1 Timothy 1:12-17
An unverified legend claims that shortly before the Second World War, a puff piece by an American journalist wrote that Magda Goebbels made a great strudel. The wife of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, Magda was held up as the ideal German woman. Her husband, who gained power and wealth by promoting hatred and inciting violence, was as guilty in the Holocaust as the men who operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Magda joined Joseph in murdering their own children before committing suicide in the final days of the Nazi dictatorship cult.
Charlie Kirk was the Joseph Goebbels of our age. Would you ask Jews to mourn for Goebbels? To do so would be gaslighting of the highest order.
Like Goebbels, Kirk gained power and wealth by promoting hatred and inciting violence. He described the stoning execution of LGBTQ individuals as “God’s perfect law.” He did not need to throw a stone. All he had to do was activate an unstable member of his own lunatic cult. His assassination at the hands of Tyler Robinson, a follower of a different branch of America’s Neo-Fascists, is nothing to celebrate. But he was not a hero.
When people like Donald Trump, Representative Nick Langworthy, and Chemung County Legislator Joe Brennan use it to further divide and antagonize, they tell us a lot about who they really are. As do organizations like the National Football League, which held a moment of silence for Kirk on Thursday night, and has invited teams to do so today. It is increasingly clear that much of professional sports in the United States is just a modern version of the ancient Roman “bread and circuses,” all in the service of oligarchs.
It is sin, and we would be advised to do an examination of our consciences, for each of us is complicit in our own way.
It is estimated that the cancellation of the international PEPFAR program under the Trump-Musk race war will kill twenty-two people while we sit here this morning, two of them children. Analysts expect eleven million preventable cases of HIV/AIDS.
Sin is a tough topic. It is a sort of unwritten rule among progressive Christians, those of us who lean into the expansive justice of the prophets and the unearned grace of the gospel, that we do not preach about sin, and if we do, we make it a vague societal sin, avoiding the intimate and personal, and therefore avoiding personal responsibility.
Many of us have been terrorized by sin and damnation preaching, often because we did not fit neatly into the boxes Victorian culture constructed for gender and sexuality, things we could not always control about ourselves. We did not need the heretics of Fundamentalism to replace haunted houses with “Hell Houses,” for all too often we experienced the inferno while sitting in the pews on Sunday morning, or listening to our families gossip around the dinner table about the spinster ladies who lived together, or that queer bachelor uncle.
It does not help that sin, like its legal analog crime, is defined by the wealthy and powerful to protect their wealth and power. It is a sin and a crime to steal a loaf of bread from the bodega at midnight like some latter-day Jean Valjean, but it is not a sin and perfectly legal if the next morning you sign the deal that destroys a pension fund, impoverishing thousands. It is a sin if you kill twenty, but it is patriotism and defense when they kill twenty thousand. And don’t get me started on the health insurance industry.
Even if we ignore the operational hypocrisy in the Christian nationalist approach to sin, we still have to deal with those definitions of sin attached to ideas about God that no longer make sense to us.
Yahweh as described in some portions of scripture is the ultimate perpetrator of domestic violence, co-dependent, fragile, narcissistic. It is a sin to offend the honor of this brute in the sky, so we tiptoe around, and blame ourselves for divine violence. If the Assyrians invaded, it must be because we were sinful. Fast forward 2500 years, and who needs Caligula in the Oval Office when we have Caligula on a heavenly throne? We might as well eat that bacon cheeseburger and book our spot in one of Dante’s rings of fire.
Yet, I dare to suggest that we should occasionally engage in self-examination, should look in the mirror, should confess our own imperfection, lest we become self-righteous. Refusing to use the word “sin” allows others to define it, to turn it into a weapon.
Let us start, then, with Sir Terry Pratchett, the late British author whose works have sold over 100 million copies in 43 languages. Pratchett, who died of early onset Alzheimers at the age of sixty-six, wrote 41 books in a satirical fantasy series set in Discworld, each skewering aspects of modern life and the fantasy fiction genre. In “Carpe Jugulum,” published in 1998, there is a section of dialogue that includes this line:
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
This seems to me a rather good starting point. Sin is not bruising the ego of some eternal monster in the sky, nor is it serving some imaginary monster in some imaginary hell, as much as that idea appeals in the current context. Sin is not about what you think, despite Jesus setting that rather high bar, for we are practical people, as we remind ourselves every week.
Sin is about what you do.
But I would widen Sir Terry’s definition a bit, given what we now know about our living planet, about the sentience of animals, the mysterious community of the trees. Sin is not just treating people as things. It is treating any living being as a thing, and by extension, behaving recklessly with the systems on which those lives depend.
What is the greatest commandment?
Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.
Swell. Love, love, love. Love God, which is to say the mysterious and serendipitous creativity that is active in creation, that we experience in creation, and in which we participate as creative beings.
Love neighbor and self in the exact same way.
Who is my neighbor?
There was this man, and he was mugged, wounded and thrown in a ditch. And there was this Samaritan…
We all know the story.
The law said that going down into that ditch to help the wounded man would make the religious people unclean, would bar them from their performative religiosity. Sacrifices to Yahweh’s ego were more important than Yahweh’s living creation, the wounded man in the ditch. Jesus pushes past what is lawful to what is loving.
The Authorized Version, the poetic but poorly translated English-language text created under King James, says “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Sounds right. Lying about someone is not very loving. Excuse me while I repost a meme on Facebook that I have not taken the time to verify…
It says “Thou shalt not kill.” Though the ancient Hebrew may actually say “Thou shalt not murder.” What exactly is the difference between killing and murdering? It seems to me that it is only murder when it is not authorized by the powerful and wealthy. Eighty three percent of those killed in Gaza are considered collateral damage, not affiliated with Hamas or any other terrorist group, but if you dare call it a genocide, hedge fund billionaires will target you and terrorize you.
I refuse to get mired in a debate about how much addictive behavior is under our control. We know that our very consciousness is entangled with other beings. A bad gut biome can cause depression!
At some point, we have to own our self-destructive behaviors, the sin of not loving ourselves, stop playing the victim even if the road to recovery starts with admitting our powerlessness and crying out for help. That sponsor who walks with you as you get clean is loving you and fulfilling the great commandment, as are you when you lean into God’s grace and slowly work your way back to sobriety or whatever state of equilibrium it is that honors the you that God created.
Sir Terry’s statement about treating people as things is particularly applicable to sexual sins, though a thorough consideration of that category might best be left to an adults only faith formation session. We can agree that non-consensual sexual behavior is a sin and a crime, but so too is the sort of self-loathing and disgust with the human body that Paul and later Augustine planted in our faith tradition.
We could go on, cataloging and parsing, debating degrees of sin, collective atonement and individual atonement, and honestly, we probably should. After all, the self-righteous are a particular target for Jesus. Scripture tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We have all loved less than we could at times. But I’ll close with this: God is good and grace abounds. We must forgive one another, and sometimes forgive ourselves, not that we might sin again, but that we might live in the freedom and love God intended when She set this crazy show in motion, stars and stardust and you.
Amen.