Matthew 3:13-17
Dogmatic Christianity defines heresy as incorrect belief, claiming that there is such a thing as a correct belief that has been directly revealed to humans by God, through a burning bush, prophetic visions, or the actions of the Holy Spirit.
Constructive Christianity brings skepticism to the table, inclined to believe heresy simply indicates the side that lost, with orthodoxy the result of popularity, violence, or political interference. Those deemed heretics and their texts often felt the flame, not of hellfire, but of our more conventional murder and book burning.
We do not know if the works of Marcion, a Second Century Christian heretic, were actually burned, but we sure don’t have them. What we do have is Tertullian’s five-volume rebuttal, Adversus Marcionem, allowing us to reconstruct the original heresy, as least as Tertullian understood it.
In short, Marcion claimed that the good and loving god who sent Jesus into the world could not be the same as the malevolent creator god named Yahweh. He rejected the Hebrew Scriptures entirely, and developed his own canon of texts, made up of a shortened version of Luke, and ten of the letters attributed to Paul.
I do not agree with Marcion, but I certainly understand how he got there. If the Jewish Bible is read as an absolute and accurate record of a deity who punishes in an arbitrary and capricious manner, who orders genocide, it is most certainly not great news. That god would be as predictable and as good as your average domestic abuser, neither rhyme nor reason behind the violence and manipulation, the victims, in this case us, trying to justify our own suffering. In fact, some of the prophetic texts do exactly that, attempting to justify what they perceive as divine punishment, invasions and slaughter.
But if God can change or our perception of God can change, then we start to get somewhere. Then the god who promises that blessings and curses pass from generation to generation in early text layers, punishing children for the sins of their parents, rewarding those who deserve no reward, can become the god who declares through Jeremiah that we are only responsible for our own sins, that no more will you suffer for something some random ancestor did six generations ago that offended divine fragility.
If Jeremiah is right, the much later Christian theology of original sin is wrong, and I’m sure you already know how I feel about the idea that humankind is eternally damned because a mythical woman ate the fruit of a mythical tree placed there by a gaslighting god. Eden is a teaching story in the tradition of Jewish midrash, not a history or a scientific treatise.
Original sin is not even a Jewish concept. Centuries of Jews reading that same Genesis text we read, and they never developed that self-loathing theology.
Nor is original sin a teaching of Jesus. As understood today, it is an idea articulated by Augustine of Hippo near the end of his life in the early Fifth Century, connected with his disgust with the human body and any form of sensory pleasure. It remained one idea among many, not a doctrine, for another millennia, before being picked up by both the Protestant Reformers and the Roman counter-reform of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century.
Like blood atonement, we take as normative for Christianity a theology that was never the only belief, that was just not that important.
John is not in the River Jordan baptizing babies who enter the world defiled, baptizing to prevent them from going to limbo. John’s creative new rite is about real sins done by real adult people, and a chance to break the shackles of judgment and guilt, the judgment of others, the guilty self.
Jesus would declare sins forgiven as part of his ministry of healing and teaching, a grievous heresy in a culture in which only the priest served as mediator between the human and the divine. But first, Jesus himself was baptized by John, madness in what is known as a high Christology, in which Jesus is sinless, the virgin birth an escape from original sin. But that is a knot for another day.
Original sin simply is not gospel.
Traditional pre-scientific theology would have humans created as apart from the natural order, which we are not, eternally damned by an embittered god, a god Marcion rightly rejected. In truth, we are bipedal primates, weaving mystery into story, but also weaving in bright threads of transcendence. We come out of the womb into familial and social systems, hard wired to watch for danger, convinced that we must compete for resources, and while we must work to escape the little lizard brain that all too often takes control, we are not born in a state of sin and damnation. We’re animals albeit social animals, and yeah, that comes with some baggage.
But you were not born into original sin. And while you may consider yourself to be creative, it is unlikely that your sins are particularly original either. Whatever is in that long bag of sin you may be dragging behind you is your own doing, not Eve’s legacy.
Don’t get me wrong. You’ve sinned. So have I. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
I have not sinned because I have failed to obey some strict and stifling legal code, ancient or new. As we’ve been reminded again and again in the last year, as the founders of this congregation knew, just because something is legal does not mean it is right. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was the law. The Underground Railroad was criminal. The Mosaic Law allows for slavery too.
No, your sins are not about law. They are about love, the failure to love, or mistaken priorities in love. Love God, which we experience in this creation. Love your neighbor, which Jesus tells us is everyone, regardless of their tribe or state of cleanliness. Love yourself, something folks who manage the first two, God and neighbor, still manage to get wrong.
Once a month you hear me use the words “utter dependence” in our Communion Rite, a phrase drawn from the early 19th century founder of Liberal Theology, the Rev. Dr. Friedrich Schleiermacher. It seems a good starting point for love. You did not call yourself into being. You are not the Creator, good, bad, revealed, imagined, personified or impersonal force. You are a roll of the dice, hopefully a lucky one. That you are here is an improbability, like this green and blue planet traveling through space. If that is your starting point, all of your entitlement melts away, racial or social, and your neighbor becomes a miracle too. We hope that lives are rendered good, though we know that is not always so, that the moments of gratitude and grace out weigh the fear and pain.
And honestly, that utter dependence and all that can flow from it could be enough, wonder and humility. But we can go one step further. Through contemplative practices, prayer and the arts, we can begin to understand our connection, our entanglement, with all of the other parts of creation that are also utterly dependent upon the X in the equation we call God, the chef who made the French Toast you’ll be having at Brunch, the grandfather that inspired her to cook, the immigrant who harvested the eggs and the hens that laid them, the captured sunlight in the wheat, and the ancient person who looked at a tree and thought “I wonder what the inner bark tastes like?,” giving us cinnamon.
We’re still going to have to eat, and most of us are still omnivores, but we can come to that process with reverence and compassion.
Now move from the righteousness of eating to the righteousness of feeding. Of healing. Imagine the sin of our present economic system, of our healthcare system, of our government.
As the ancient formula goes, you have sinned in what you have done and in what you have failed to do.
The now discredited Effective Altruism movement used the motto “Doing Good Better.” It was lacking in humility. A better variant, popularized these days on t-shirts and bumper stickers, goes like this: Be Better. Do Good.
Jesus said “Go and sin no more.” I’m not quite that ambitious. Go and sin less. That seems doable. And may you know and share the grace that liberates and reconciles, this day and always. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Blessed Savior,
you lived in a time of violence,
Rome’s backbreaking demands,
and brutal punishments,
non-compliant villages terrorized,
put to the torch,
the men slaughtered,
women and children sold into slavery.
We live in a time of violence,
masked government forces
in opposition party states and cities,
immigrants disappeared,
documented and undocumented,
some refugees, few criminals,
and even some our own citizens,
and now, one more street execution,
the punishment for challenging ICE.
We pray for communities under seige,
families in hiding,
children on lock down
the faithful and courageous
who bear witness,
who document and challenge.
We pray for the family of Renee Nicole Good,
her wife and children,
for the Somali community in Minneapolis.
We pray for all swept up in a feverish fascism,
pray that when the time comes for accountability,
they might receive the due process they deny others,
that they might repent of their sins,
might be treated with restorative justice,
just as you commanded.
You loved your companions,
as we love ours,
praying as you taught us saying:
Our Father…