Days of Awe

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

Sept 25, 2011

 

Reading: Forrest Church, “Evil and Sin,” in The Cathedral of the World:  A Universalist Theology, Boston:  Beacon Press, 2009, pp.97-100, passim.

National or collective sin almost always cloaks self-interest in the garb of higher virtue. Not only as individuals but also as a nation, we justify questionable means by noble ends. We exculpate ourselves by pointing out that others do worse. We rationalize away our crimes as aberrant. In short, by shifting moral responsibility away from ourselves, we pronounce ourselves innocent. Ever since Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, we humans have avoided taking responsibility for our actions (and therefore accountability for their consequences) by proclaiming that the buck stops elsewhere. That, in a nutshell, is original sin….

If you don't like the word "sin," substitute another—"humankind's innate inhumanity," perhaps—but don't underestimate the concept, or think that we are all born good and then somehow get destroyed or twisted by society. Given our natural egotism and instinct for survival, which through opportunistic self-rationalization easily morph into the drive to dominate, sin is bred in the human bone….

We have so much more in common than could ever possibly divide us: alike mysteriously born and fated to die, the same sun setting on each of our horizons. We all want and need love, security, freedom, and acceptance. We need others' forgiveness and understanding. All of us do. We ache in the same way. We bleed in the same way. At times, we all feel awkward and unworthy and inadequate. And we all fail at times to hearken to the better angels of our nature.

This is the centerpiece of theological universalism. To whatever extent we place our primary identification with sect or nation, with race or gender, with school or party, we betray our common humanity. Party to faction, we fall prey to the beguiling logic of division, the logic of retribution and judgment, the logic of hate. In short, we live—all of us live—riddled with sin and in need of salvation. These two tenets of Universalist theology complement each other. It's worth remembering, in a world defined by the rhetoric of "us versus them," that we, too, are sinners and that they, too, can be saved.

Sermon:  Days of Awe                            -Rev. Paul Sprecher

 

Rosh Hashanah, the Head of the Year in the Jewish calendar, begins this coming Wednesday at sundown; it is the first of the 10 Days of Awe, a time of teshuvah – repentance – that ends on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  The traditional legend, “The Power of Forgiveness,” is appropriate for this season:

Rabbi Abba … once sat at the gateway of the Town of Lud.

He saw a traveler sit down on a pile of rocks at the edge of a mountain overlooking a cliff. The man was exhausted from his journey and immediately fell asleep. R. Abba watched this innocuous scene for a bit until to his dismay he watched as a deadly snake slithered out of the rocks making its way towards the sleeping man.

[R. Abba, who for some reason was immobilized and transfixed by this unfolding drama,] suddenly watched as a new turn of events happened. A giant lizard jumped out between the rocks and killed the serpent.

R. Abba continued watching and saw that the man stood up and was perplexed to see a beheaded snake lying in front of him. The man quickly gathered his possessions and rose to continue his journey. At that instant the pile of rocks he had been sitting on collapsed and fell into the ravine below.

The man was about to wander off when R. Abba ran after him and recounted everything he had witnessed. He asked the man, "My friend, to what do you attribute all these miracles that just transpired?"

At first, the traveler did not want to be bothered but felt the sincerity of the rabbi’s question and confided in him.

"Throughout my life I have never let a person harm me where I did not pacify him. Never have I gone to sleep without forgiving someone for hurting me in any way. Anyone who would hurt me would I endeavor, with all my heart, to resolve whatever animosity was between us. And lastly, I would turn the hateful situation to doing acts of kindness for the person involved in the misunderstanding."

When R. Abba heard this he burst into tears. This person's actions were greater than Joseph, [whose story is told in the book of Genesis]. For Joseph had to deal with his brothers; of course he was going to forgive his brothers. But this man forgives anyone and everyone who has harmed him. It is no surprise that God performs miracles on a daily basis for this blessed man.[i]

The Days of Awe are a time of self-examination, repentance, acknowledgment of wrongdoing, making amends, of seeking granting forgiveness. Yom Kippur, last of the Days of Awe, includes prayers for forgiveness from God, but first forgiveness must be sought from those one has wronged.  As the Talmud says,

Although God is merciful and pardons the sins of man against [God], he who has wronged his neighbor must gain that neighbor's forgiveness before he can claim the mercy of the Lord….  The Day of Atonement may gain pardon for the sins of man against his Maker, but not for those against his fellow-man, till every wrong done is satisfied."[ii]   

The Days of Awe are a season of “I’m sorry.”  “I forgive you.”

“But I,” says our pride, “I have nothing to apologize for.  I’ve done nothing wrong.” 

It’s hard to acknowledge that we have done what is wrong, that we have (shudder!) sinned.  “Sin” seems like a technical, theological term that doesn’t apply to us personally.  We don’t talk so much about it in our liberal churches.  I love the way Forrest Church addresses this:

Liberal theology doesn't take sin and evil seriously enough. American fundamentalism takes evil seriously, and would certainly seem to have a doctrine of sin. But by trivializing sin into a moralistic catalogue of personal foibles, fundamentalists often appear to reserve the badge of real evil for others. With sin, however, there are no others. The world is not divided into sheep and goats. Each of us is both sheep and goat, making original sin a corrective to any theology based on an "us versus them" model, and conducive as well to the development of a clear-eyed, unsentimental universalism. Martin Luther put it this way: "The ultimate human sin is our unwillingness to concede that we are sinners." ….[iii]

The word “sin” is unpleasantly linked with a kind of theology most of us reject.  We remember our Puritan forebears thundering about Sin from the pulpit, most famously in the sermon by Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” in which he compares our state to that of a spider held by the slightest of threads over a raging fire, subject to being dropped into the pit of hell – and deservedly – at any instant.  I suspect that ministers in this pulpit have occasionally used that stern language as well:  “You are all wretched sinners!”  For starters, I would rather say – and more in sorrow than in self-righteousness – “We are all sinners.”

Sometimes words like “sin” become an impediment to understanding because their meaning has become associated with some one thing different from or narrower than its original meaning.  The word “sin” most recently has become associated especially with sexual misbehavior, particularly – at least of late – with homosexuality.  “Sin” is also used, of course, to refer to deeds we would all consider evil:  murder, drug trafficking, theft, violent fighting, and so on.  But those are crimes that most of us have nothing to do with, and the abuse of the term to condemn variant forms of sexuality is not a usage we religious liberals tend to share.

Our church book group just finished reading and discussing the memoir Townie by Andre Dubus III last Tuesday; we were struck by the constant violence, fighting, abandonment and general dysfunction the author experienced in his youth.  I wondered out loud where this violence, this evil, originated.  Was it some sort of curse on communities on the wrong side of the tracks, or was it somehow innate in all of us?  Was it (shudder) something we might refer to as “original sin?”  We as religious liberals sometimes distance ourselves from these more obvious examples of falling short, of brokenness, and hold ourselves to be righteous.  We think to ourselves “Those poor benighted people.  If only they could be educated better to be more like us.”  But of course, we also fall short, albeit in different and more “respectable” ways.

Words change their meanings and associations over time.  Consider, for example, the word “gay.”  In times past any young man might have been called “A gay blade” – a ladies’ man – without in any way suggesting homosexuality – quite the contrary!  The word originally referred to being "carefree", "happy", or "bright and showy."  Today, it refers almost exclusively to male homosexuality, and its use to mean anything else seems odd.  In cases of such a drift of meaning, it is sometimes useful to go back to previous usages.  In the case of “sin,” I like to remember the original Hebrew and Greek from which our Judeo-Christian concept of sin is derived.  Fred Muir, the Unitarian Universalist minister in Annapolis, offers this explanation of the original Hebrew meaning of the word translated as “sin” in the Bible:

The Garden story was all about cheyt, the Hebrew word meaning "to miss the mark," which was their definition of sin—like shooting an arrow at the target and missing. After you miss, of course it's a disappointment, but you try again, you try to hit the mark. In other words, sinning is a part of life, no different than breathing, eating, or sleeping. So we sin—what else is new!

Sin … is anything that I do that isolates, ostracizes, or separates me or others from the human community (and by extension, from the web of life) which results in robbing or denying human uniqueness and potential. Call it evil or flawed behavior; call it missing the mark; call it brokenness; call it denial, repression, or reaction formation—it's all sin if it separates, ostracizes, or isolates us from the ground of our being, from that which defines us as human beings. Sin is behavior that prevents a person from living out their potential for human being-ness.[iv]

Who among us has not “missed the mark?”  Who among us has not fallen short of our best intentions, our highest resolve?  I don’t know – you may be perfect; I’m pretty sure I’m not!  Most days I can point to at least one instance of “missing the mark,” a moment of irritation in which I have lashed out – mildly, of course – because of some small thwarting of my will, some instance in which someone didn’t do something the way I would have done it, some unkind remark.  Or maybe I subtly took advantage of a situation and put myself ahead of someone else in line or in traffic.

“I’m sorry.”  “I forgive you.”  It’s helpful to have the Days of Awe to reflect and to make amends.

More broadly, all of us forget on occasion that we come into existence and live every moment of our lives in the midst of other human beings who have their own needs and interests that will inevitably thwart us in one way or another.  So we need moral guidelines to show us how to overcome our brokenness, our estrangement, our tendency to see only our own needs and wishes.  Kant proposed what is perhaps the most famous philosophical formulation in his Categorical Imperative:  “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”  My parents put it in simpler terms:  “What if everybody did that?”  The Golden Rule says the same:  “Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.”  An earlier formulation was offered by Rabbi Hillel, one of the sages of Judaism who lived just before the time of Jesus.  It is said that

 “… a certain heathen came … to Hillel [and asked that he] teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.”[v]

Who of us has not fallen short of this standard?  “I’m sorry.”  “I forgive you.”

Of course, nations, too, can fall short of this standard.  I like Forrest Church’s formulation:

National or collective sin almost always cloaks self-interest in the garb of higher virtue. Not only as individuals but also as a nation, we justify questionable means by noble ends. We exculpate ourselves by pointing out that others do worse….[vi]

 A recent example with serious international ramifications is cited by J.J. Goldberg in the Jewish Forward:

Well, here we are in the month of Elul, approaching the sacred Jewish season of repentance and forgiveness. This is the month set aside in tradition for practicing our shofar blowing and apologizing to our neighbors. So what’s the big message out of [Israel, ]the Jewish state? “No apologies, no way.” And a happy new year to you, too.

Normally, we think of an apology as a useful gesture, a nicety that helps to smooth a few ruffled feathers. I hurt your feelings, I think you should get over it, but your foolish pride won’t let you. What will it cost me to make the first move? Just a bit of pride. So I shrug, grin sheepishly and say the words, and we hug. Crisis averted.

The Israeli-Turkish smack-down over last year’s [Gaza] flotilla deaths is a squabble of a very different magnitude, but it comes down to the same thing: pride. Turkey says its national honor requires an Israeli apology for the deaths of Turkish citizens; Israel says its national honor forbids apologizing for an act of legitimate self-defense. They’re a pair of old friends, stuck in a downward slide toward enmity because neither one will blink.

The difference between them is that Israel has much more to lose: its most important regional ally, its third largest trading partner and its vital bridge to the Muslim world. Risking all that for the sake of honor seems unforgivably short-sighted.[vii]

I need – we all need – to remember:  “I’m sorry.”  “I forgive you.”

This is a season for repentance and new beginnings, for teshuvah in the Hebrew.  This is a season for returning again to our true selves, to our commitment to bring harmony rather than rupture to our relationships; to return again to the home of our souls.  [Sung:]

“Return again, return again,

Return to the home of your soul;

Return again, return again,

Return to the home of your soul.”

So may it be, and Amen.

                                                                    www.secondparish.org