Above all, repentance; not wholesale repentance: “I have sinned, father, I have sinned,” or, still worse, the admission that I am wholly in sin, that I was born in sin, that every step of mine is sin. This admission, collecting, compacting all the sins in one heap, seems to separate them from me and deprives me of that inevitable spiritual use, which by the mercy of God is attached to every sin. … We have a terrible habit of forgetting,—of forgetting our evil, our sins. And there is no more radical means for forgetting our sins, than wholesale repentance. All the sins are boiled down, as it were, into one impermeable mass, with which nothing can be done. – Leo Tolstoy (1905)
Genesis 9:8-17
Joel 2:1-17
On the sports calendar, we are in that bleak period between the Super Bowl and Spring Training, though hockey and basketball carry on, and the Nascar season is supposed to start this afternoon with the Daytona 500, Florida weather permitting.
On the civic and cultural calendar, we are a few weeks out from the MLK federal holiday, and more than half way through Black History Month.
And on the Christian religious calendar, we are celebrating the first Sunday in Lent, which comes very early this year. And there is a thread, of sorts, that connects our first reading this morning, on repentance and from Leo Tolstoy, with the story of the African diaspora in America, though I couldn’t quite figure out how to work in the Daytona 500. Maybe Bubba Wallace will win the race.
You see, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired in his nonviolent resistance to American apartheid by Mohandas Gandhi, the revered leader of India’s independence movement who began as a civil rights activist in South Africa, and Gandhi was in turn inspired by Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded.
Tolstoy himself was profoundly changed by his experience as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, much as Francis of Assisi was profoundly changed by his experience of war centuries earlier. Tolstoy became a Christian anarchist, though he rejected the violence traditionally associated with anarchism, self-identifying as a pacifist. Today he is mostly remembered for his novels, but he was an important Christian thinker in his time.
It is Tolstoy who gives us our first Lenten challenge, a season traditionally treated as penitential, a season to acknowledge our sins and repent. We don’t spend much time on sin in the reconstructive and progressive Christian tradition, and honestly, with good reason. It is hard to tease out a timeless concept of sin from historically-specific human systems of oppression and power.
Even though scripture contains a deep layer of justice and admonitions for right and loving relationships, you have to jackhammer your way through ancient misogyny and oligarchy to get there, not to mention current misogyny and oligarchy.
So let’s start with the ancient problem, then circle back to sin in our own lives.
Some of the Torah was written during the First Temple period, about four centuries from the reign of King Solomon to the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians.
The balance of the Torah was written, redacted, and given something close to final form during the Second Temple period, another six or so centuries from the return to Jerusalem authorized by the man they considered a messiah at the time, King Cyrus of Persia, until Jerusalem and the Second Temple were once again destroyed four decades after Jesus was murdered, both the execution and the destruction at the hands of the Roman Empire so lauded today by America’s white ethno-nationalists.
Like most cultures in the Ancient Near East, the culture of the Yahweh-worshipping Canaanites, broadly called Israelites or Jews depending on the year, was patriarchal, so there’s that. But more critical to this period, they believed that the human relationship with God was transactional.
The Torah takes the form of a treaty with hundreds of clauses. In exchange for faithful observance of the contract, the people would be rewarded with prosperity and independence. And funny enough, many of those clauses had to do with making payments to the Temple. They fell into various categories of offerings and/or Temple taxes, but the bottom line was that there was this immense bureaucracy that sometimes settled civil disputes but had little other function, and it was self-serving and corrupt. Unless you take seriously the idea that God is an angry narcissist in the sky, in which case, the showier the better, so bring on the gold leaf and incense.
There was only one offering in the entire Temple system, a sin offering called a holocaust, that was completely consumed by fire. Every other form of offering supported the priests and their families. The more sins the priests could invent, the more they could demand from the increasingly impoverished people.
There is something to be said for the fact that despite the role of the powerful in preserving the story of ancient religion, subversive texts still make it into the canon, texts that challenge the transactional nature of the Temple system, texts that make clear that the sacrifices are not required by God, that all God demands is justice and fidelity.
Even if it had been true, transactional theology never played out the way the priests had promised it would. Good people got crushed, bad people got rich, and invading armies laid waste to the land. So ancient theologians had to reconstruct belief and declare that God’s end of the bargain would be fulfilled after death, pretty convenient since none of us can send a lawyer back from the other side to appeal divine judgment, if there are in fact any lawyers on the other side, though they may well be on the side of the appellants.
With Christianity, Temple transactions became church transactions, with the exact same self-serving corruption, the sale of indulgences, bishops living in luxury while the people went hungry. This was a primary cause of the Protestant Reformation.
Today, the most visible forms of American Christianity combine both forms of transactional faith, promising that fidelity will be rewarded in both this life and the next. There might be a little religious emotionalism attached, but in the end, the Christian does what those with power say she or he must do in exchange for a new luxury SUV and/or life after death, the former sometimes leading to the latter.
I want to suggest that our relationship with that holy mystery we name as God was never actually transactional. Our prayers do not change God, they change us. Our obedience to the deep call to love, to love ourselves, to love our neighbors, to love creation, all and all a call to love God, is not transactional.
Sin is not sin because we fail in a transaction, because our karma card was declined at the register. Sin is sin because it is a failure to be our best selves, a turning inward and shrinking from the transcendent, from love and art and connection, from beauty, even the terrible beauty of working together and journeying together through sometimes brutal and awful situations.
While the ancient Torah story of Noah returns divine violence for human violence, and even the first Jesus followers sometimes fell into an apocalyptic mindset, anticipating a violent Day of the Lord that never came, our faith is centered on the non-violence of Jesus, legally and violently executed by Temple and Empire, who defeats death itself. Non-violence not unlike that advocated by King, by Gandhi, by Tolstoy.
The “good” in Good Friday is not that Jesus was a price God paid to God in order to release us from our transactional failures, our sins. That is us projecting human concepts of retributive justice on to the holy. God’s justice is redemptive, restorative. Jesus lives grace, and tells us that God lives grace. The idea that there is a scorecard is absurd.
So why, you may ask, should we catalog our sins? Why shouldn’t we allow our sinfulness to melt down into one impermeable mass, as Tolstoy condemns?
Let’s jump back to that flood story, so common in the cultures of the ancient Near East. It is only in the Israelite and Jewish interpretation of that regional myth that we find God looking at God’s own violence pitted against human violence and declaring nevermore. If God can learn from holy mistakes, so can we, not because we have to balance some metaphysical books, but because our sin is not who we are. It is keeping us from being who we are.
Doing an inventory is essential, something the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous knew when they made it the fourth of twelve steps in their recovery program. Specifically, they call it a searching and fearless moral inventory.
Inventories don’t work as broad categories. You don’t say “I’ve got some lumber and I’m going to build a house.” You say “I need X amount of lumber to build this house to these plans.” You don’t say I’m going to buy some food to feed some people. Unless, of course, you’ve got some loaves and fishes magic going on. The rest of us know that to feed sixty people you need a certain amount of food. And a vegan option. And sixty five people are actually going to show up, though only forty were signed up by the deadline.
Our sisters and brothers in Rabbinic Judaism have something similar to our Lenten practice in their Ten Days of repentance, beginning with Rosh Hashanah. Again, and like twelve step programs, this is not a generic and impermeable mass of sin. Sure there are generic and communal prayers, but the faithful Jew is called to repair the specific harm that has been done, for if one has not moved beyond strife and hatred, the Yom Kippur prayers are not heard.
I am specific in thinking about my sins for the same reason I am specific when I take my blood pressure, for I have indeed succumbed to my family’s tendency to hypertension, and if I want the doctor to get the dosage right, I have to provide real numbers. I’m not looking for how many “Hail Marys” I have to say, because that is not our thing. Again, not a transaction.
And honestly, I don’t have some graceful way to wrap this up and make you feel all warm and fuzzy about yourself. We are amazing and beautiful and sometimes a red hot mess, imperfectly perfect and loved by a perfect holy mystery we name as God who is found in fiddleheads in the forest and nebulae in the universe and a street preacher who said “Go and sin no more.”
So yeah, do that… Go, and sin no more.
Amen.