom and dad didn't go to church, but my neighbor went to the fundamentalist church. In Sunday school there I had learned about sin and hell.

For some reason these Sunday school lessons came to mind as I stood in the hallway while my mom was cleaning up the mess in the bathroom. After a while I crept back toward my bathroom door, and peeked around and asked, "Mom, was what I did a sin?" "Yes!" She replied with such alacrity that my stomach felt like it had dropped to my feet. Oh no! This was serious. I was just figuring out what sin was and here I was already committing one. I knew that was bad, because I'd learned that sin led to hell - a very hot, fire-y and bad place you wanted to avoid no matter what.

Needless to say, Mom and I ended up having a long talk about this later that night. No, she reassured me, I was not going to burn in hell for spilling her eyeliner. There were levels of sin - and as sins go this one was pretty minor. "Everyone sins," she said, "even me. We just try not to and" she looked at me pointedly, "try to learn from it when we do make mistakes."

A couple weeks later my mom said, "I don't think you should go to church with Kimmie any more." That was fine with me, and so there was no church for a couple of years. I finally went to church again when my mom found the local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, and this time the whole family went to church together.

There wasn’t talk about hell or sin at the Unitarian Universalist church. The people were just as nice as the fundamentalist people had been, but these people believed in science and nature and that the aim of life was to make this world we live in the best world we can. I liked it there a whole lot.

I was relieved that sin and hell were not part of this new religion. I'd go so far to say I was exuberant about the absence of damnation. These were all pretty scary ideas.

But I also had many so questions. Why did bad things happen? What made people do mean things? Why did I want to do bad things some of the time? Why did I get so angry? Was it possible, with so many bad things happening, that doing good makes any difference in the world at all?

I am not six years old anymore, but I still have these same questions. Terrible things happen all the time, all around me. And I do wrong and make mistakes. But I was reluctant to take up the idea of sin again. In a hopeful faith like ours, why would I reconsider the idea of sin as one that might be helpful to my religious life? But over time I have come to believe that sin is a reality of human life, just as virtue is a reality of human life. No one can escape either.

I remember a story a former warden of a maximum-security prison in California told when he explained why he gave up his work and chose a different vocation. He said that he had come to believe that everyone has a gift to bring the world, and that one of the most dangerous men in prison had convinced him of this. This prisoner was a frightening presence: the depth of his rage was so deep. But he had a special gift. He could teach people to read. The illiteracy rate in prison is horrifically high. If prisoners are going to be able to live productively when they return to civilian life they need to be able to read. And this man had a gift for teaching literacy in the most difficult cases. The warden quit after this man was executed for his crimes. Now matter what our sin, however deep it may be, there is still some virtue in all of us. Sometimes that virtue may be hard to see, but I don't believe we can deny it exists.

We are born with free will and this great gift inherently possesses the possibility of both sin and virtue. To deny this is to deny the reality of our human condition.

The idea of sin is an ancient one. Sin is derived from the greek word hamartia, which means to miss the mark. Imagine a target on a haystack. Even when we try and aim for the bullseye, some of the time we miss. How can we make the mark every time? That is what it is to be human.

When we miss the mark we have yet another decision to make. We can choose to pick up the arrow and plant our feet and aim again, or we can stop trying to aim for the good, stop trying to set our sights on the mark. It is for us to decide what we'll aim for.

To discover what sin might mean for us liberal religious people today, I turned to our Universalist past, and discovered something interesting in the writing of Judith Sargeant Murray. Mrs. Murray was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the post-revolutionary period, and her religious understanding had a dramatic impact on the development of Universalist thought in this country.

In 1778 she wrote a letter to her youngest brother in response to his questions about universal salvation and sin. She writes to him: "No [one] can live, in this imperfect state, without being guilty of that, which, in the sight of God, is sin. For, my dear, the very heavens which appear to us as perfect are not clean before [God]." [but even though] "we have all broken the laws of our God . . . We know . . . the Robe of Salvation covers all."

Murray reconciles the fact of sin with the love of God and the salvation of all humanity. She found a hopeful gospel in sin. Then, as I explored further, I found that the generation following Murray continued to find hope in sin.

Hosea Ballou was one of the leading Universalists in the 19^th century. He writes in his Treatise On Atonement: "God [is] the author of sin. . . . but as it respects the meaning of God it is intended for good. . . . If sin and guilt had never been introduced into our system, that plan grace by atonement could never have been exhibited." For Ballou, sin was actually intended for the good by bringing to humanity the possibility of atonement. Our Universalist fore-bearers moved toward accepting the reality of human sin and human virtue – and continued to affirm the great love of God.

Today, true to our heritage, we still do not come to church to be filled with fear of God's retribution. Our gospel continues to proclaim the hopeful message of the reality of a great redeeming Love. We are each charged with the responsibility to develop our own theological path and discover what beliefs about God or mystery or the holy will ground our lives. Upon this ground of belief we are called to build the moral foundations by which we will live. I believe the notion of sin can help our moral foundations and convictions grow, and can strengthen our compassion for the failing of ourselves and others.

However, I also think a conception of sin that immerses us in guilt is harmful. Guilt and sin have long been wed in the Christian tradition, but our Universalist forbearers believed that they must be separated. Remember that Murray insisted to her brother that sin was a fact of every human life. And Ballou claimed that sin was created by God for the good and brought us the gift of atonement. Sin did not exist to bring guilt, but hope.

So how can we understand sin in a way that will help us grow as religious people?

I would like to suggest that we consider sin in light of the definition from the Greeks - to miss the mark. Or to look at it another way, sin is the obstacle that keeps us from perfection. If we were all perfection our life would have no meaning. If the world were all goodness, our blessings would have no value. The tension between sin and virtue brings meaning to our lives and this tension deepens our spiritual understanding.

The purpose of our faith is to help us as we struggle toward the good: to help us choose virtue over sin. And yet I know we will fall short in large and small ways. All I have to do is look at my own life.

Have I ever pulled the chair out from behind the little boy who sat next to me so that he'd fall on the floor when he tried to sit back down? Yes. When a cashier gives me too much money in my change, have I ever kept it? Yes. Have I ever raised my voice and spoken in anger to my spouse? Yes. Have I ever judged harshly those who have different beliefs that I? Yes. Have I raised my hand in rage against another living creature? Yes. Have I ever lied to save myself from punishment or embarrassment? Yes. I have done all of these things, and with all of these I missed the mark of virtue.

Each of s has done some wrong that weighs heavily upon our hearts, but I think there is something that we can do to transform our misdeeds. We have the power to atone for our sins.

When I was a teenager my grandparents picked me up from school every day, drove 40 miles to take me to my ballet class, and waited for five hours until class was over to take me home. Was I grateful for this substantial commitment they were making to me? No. They irritated me. They drove too slow. They wanted to know how my day was and what I was learning in school. They believed different things than I did about all kinds of stuff. They bugged me and I was not shy about letting my irritation slow. I had no regard whatsoever that they were giving up most all of their day every day so that I could have a hobby. I was so self-centered.

But one day, when we were driving down to dance class, something different happened. We had a good talk about what I had been up to and what they’d been up to that day. We talked about some things that were going on in our town, and I even asked my grandfather to help me with my chemistry homework. It was a wonderful day. I remember thinking to myself that this day had been so much nicer than the other days over the last year and a half, and I'd like to keep having days like that one with them.

The next day I went to school in the morning, and after school, instead of my grandparents, my mom met me in the parking lot. My grandfather had had a heart attack and was in the hospital and I needed to come right away. He died two days later. I cannot express to you how deeply I regretted my selfishness and irritability over the year before he died, or how grateful I was for the last day we'd had together. There was nothing I could do to change what had been with my grandfather, but right there and then I decided to quit being so selfish. Over the next ten years my grandmother and I had a wonderful time together. I'd drop in for visits, take her shopping, or just call and see how she was doing.

How do we unburden our hearts of our misdeeds and renew our quest for the good? It is by atonement that our burdens are set down.

 Atonement enables us to ask for forgiveness, to change our hearts, to right our wrongs, to help us re-aim our lives toward the good. Atonement is the gift of sin, and I believe the source of hope in our world. It is in our internal battles, where we reach for atonement, that we may be reconciled to one another, and in doing so come closer to the holy.

May it be so.

BENEDICTION

Go now,

And may your aim be strong –

And when you miss the mark,

May your hearts be forgiving.

Go in love and go in peace.

Copyright 2000, by Jennifer Schnayer.  All rights reserved.