“People who think I’m some crazy liberal are always so shocked about how much I love to talk about sin,” the tattooed progressive Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber remarks in a characteristically delightful sermon at the House of All Sinners and Saints. “I think liberals tend to think admitting we are sinful is the same as having low self-esteem. And then conservatives ... [say] that sin is the same as immorality and totally avoidable if you can just be a good squeaky-clean Christian.”

“Sin” is a word that gets a bad rap. Perhaps rightly so. The word has been used as a tool to shame the already vulnerable, calling them “sinners,” singling them out as dirty and separate. More often, the word has been used with a kind of insufferable solemnity, a resolute refusal to lighten up, an effort to immobilize mankind in one great, awkward, eternal, pompous hush of holiness.

The very idea makes one want to rebel. Small wonder that more than a few people hear the tale of Satan's Fall and identify Satan as the hero, or look at Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden as a noble, emancipatory act.

Live free or die... right?

I don't disagree. Live free or die. But here is how Oscar Wilde, a man of profoundly Christian imagination, puts it in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” The poem begins by introducing a man who must hang tomorrow:

He did not wear his scarlet coat

For blood and wine are red

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved

And murdered in her bed.

Then the twist:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,