sermon

September 28, 2008

Ellsworth, Maine

Rev. Leela Sinha

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the high holy days of the Jewish calendar, are late this year, or we were early. But they are finally approaching, these days of atonement when names are inscribed in the book of life for the coming year, and when all wrongs must be righted, and all amends made. Sin is a concept more closely associated with Christianity than with Judaism in popular culture, but the idea is there, violations of law for which one must repent and be forgiven. As we come down from that long and venerable religious line, we could have inherited it, we might have inherited it, but we certainly don’t talk about it.

I think we’re afraid of sin.

I think we’re afraid of sin even if we don’t believe in it. In fact, it’s especially scary, then. It’s scary because if we don’t believe in it then we don’t know what it looks like, can’t fight it, can’t name it. We know there’s something big and bad out there but we don’t know what it is; we might accidentally meet it, or talk with it in the street, invite it home for dinner. We don’t know what happens if we forget and let it in, because really, it’s not there.

We Unitarian Universalists never really talked about getting rid of sin, not as a planned proposition. We talked about getting rid of hell, and agreed that probably made sense, given that whole bit in the New Testament about a loving god; we talked about authority and where it comes from and we even talked about getting rid of god–although we never did come to agreement on that, the discussion is robust, with a respectable history. But we’ve never brought sin front and center.

Sometimes it seems like we did, back when we were talking about hell. But believing that god, if there is a god, is too good to damn us, no matter what, is different from believing that we’re too good to be damned.

If there is such a thing as hell, and if the world worked on a strict eye-for-an-eye system of checks and balances, a lot of us could be in a lot of trouble. We all make mistakes, errors in judgment, little ones and sometimes big ones. Even if we set aside those people who, for reasons too complicated for us to understand, become violent and consistently mean, we are still left, not with some kind of perfect elite a la the Puritans, but with a flawed and messy bunch of people– of us. Sometimes we don’t know what to do; sometimes we know but we can’t bring ourselves to do it. Sometimes we act fast and don’t think until later. And some of the mistakes we make are really just mistakes–minor upheavals in the fabric of our lives. Others, however, are bad. They’re really bad. We don’t like to think about it; we certainly don’t like to talk about it. But we do have language for it. Old language. It’s called sin.

The word “sin” has a fascinating etymology, coming to us from the Germanic line. The words retain their sense of “trespass” or “offense” back through the years until they suddenly shift to meaning “true”. It seems likely that the origin is “to be truly the one who is guilty”. So sin comes from truth. (From the Online Etymology Dictionary)

Now we have this scary thing that we might not believe in that is derived from that which is at the very core of our sense of reason, which in turn is at the core of how we practice our faith. That should make us feel nice and secure.

**

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