"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
--Romans 7: 15-25a
If you look out the window of the oratory in our home, you will see a large target leaning up against a tree. That is my wife Kristen’s target. As some of you may know, my wife is a pretty darn good archer; in fact, one day, after she hadn’t shot her arrows for several weeks, she said, ‘I’m gonna go shoot,’ and she went outside, immediately shot a bullseye, and came back inside and said, ‘Well, I’m done.’
At least we know we won't starve when the apocalypse comes.
When she took up archery, though, Kristen taught me something that I had never known before. Did you know, she asked, that the word ‘sin’ is an archery term? As in, the thing that Jesus came to free us from? Yes, it’s an archery term that was originated by Aristotle. The Greek word is hamartia, which literally means ‘to miss the mark,’ as in an archer missing the target. I must say, though, my wife rarely misses her target, so I guess that means she’s not prone to sinning…
All kidding aside, the word hamartia appears 141 times in the New Testament, and each time it gets translated as ‘sin.’ I know that some of you who read this blog have had experiences in church settings where the sermon each week is about nothing else but sin. Perhaps you've heard sermons that sounded something like this: Sin was brought into the world by the misdeeds of Adam, Jesus died to save us from sin, but sin continues to exist, and it is up to us to fight it by avoiding what we perceive as sinful behavior and going to church regularly. Does that kind of message sound like some of your experiences?
But here’s the thing: the desire to stay away from sin so fiercely is often counterproductive and can unintentionally lead us to sin. We create lists in our heads of dos and donts, what is and is not sinful, which reduces our faith journey to just being about following a set of rules, and our relationship with God and one another ends up just being legalistic. God then becomes a great big judge in the sky to fear, rather than a partner with us to love and who shows us how to love. This isn’t what sin, what hamartia is about.
Of the 141 times hamartia shows up in the New Testament, a quarter of those appearances are in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul knew that avoiding sin wasn’t about just following a set of rules, but instead it had to be relational and contextual. If it’s just about following laws, what do you do when those laws get complicated and confusing. He says in chapter 7, verse 22 that he delights in the law of God, but he sees in his members another law that is at war with the law of his mind, making him captive to the law of sin. That’s four sets of laws he’s talking about! How could he possibly keep track of it all and avoid every single pitfall? He can’t. Nobody could.
Saint Paul, who understood that sin was relational, not legalistic.
The harder we try, the worse it gets. Paul says he doesn’t understand his own actions, that he does what he knows he shouldn’t do, what he doesn’t even really want to do, and he doesn’t do the things that he knows he should do, the things his heart tells him to do. How often does this happen to us? Even when we want to do good we end up missing the mark. Consider a time perhaps when you thought to do something nice for someone, but instead of doing something that they would have appreciated, you did for them something you appreciated—like giving them your favorite DVD as a birthday present.
Another common example is when you withhold the truth from someone because you think it will protect them, only to realize once they’ve learned the truth that it wasn’t nearly as harmful as you keeping it from them. In both of these examples, the intention is not to hurt someone, but, as Paul shows us, sin can infect the heart of even the best of our intentions. In those moments, we very simply miss the relational mark. We sin.
Take Paul, for example. His intentions were actually good when he was persecuting the followers of Jesus because of what the law told him to do. He believed he was doing what was right. It wasn’t until Jesus knocked him off his horse on the Damascus road that Paul realized how wrong he was. Just because he thought he was doing good, didn’t mean that he actually was. Sin is about impact, more than intention.
This is something that I have noticed is quite hard for folks. How many of you have ever been in an argument with someone you care about after you said or did something hurtful, and your response was, ‘But I never intended to hurt you.’ That may be, but the intent doesn’t justify the behavior, which still has a harmful impact.
An example from my own life would be that I grew up in a part of the country where the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—what most of us call the Confederate flag—would routinely fly in people’s yards and appear on my classmates’ shirts at school. I know from my own conversations with some of those folks that they would say that it was never their intention to promote hatred, but that doesn’t really matter when an entire population of people experience that image as a symbol of slavery and oppression.
We are seeing those kinds of conversations happening right now, and the more we use our intention as a crutch—or the intentions of our ancestors—the more we miss the relational mark, the more we ignore and silence the voices of those who are telling us that they are being harmed, and the more we sin against one another.
This, I suspect, is what is at the heart of sin: an inability to accept when someone has told us that our behavior has caused harm, which then prevents us from learning from those experiences and growing in relationship with God and one another. When we think of sin in this way, then yes, we are all sinners because we are all guilty of this on a daily basis. It isn’t always helpful to just think of sin as the big list of ‘Thou shalt nots’ that we find in the Book of Leviticus because such lists can’t name every context and can’t cover all the relational nuances of every possible situation. Maybe, then, we can start thinking about our sins in those relational terms, accepting that we will miss the mark, but even when we do, there is a solution
What that solution is not, I must say, is shame. Shame is different from guilt, as Brene Brown reminds us. Guilt says that we have done something wrong, while shame says that we ARE something wrong, fundamentally. We can feel guilty without going to a place of shame. What shame does is make the moment about us, preventing us from hearing the other person and accepting our wrong-doing because it keeps us at the center of everything. If we are to move beyond our sin, we must move beyond our shame, beyond our need to protect our own image. Sometimes our shame can seem overwhelming, leading us to a place of extreme defensiveness.
Still, for others, shame manifests in an extreme case of beating oneself up because they feel like the worst possible person. Even Paul fell prey to shame—he exclaims in the reading, ‘Wretched man that I am!’ But he follows it with ‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ Jesus frees us from shame and gives us the gift of grace to move beyond our sins, turning ourselves away from our past behavior and committing to being different.
This is what repentance is about. The Greek word is metanoia, and it literally means ‘to turn oneself around.’ This is the solution. We will continue to miss the mark, but we don’t have to hide behind our intentions or go to a place of shame. This is true for individuals, for the Church, and for our country.
