“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,

Some with a flattering word [...]

Wilde presents sin as a kind of first step down the road of death. Sin is a foretaste of mortality, a little chill of death that enters the world through what we do or fail to do, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Whose death? Wilde talks about sin as killing what or whom we love. Since we live in and through what we love, any crime against love is a little death of our own, an erosion of the soul.

Sin is a rich, nuanced, existentially real concept.

Let's spin out the analogy. Death is bad because it strips us of who we are, tears us apart from those we love, threatens to make life itself futile, and stands over us as a grim master. Sin is bad for the same reasons.

Sin presents itself as a kind of freedom: Disobey God, be free, trust yourself. Obey your own better judgement. But the choice is not presented fairly. Everyone serves someone, or something (grades, careers, reputation, “having a good time”). The real question is what in this world is fit to rule humans. A good master, a kind master—these things are hard to find. David Foster Wallace demonstrated that much in his Kenyon commencement speech “This is Water.” Serve money, serve power, serve fame, and these things, Wallace observes, will eat you alive.

Sin, then, is simply the choice to serve the sorts of things that are destructive rather than life-giving. We may serve these things by freely, deliberately prioritizing them, but equally we may just unwittingly fall into the habit of doing what's against even our own better judgement. Luther talks about sin as the “bondage of the will,” with good reason.

Sin corrupts. When things start to go wrong, in a moment of spite, they have a way of getting out of hand, quickly becoming all-pervasive, something whose consequences spill on from generation to generation. There is biblical talk about the “sins of the fathers” being handed down to their children. It's the truth of any messy family history, and in still broader cycles of violence, oppression, or greed which have become systemic and almost inexorable.

Sin is the futility that clings so close to us, the self-destruction, the self-harm, the harm done to those one loves best. It is what Francis Spufford in “Unapolagetic” calls “the crack in everything.”

In Christianity, “salvation” does not principally mean salvation from divine punishment for one's sins—it is salvation from sin itself. For sin is often its own punishment, the natural consequences of having one's own way.

This, in short, is Christianity's frank diagnosis of the human condition: That serving yourself is not to put yourself in good hands. It is of urgent importance to find something worth serving that will put life back in these dry bones.

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, marking the beginning of the season of Lent. Ash crosses on foreheads remind us of our mortality. Prayer and fasting aim to draw us outside of our ingrown selves and into solidarity with the hungry and the poor. Immersing ourselves in ancient narrative, we reorient our hearts and minds in the service of the Highest—as “40 Days in Mark,” a Lenten blog project of the Harvard Ichthus, aptly reminds us.

Through these rites, the Lenten season offers the beginning of an answer to the problem of sin.

But only because it joyously looks forward, as do I, to Easter Sunday six weeks from now.

Et gloria in excelsis Deo.

 

Stephen G. Mackereth '15 is a joint mathematics and philosophy concentrator in Mather House.