By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Let me begin by posing some questions for you to ponder:

Your son stays out past curfew and doesn’t bother to call you, causing you to stay up until 2:00 am sick with worry before he finally comes home. What he did broke your agreed upon rules and will require discipline but would you call his behavior a sin?

You are a teacher, and one of your students fails a test and is in danger of not graduating. You know she is capable of better work but that she has been dealing with the death of her best friend who was killed in a car crash earlier in the semester and so you decide to fudge her grade by a few points to make sure she graduates. Tinkering with her grade violates academic principles, but is it a sin?

You bring a chicken casserole to a vegan dish-to-pass. It is rude and thoughtless, but is it a sin?

And what about the more classic vices – which are sins and which are simply the result of cultural standards, or health concerns, or personal choice? Is smoking a sin? Is drinking? Gambling? Dancing? Working on the Sabbath? Adultery? Gluttony? Sloth?

There are certain expectations we all have of one another in a society, workplace, and family, and to fail to live up to those expectations may be deemed impolite, inconsiderate, or even illegal, but are they sins?

What is sin? Throughout Christian history, church people have wrangled over the cataloguing of sins trying to come to an agreement over which behaviors are acceptable in the Christian life of faith and which are a fundamental violation of one’s covenant with God and the community. We can probably all agree that sin is not good – as Christians we all agree that God calls us to be in alignment with God’s desires for us and for the world and that anytime we get out of alignment, our lives feel fractured and our relationships with others suffer. We know in our hearts that sin causes us distress and that we will experience the greatest amount of peace and wholeness with ourselves and with one another when we avoid sin and walk closely with God, but when we try to describe exactly which behaviors push us off the path and which keep our feet securely grounded, we become decidedly uncomfortable. The problem is that as much as we try to make up nice tidy black and white lists of sins, those lists don’t seem to really work in a world that has too many gray areas. Moreover, we have witnessed too many periods of human history when neat lists of sins led not to greater peace for all people but instead led to inquisitions and intolerance. It is only in hindsight often that we can see that what people promoted as condemnation of sin was really just a result of personal bigotry. So we are left with this conundrum: we know we must avoid sin – we know sin fundamentally fractures our wholeness and can destroy our relationships with others and with God – but when we try to define exactly what sin is so that we know how to avoid it, we are left speechless.

The apostle Paul addressed these questions in several of his letters, and while sometimes he too tried to make up lists of behavior that should be avoided by the Christian, at other times he backed off such ethical dogmatism and preached a more ethical relativism. What is sinful for one person, he admitted, may not be sinful for another. In Romans 14, after a long discourse deliberating over this very thorny question, Paul finally comes to the conclusion that “sin is anything that does not proceed from faith.”

As I read this, I imagine Paul standing uncomfortably in front of a room full of squabbling church members pushing him to define sin so they will know what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do until he finally says impatiently, “Whatever doesn’t proceed from faith is sin!” The room quiets in the face of this definitive answer but just as Paul turns to walk out relieved to have settled the matter, of course, someone raises a hand to ask the inevitable question: “So what is faith?”

But it turns out that this question is easier to answer because it is one that the Biblical writers address over and over again, whether in the Hebrew scriptures or in the New Testament writings: Faith, the bible tells us, is remembering. Faith is remembering God’s actions in the past and trusting that as God has acted on our behalf before, so God will act again.

Faith is remembering that God acted to free the people from slavery, delivering them from the hand of the oppressor. And faith is trusting that just as God acted in the past, so God will act again today. Faith is trusting that God will free us as well from that which oppresses us.

Faith is remembering that when the people were starving in the wilderness, God sent them manna to keep them alive. And faith is trusting that just as God has acted in the past, so God will act again today, calling us to bring food to the hungry and in turn feeding our own starving souls.

Faith is remembering that when the people were in exile, God dwelt with them, never leaving them for a second until the time when they could return once more to their homes. And faith is trusting that just as God has acted in the past, so God will act again today, refusing to abandon us no matter how deep our loneliness, no matter how lost we may feel. God will stay by our sides until the day we return home once more.

Faith is remembering that when human cruelty and fear and selfishness appeared to be the most powerful forces in the world, even hammering fists against God’s own son to nail him to the cross, God’s gentleness was more powerful that the greatest evil. God stepped quietly across the chasm between life and death and healed those wounded hands and feet, raised Christ to life once more. Faith is trusting that just as God acted in the past, so God acts again today and every day, continuing to overcome evil with goodness, healing the wounds that lie deep within our broken souls, and bringing new life where we thought there was nothing but death ahead for us.

Faith is remembering what God has done and been for us and trusting that the God of our past will be the God of our present and the God of our tomorrow. And if faith is remembering, then sin is living as if we have no memory of those acts of God on our behalf. The Psalmist says, “[We] have sinned; we have committed iniquity, have done wickedly. Our ancestors... did not consider your wonderful works; they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love...”

Sin is refusing to remember and trust the story of God’s goodness in our lives. Sin is behaving as if there is no one who cares what becomes of us. Sin is acting as if our existence is just a meaningless stretch of trivial days where what we do doesn’t matter because goodness is no more powerful than evil, and death is just as likely as life. To sin is to forget the place of God in our days and rewrite our story as if we are all alone in an uncaring world.

Of course, God shouldn’t feel too hurt when we treat God with such forgetfulness, because we do this all the time to one another as well. Think of a couple getting into an argument. What began as a disagreement over one particular issue can quickly expand into an entire re-writing of the history of their relationship. Every terrible thing that has ever happened between the two, every mistake in judgement, every personality flaw from the past is dragged out for review. The bad is globalized and the good of the past is ignored. "You are always so arrogant," the couple says in sweeping statements, “You never listen to me."

Now, if the two were to step out of the emotion of the moment and scrutinize their own words, it would be obvious that the story they are rehearsing is grounded in a deliberate forgetfulness. If they were to be honest, they would say something more like: "You're not listening to me right now and in the past there have been other times when you haven't listened, but there were some times when you did listen especially last Tuesday when I was worried about finances -- you did a pretty good job of listening then and I would be really nice if you could listen to me today like you listened to me on Tuesday." You know, that just doesn't have the same impact as "You never listen to me." Nevertheless, such deliberate forgetfulness practiced heedlessly and consistently undermines the strength of the relationship and rewrites our history until we come to a place where we begin to believe the false story we have created. There are relationships that have experienced many real hurts and differences that will never be repaired sufficiently to allow the relationship to continue, but there are just as many that have come apart because of our tendency to rehearse only the bad and refuse to remember and acknowledge the good. Whether in our relationships with partners, family, or neighbors, anytime we deliberately forget the goodness we have received in our lives, we risk alienation from one another. We hunker down with our wounded pride and we pass judgements on others forgetful of our own need for forgiveness. We assume the worst in everyone because we have chosen to ignore the best. Deliberate forgetfulness is a sin because it leaves us living in a lonely world that we ourselves have created by our refusal to remember hands outstretched in grace. We live in a world not of God’s making but of our own.

The Christian writer, Frederick Buechner calls upon us to practice “the redeeming power of memory”. With other people of faith, we come together to rehearse and remember the goodness of God and the power of grace in our lives. Buechner says, "The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later."

To sin is to ignore the goodness of God in our lives. To sin is to act in ways that deny the grace God has shown to us and the forgiveness we ourselves have received. To sin is to live as if all of the love which Christ expended upon us as he poured himself out on the cross was of no purpose and no consequence to the person we have become, to the people we are called to be.

Faith is to remember and to trust that this gracious merciful God of our past is the God of today and will be the God of our tomorrow. No matter what happens, we will remain faithful to the promise that we live in God and God lives with us, and we will remember.

I invite you now to this table of remembrance where God’s grace is once again poured out for us so that we might live in wholeness and peace.