Sermon by Catherine McCaw
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our strength and our redeemer.
Today is the 24th Sunday after Pentecost. It is also the 21st anniversary of 9/11. Meditating on the meaning of the coincidence of these events, I have come up with this truth. Osama Bin Laden was right about me.
As many of you know, I teach a course called Theory of Knowledge, which is part of the IB Diploma. It is a course about how we know the things we think we know. One of the first topics we discuss is the definition of knowledge. About 400 years before the birth of Christ, the Greek philosopher, Plato, defined knowledge as Justified, True, Belief. For a claim to count as knowledge, we must BELIEVE it to be true, we must have a GOOD REASON for believing it to be true, and it must BE true. 1 thousand 963 years after the death of Christ, an American philosopher called Edmund Gettier challenged Plato’s definition. Since then, philosophers have amused themselves making up “Gettier problems”, to illustrate his argument. The one I like the best involves a clock in a train station. Suppose you are waiting for a train at a train station and you look at a clock, which tells you that the time is 3:00. You conclude that it is 3:00 and you are correct. You go back to reading your book and don’t look at the clock again. Your train departs on time and you don’t realise that the clock is broken. You believed it was 3:00, your justification was that the clock said it was 3:00 and it turns out that, by pure chance, it was 3:00. You had justified true belief, but your justification was bogus, unbeknownst to you. Did you, in fact, know, that it was 3:00? Osama Bin Laden was right about me, but his justification, I would argue, was bogus.
Osama Bin Laden justified his attacks on America and the west in general, by accusing us all of being sinful. I am sinful.
All of today’s lectionary passages relate to sin in one way or another. The reading from Jeremiah paints a bleak picture of a wrathful God punishing the Judeans for turning to the worship of Baal. In this and many other passages, he predicts the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. However, many verses are disturbingly resonant today:
“A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people”
“I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void”
“all the birds of the air had fled.”
“I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert”.
We don’t use the word “lo” very much anymore, but otherwise these statements could be drawn from this summer’s headlines.
We sometimes use the shorthand of referring to the “Old Testament God” and the “New Testament God”. Of course, this is inaccurate. God doesn’t change. However, our human understanding of God has changed quite profoundly since the time of Jeremiah.
I think our developing understanding is analogous to the techniques we use to manage the behaviour of children at different developmental stages. At every stage, our goal is to keep them safe and prevent them from hurting others. However, it is difficult to explain our reasoning to very young children, so we tend to teach them hard and fast, absolute rules, enforced with some rewards and consequences, such as being removed from the group for a period of time, so they can experience a cause-effect relationship between the action and the consequences. As they get older, we can explain the reasons behind the rules and, in place of consequences, we can encourage them to find ways to make things right. Ruth Poulsen is our resident expert on dealing with erring adolescents. I often try to get her onto the subject after lunch on Sundays because I learn so much from her. We hope that they will develop into adults with an independent sense of right and wrong, not needing to be hectored about the rules. From an educational point of view, the most useful situations are those with natural consequences that are mild enough that children and teens can be allowed to make mistakes and suffer the consequences. If you don’t do your homework, you will do badly on the test. If you use the class time designated for work on your TOK essay for other purposes, you will end up staying up all night the night before the draft is due, That isn’t God or the teacher punishing you – that is just the result of your inaction. When my niece was 3, she wanted to wear her new flipflops with tights. We told her she couldn’t, and she assumed it was an arbitrary rule imposed on her by unreasonable adults. We had to let her try to put on her flipflops before she accepted that “You can’t wear tights with flipflops” was not a prohibition, but a statement of fact.
The ancient Israelites and ancient Judeans were not children, but their understanding of the world was limited in comparison to our own. They recognized that there was a causal relationship between their behaviour and the Babylonian conquest, and they attributed it to a punitive God. There are hints in the reading of our understanding of God.
“The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.”
Yet I will not make a full end.
“Because of this the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black;”
The whole Earth mourns, because of the Judeans’ sin.
When I look at the devastating effects of climate change on our planet, I also see a causal relationship between it and my sin, but it is not that God is punishing me for flying to Canada at every opportunity and running the air conditioning from March to October. The devastation of our planet, the spreading of the deserts, the mass extinctions are the natural consequences of my actions and inactions and those of people like me. The Ancient Judeans were literally turning away from God to worship Baal, but they and we have gradually come to understand that all sin is a repudiation of God’s plan for us and our world. God wants us to live on a beautiful planet that is constantly renewing itself. Our greed and selfishness makes that impossible. The natural consequence is massive environmental damage. I have two black eyes because I attended a start of year party, drank too much and tried to ride my bike home. God didn’t strike me down to punish me. This is the natural consequence of my overindulgence.
Psalm 51 was written by King David about 400 years before Jeremiah’s prophecy. David had never deviated from the worship of the one true God. His most famous sin was engineering the death of Uriah the Hittite. Scholars think Uriah was an ethnic Hittite who had converted to the worship of God. He served in King David’s army and lived near King David’s palace. King David saw Uriah’s wife bathing and wanted to sleep with her (he already had seven wives and multiple concubines). He summoned her and impregnated her. He recalled Uriah to Jerusalem hoping he would sleep with his wife and be a plausible father to the child, but Uriah felt he could not take the time to visit his wife while others were fighting. Therefore, David arranged for him to be sent into the heat of the fighting and abandoned by his comrades so he would be killed and David could marry Bathsheba and cover up his sin. He had forgotten or never truly realised that God knows all and sees all, and has an intention for all. By the time he writes Psalm 51, David realises this. He writes:
“Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight,”
By seducing or coercing Bathsheba and killing Uriah, David has turned from God’s intentions, as if he had turned from the worship of God to the worship of a pagan fertility idol.
David equates his sin with sexual desire, which may explain his next statement:
“Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”
This, I think, is correct in explaining that we are born with the inclination to indulge ourselves in ways that can lead to sin (a turning away from God), but I disagree with the implication that the mere act of intercourse is somehow sinful. I’m not an expert on theology - or intercourse, but I think the New Testament backs me up. Osama Bin Laden was obsessed with who was sleeping with whom. He would have approved of me in that respect. I have never had intercourse outside of marriage.
Groucho Marx supposedly once said “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” I feel that way about the people of many religions and denominations who praise people like me for not having intercourse. I have come to the conclusion over the years that I do not have the same urges as most others do. I have destructive appetites, but lust is not one of them. Furthermore, I don’t see what is inherently sinful about sexual appetites. King David’s sins, in my opinion were: violating a woman’s privacy by watching her bathe when she thought she was alone, possibly coercing her to have sex with him (although the Bible is silent on her attitude to the relationship), having sex with someone outside of marriage as a married man (he was married to seven other women and had several concubines), having sex with someone he knew was married, trying to deceive the world about his actions, and engineering the death of a fellow human being for his own selfish ends. Desiring Bathsheba wasn’t the problem. Acting on his desire was. Letting himself sink into self-indulgence to the point where acting on every desire seemed OK might be sinful too. However, if there were no sexual desire, our species would die out. That can’t be God’s plan. I see the subsequent unraveling of David’s family as a natural consequence of polygamy and the climate of selfishness and self-indulgence he exhibited rather than the punishment for the mere experience of sexual desire.
I think Got wants integrity, kindness and responsibility in relationships. God also wants our species to continue. I think a lot of the rules around sex and marriage in the Old Testament were aimed at incentivising those behaviours. These behaviours can take a different form in modern society. Our species is in no danger of dying out. Not all sexual relationships automatically result in pregnancy. The social ills associated with polygamy are generally believed to outweigh the benefits. I still think that only adults who have built up a foundation of trust should venture into intercourse, but what do I know?
Apart from that verse, Psalm 51 reveals the nature of God in many ways:
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; *
in your great compassion blot out my offenses.
Wash me through and through from my wickedness *
and cleanse me from my sin.”
In the Old and New Testaments, we have constant examples of God’s loving- kindness. The alternate Old Testament reading is printed in the back of the bulletin.
It relates an episode shortly after the Exodus, either 1300 or 1200 years before the birth of Christ. Every man and woman and almost every child among the Israelites had witnessed the miraculous events that accompanied their escape from Egypt. They were still being let by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. They were still receiving manna. Moses left them for 40 days to climb Mount Sinai to commune with God and they panicked. They melted down all their gold and built a golden calf. The reading has God laying down these facts before Moses and Moses begging God not to punish his people. The point is, God doesn’t punish the people. Moses does. In the part of the chapter that doesn’t get read in church, he has the Levites slaughter 3000 people. I can only attribute this slaughter to a misinterpretation of God’s intention. God forgave the Israelites.
There are other hints about the nature of sin in the Old Testament. The whole book of Job disproves the assumption that all misfortune is a punishment from God for sin. Job’s friends spend many chapters encouraging him to confess his faults and hope to receive God’s forgiveness. Job correctly insists that he has not committed any fault deserving of divine punishment. However, in Chapter 42 vs 6, Job says “Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” In this statement, he acknowledges that he has sinned. I’m like Job. Neither my sins nor Job’s are so severe as to warrant the terrible events that destroyed Job’s life, but they are real.
In spite of the book of Job, the Jews of Jesus’ time continued to believe that all misfortune was a punishment from God. In John 9:2, the disciples ask Jesus whether a man is blind because of his own sin or a sin of his parents. Jesus replies that it is neither. The purpose of the man’s blindness is to display God’s healing power.
The Jews of Jesus’ time also had a very legalistic interpretation of sin. There were hundreds of laws governing Jewish behaviour, and breaking any was considered a sin. Even touching people or objects associated with sin, such as menstruating women, was to taint oneself. Women couldn’t take part in religious rituals until 33 days after the birth of a male baby or 66 days after the birth of a female baby. There were complicated rules governing what could and could not be eaten and even forbidding wearing garments combining two different types of thread.
Jesus constantly broke these taboos. He healed the women afflicted with a bleeding disorder who touched his robe in Mark Chapter 5, Matthew Chapter 9 and Luke Chapter 8. He asked a Samaritan woman who was living with a man to whom she was not married in John 4. Three weeks ago, we read the story from Luke 13 where Jesus heals a woman on the sabbath. In our gospel passage today, we see Jesus not only speaking to known sinners and collaborators, but socialising with them.
In John 4 the pharisees confront Jesus with a woman caught in adultery and ask if they should stone her. They were trying to entrap Jesus into disrespecting either Roman law which did not allow for executions of adulterers or Mosaic law under which both the man and woman should be stoned to death. Jesus’ response is very thought-provoking. He simply says, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Since none of the men could honestly claim to be sinless, they departed. Jesus tells the woman that he will not condemn her and that she should “go and sin no more”. Adultery is sinful, but God wants true repentance, not retribution.
Later in the New Testament we have confirmation that Christian morality is not dependent on rigidly adhering to the strictures of Mosaic law. In Acts 10, God gives Peter explicit permission to ignore the Jewish dietary laws, for instance.
Our freedom from Mosaic laws is a bit of a double-edged sword. We do not consider it sinful to eat pork, but neither can we claim to be virtuous simply by virtue of avoiding pork. In Matthew 22, Jesus sums up what it is to be virtuous:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
This implies that the purpose of all of the specific laws and strictures the Jews lived by was to encourage lives permeated with love of God and love for one’s neighbour. It’s also a tall order. What does it look like when one loves God with all one’s heart, all one’s soul and all one’s mind? What does it look like when one puts one’s neighbour’s welfare on a par with one’s own?
There is an uncomfortable episode in Matthew 19 where a rich young man approaches Jesus and asks what good deeds he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honour your father and mother; also, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” The young man informs him that he has always kept these commandments. Jesus advises him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. The young man leaves sadly, unable to bring himself to part with his possessions and Jesus says: “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The young man doesn’t truly love God with all his heart, all his soul and all his mind. The problem is neither do I. According to a 2021 calculation by Credit Suisse, millionaires and billionaires make up 1% of the world’s population and control 46% of its wealth. Middle class people like me make up 11% of world population and control 39% of its wealth. Households with incomes between $10,000 and $100,000 make up 33% of the population and control 14% of the wealth, and households making less than $10,000 per year make up 55% of the population and control 1% of the wealth. To put it another way, I belong to the wealthiest 12% of the world’s people, and between us we control 84% of the world’s wealth. This is not what a world devoted to God with heart and soul and mind looks like. Incidentally, you may have heard the interpretation that the “eye of a needle” was actually a gate in Jerusalem that was too small for a camel to get through without first being unloaded. Unfortunately, there is no archaeological or textual evidence for the existence of such a gate. You may also have heard that some scholars think “camel” is a mistranslation and Jesus was actually saying it was easier for a rope or cable to get through the eye of a needle. This may be true, but it is still impossible to get a rope through the eye of a needle. The disciples’ reaction to this statement shows that they believed Jesus was describing an impossibility because Matthew reports that they were astounded and asked: ‘Then who can be saved?’ There is a shred of hope in Jesus’ reply: ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.’
So I am a sinner. I haven’t killed anyone, or committed adultery. I am nice to the people around me. I go to church most Sundays, but I am addicted to a lifestyle that prioritises my own security and comfort over God’s plan.
So where does that leave me? First, we have ample evidence that the first step is to admit to the sin. Jesus chatted to fornicators and adulterers. He socialised with tax collectors. He welcomed Paul into the Church even though Paul had previously devoted himself to hunting down Jesus’s followers and overseeing their brutal executions. He has all the time in the world for sinners. While not condoning sin, he makes it clear that he doesn’t hate the sinner. What he does condemn in very strong terms is hypocrisy. For instance, in Luke 18 we find the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying at the temple:
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
Jesus tells us that it is the tax collector who went home justified before God. For more evidence of Jesus’ distaste for hypocrisy, see Matthew 23.
Penitence is the act of admitting sin and expressing regret for it.
In our reading from First Timothy today, we see Paul’s penitence. He expresses gratitude to Christ for taking him in even though he was formerly a “blasphemer, a persecutor and a man of violence”. He calls himself “the foremost of sinners”. In our psalm, we see King David admitting “I acknowledge my fault and my sin is ever before me”. So far, so good. I can manage penitence.
The problem is the next step – repentance. Repentance encompasses penitence, but goes further. Repenting is stopping the sinful behaviour and turning to God. In our Gospel reading, Jesus asserts that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
I don’t know if I have the strength of character to turn to God with all my heart, all my soul and all my mind. Mine is not a new problem, and my hope lies in Jesus’ reply to the disciples after the encounter with the rich young man – “With God all things are possible.” In Psalm 51, David doesn’t undertake to turn his life around on his own. He asks God “Create in me a clean heart and put a new and right spirit within me”. Similarly in First Timothy, Paul refers to receiving the necessary strength from Jesus to live his life according to God’s plan. Perhaps with a penitent heart and God’s help I can learn to lead a more godly, loving life.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.