I despair of the way children are taught about sin. In many situations, it’s a sort of Santa Claus ‘naughty or nice’ approach, where there is a list of things that are good (like patting puppies on the head) and a list of things that are bad (like punching puppies in the face). So children are taught to do more good things and fewer bad things, and this makes God happy.
Sometimes the concept of Original Sin is introduced with little nuance, so some children are taught that they were born sinful, and they often interpret that as meaning they are intrinsically bad. This, of course, is merely part of a litany of grievances I have about how children are introduced to faith, but let’s just focus on sin for today.
As we mature and are exposed to more sophisticated theological concepts, we come to understand that God is not making a list of our actions and checking it twice in order to find out who’s naughty and nice. Rather, our cruel and selfish actions derive from sin. And sin is our failure to live fully into our identity as people created in the image of God. We grieve our failures - and we own up to our failures - because God desires the very best ‘us’ possible. When we are in Christ we are out of the fear and disintegration of the world. We are saved from sin in the old creation and we become a new creation.
Now, I’ve said sin about 14 times already in this sermon, and I’ll say it quite a few more times before we leave today. But it’s one of those words that is shrouded in etymological ambiguity. I mean, it’s from Old English where synn basically meant something like ‘to be guilty’. We use it to translate hamartia from the Greek and hatafrom the Hebrew. And both those words have multiple layers of meaning. The Greek word can mean something like ‘missing the mark’ and the Hebrew word can mean something like ‘to go astray’. But sin as a word and as a concept is unsettled. It’s hardly surprising that six-year-olds struggle with the concept, and slightly baffling that so many religious education curricula introduce sin with such certainty to children who are still fans of Bluey. But I digress.
At the moment, the lectionary is blessing us with readings from the letter to the Romans. The reformer John Calvin wrote his very first commentary on the letter to the Romans, and re-interpreting Romans was a significant intellectual exercise during the Reformation. It was important work back then because of the abuses that were happening. The Church in Europe was doing wacky things like selling forgiveness of sins, so a refreshed understanding of sin was necessary. Romans has sin on every page, so it was a natural starting point. But I think Calvin brought to the text more of his contemporary concerns about the institutional church, than a desire to appreciate the text in its own historical context. So let’s do a bit of that today.
In the late 40s, 15 to 20 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the message about Jesus had reached Rome. Paul hadn’t. Presumably Paul’s preaching had inspired someone else to take it to Rome, but Paul himself had never been to the capital of the Empire. There was a sizeable Jewish population there, and it appears that these Christian preachers made contact with the community somehow. But they also interacted with non-Jews, so there was a fledgling community of Followers of The Way, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Christianity as a separate ‘religion’ was still not a thing.
For some reason, the Jews were expelled from Rome, and they had to leave in large numbers. This may have been due to rioting, it may be related to Christian troublemakers, but certainly the Jews had to get out. We know this, because when Nero came to power in 54CE he let the Jews come back. Paul’s letter to the Romans is written after the Roman Jews have been booted out and returned.
There are two types of Followers of the Way that Paul is writing to. We’ll call the first group Jewish Christians. These are people who are ethnically and culturally Jews, who have embraced the Way of Jesus. We’ll call the second group Gentile Christians. These are people who were probably familiar with the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods, and who had perhaps begun to explore Judaism in some way, but who had likewise embraced the Way of Jesus.
Can you imagine a get-together between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians after they got back from exile? Some of the Gentile Christians might have taken the expulsion as a sign that Gentile Christians were the real deal. They might have become convinced that the Jewish covenant was no longer relevant or important. Paul’s letter is of vital importance in this context. In summary, he wants to make it clear that the first covenant had a purpose, and that the Jews were central to God’s plan for the world. The new covenant, in Jesus, is the fulfillment of the first covenant. In Jesus, what began as a relationship between God and Jews, expands to become a relationship between God and all humanity.
It’s a win-win that Paul is proposing. The blessing began with Jews, Paul seems to be saying, and is now spreading throughout the whole world. (This, by the way, is classic Paul. He was a both/and kind of a guy.)
So when Paul says ‘sin’, he is talking about sin as it was understood in the Jewish covenant. Sin was a failure to observe the covenant. This included tangible acts like the dietary laws, the offerings, sacrifices and festivals, and the all-important observance of the sabbath. But it was also the intangibles – an acknowledgement of God’s holiness and purity, and asubmission to God as the author of everything beautiful and true.
This is why Paul talks so much about bodies. Male bodies were circumcised as part of the covenant. Female bodies were considered unclean when they menstruated. Living bodies which touched dead bodies were considered unclean. And so on and so on. The covenant was literally embodied in people. But so is death and resurrection. Paul proposes that the new covenant be embodied as well –not through observance of law, but through unification with the crucified and risen body of Jesus. ‘The old covenant was bodily’ he seems to be saying ‘and so is the new covenant. The old covenant lived in the bodies of the Jewish people, now it lives in the Christian believers, who are the Body of Christ alive and active in the world’. A Body which consumes the body of Christ in the Eucharist, or Love Feast. There are honestly just bodies all over the place.
It might be fashionable to reject ‘sin’ as old-fashioned or simplistic concept. It has certainly been deployed in cruel and manipulative ways. But Paul the Apostle is emphasising sin not as a way to enforce guilt or produce shame, but as an invitation to a full humanity, a humanity in which God’s righteousness is embodied in us, and where we as a community embody that righteousness in the world, nourished by the body of Christ in the Eucharist.
The Lord Be With You