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Writer's pictureRev. Joel L. Tolbert

Sin & Evil

Harmonies of Faith, a sermon series for the Summer on the core beliefs of harmonious faith, week 6 of 14, preached July 7, 2024

Sermon

Context

We believe different things and differences help us grow, or create conflict. Some believe the best way to resolve this conflict is to make everyone believe the same thing. I don’t think God’s goal is for us is to all believe exactly the same thing. I believe God’s goal for us is to all tune our different beliefs to God, to put our faiths into harmony inside ourselves and with one another and with God’s faithfulness. So we are calling this summer series, Harmonies of Faith.


So far, in this series, we’ve remembered this God does not stay hidden but reveals God’s self. This God is Triune, always one and always three... a perfect unity and relationship. As Creator, this God is the source of creation and life itself. This God provides more thanenough for all creation to function as God intends and to reach God’s goals. And humanityis a very good creation of God, and meant to be whole in mind, heart, soul, AND body.


These doctrines we’ve covered so far harmonize easily with one another. God chooses to reveal God’s self. Therefore, we sense God. We sense God as one, and see and feel God as three, yet God feels whole, complete, one. God isn’t creation but is behind all creation, including us. God provides more than enough in creation for all creation. And we humans, are somehow special to God, marked with something that is of God, even though we are not God. Like God, we have the ability and impulse to love… to love God and one another, and ourselves, with how we think and feel, what we want, and what we say and do.

Today’s doctrine is the rub, the wrench in the system… evil and sin. Find one or two people, make sure no one is left out, and talk over this question with one another…

Question of the Day

"We know there is sin and evil in our world. Where do you believe sin and evil come from?” Ready? Go!

 

(Open YouTube livestream, muted, on iPad, and chat with online attendees?)

 

Great! For anyone wishing to share, in person or online, what did you come up with?


Prayer for Illumination

Throughout the Bible, the prophets’ role is to expose sin and evil. The prophets are blunt, honest, and confrontational whenever they see sin and evil. They never compromise on the good of who God is and what God expects and promises, and so they refuse to let any form of sin or evil go unchallenged, as if sin or evil are okay with God, or worse, from God.

Before we read and preach God’s word from the prophet Isaiah, let’s pray… God as we open your word, may it open us. As we read your word, may it read us. Amen? Amen.

Scripture               Isaiah 1:21-2:5

21 (Oh) How the faithful city has become a prostitute! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her — but now murderers! 22 Your silver has become dross; your wine is mixed with water. 23 Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them.


24 Therefore says the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel:

“Surely I will pour out my wrath on my enemies and avenge myself on my foes! 25 I will turn my hand against you; I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy. 26 And I will restore your judges as at the first and your counselors as at the beginning.

Afterward you shall be called (again) the city of righteousness, the faithful city. 27 Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness.


28 But rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together, and those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed. 29 For you shall be ashamed of the oaks under which you delighted, and you shall feel guilt for the gardens that you have planted. 30 For you shall be like an oak whose leaf withers and like a garden without water. 31 The strong shall become like tinder and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.”


2:1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.


2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. 3 Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that God may teach us God’s ways and that we may walk in God’s paths.”


For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4 God shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.

5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!


This too is the word of God for the people of God… (Thanks be to God)


Sermon                 Sin and Evil

Everything we’d like to trust and believe about God, creation, and humanity would be easy to harmonize and believe if not for sin and evil. Sin and evil put us in a position where our beliefs, our faith in God cannot be easy, and if our faith IS easy, we might be either unclear on God or dishonest about sin.


See, we KNOW sin and evil are real. They are undisputable. We might disagree on what is sin or evil, whether or not something specific is fair or sin, good or evil, but we all know sin and evil are very real. At the same time, we can only hope, believe, trust, have faith in God. When young children see real sin and evil, it often doesn’t jive with the good and

 loving God we sing about in VBS. Youth and young adults eventually have something happen in their lives or see something happen in the world that is so sinful, so evil, they struggle to harmonize the dissonance of a good God with real and present evil, and many of them give up on God, church, or faith. This dissonance can happen in middle or later life too, when simpler beliefs about God finally fail under the weight of realized sin and evil.


Once we encounter and admit sin and evil are very real, the question becomes… How can what we were taught to believe, and try to believe, our faith, harmonize what we hope is true… a good, loving, and just Triune God that created everything and called human beings very good… with what we KNOW is true on the other… the presence of sin and evil in the world?


How to navigate this paradox, the reality of sin and evil in a good-God’s world, how we justify or rationalize or theologize sin and evil on one hand with God on the other, that defines the harmony or the discord of our faith.


So let’s start with some definitions. Sin and Evil are not the same thing, related, but not the same. Evil is anything that stands against God, or God’s will. Sin is any human expression of evil. Yall okay with that difference?


Now sometimes, that word sin means a choice, something we wanted or willed, that then becomes a word or action, a silence or inaction that feeds and spreads evil. Sometimes, that word sin represents a condition, a state of being into which we were born and in which we continue to exist. When we say SIN we might mean either… maybe the decision and action or maybe the condition, the state of being.  Sin means both, both what we think and want and say and do in the moment, AND sin is the water we swim in, the air we breathe, the cumulative shock waves of what those before us or beyond us thought or said or did that was sinful and stains the present with the sins of the past.


An example… If I sneak into a college admissions office and replace a letter of acceptance to a black student with a letter accepting a white student instead, that would be a sin of choice and action. Anyone who pickets colleges for accepting black people or immigrants, that is a sin of choice and action. At the same time, those picketers were taught by someone, those who came before them, the sin of racism, and their participation is because the sin of racism is a state of being, a condition into which they were born. Even if a college has a history of not accepting black people, and I applied to and attended that college, I would be participating in a sin of condition. I personally did not choose to act in a racist manner toward any specific black student, but I willingly or maybe unwittingly supported a racist institution, and the sinful condition of racism in the system. That’s what we mean when we say sin is both a choice and a condition.


What often happens when God and sin collide, is we ask, “okay… we hope God is good, and made things good, and provided more than enough. So where does evil or sin come from?” By our definitions, sin comes from humans. Sometimes sin is a choice to be sinful today, to spread evil. Sometimes sin is a condition, the consequences of choices others before us made that were evil, and now we live in a condition of sin others before us left us.

And most versions of Christianity are okay naming and condemning sins of choice, but struggle to take responsibility for the condition of sin around us. On the sin of racism for example, you might hear a Christian, feeling a bit defensive, say something like, “Well, that’s not my fault! I’m not a racist! I don’t have a racist bone in my body! I’ve never treated anyone differently just because of the color of their skin.” Ah, okay, maybe not, directly, by choice. But we know in this community, and in this country, real live racism still exists in some blatant and horrific ways. The downstream effects of slavery, the confederacy, Jim Crow, red line housing, civil rights injustices, under-supported neighborhoods and school systems, all the way to racist slurs and symbols still being flaunted today, show us racism is a sinful condition in which we still live. Unless we are actively resisting racism, we are complicit with it, and will suffer the consequences.


Like Isaiah imagined, when the community has sin in its system, all are accountable and all will suffer. None are justified before God as long as the condition of sin exists in our world. That’s what Paul meant when he said all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Isaiah did imagine that in repentance, individuals can be redeemed and good community can be renewed. Righteous AND justice are possible when we together confess our complicity and responsibility for ALL sin, and work together to bend all things toward God’s vision of beloved community, no more greed, thieves, bribes. Elderly and children get the special attention they need, and we finally end all war. That’s the goal of our confession and repentance, not just words we say at the beginning of worship, but the unravelling of the condition of sin in our world.


This doctrine is called total depravity. It means sin has totally depraved or corrupted creation. There is no corner of creation or of us that is still pure and perfect. Last week, when we talked about humanity, we resisted the idea that our body was sinful but our soul was perfect. We saw in Jesus a more holistic way to consider humanity, as heart, mind, soul, AND body together. Whatever sin is, we must be honest that nothing about us, not our minds, hearts, bodies, or souls are free of sin. We are not capable of freely thinking, feeling, willing, or acting without sin. That’s what Paul meant when he said, “the sin I don’t want to do, I do, and the very thing I want to do, I cannot!” Somehow, sin is in us, on us, all of us. There is nothing in us that is still perfect, and there is no thought, feeling, action, or desire that we can consider pure.


Not evil, mind you. Presbyterians don’t really talk about the origin of evil, only the origin of sin. Some Christians have two gods, the good god of love and peace and the bad god of evil, the devil, or satan. That second God is apparently over humans, and tricks us or makes us do evil. How convenient this Satan is.


This is why we Presbyterian don’t talk about “free” will very often. We tend to talk about the gift of free will given to us by God, but admit, our will is now trapped in sin, the sin of our choices, AND the condition of sin into which we are all born. Only the corners of Christianity that still want to think of their soul, their will, as pure and prefect, and their body as sin, really believe their will is “free.”


But that kind of faith leads down a path that I cannot reconcile with scripture OR with Jesus. Let’s say my will, my soul, is free, free to choose. Do I only make perfect pure choices? Do I move through life, willing to do the right thing every time but my sinful body gets in the way? Or does it feel more true that sometimes my thoughts, other times my feelings, other times my will, and sometimes my body all betray me.


And the kicker for me is… let’s say my soul, my will really was free, free to choose good and holy. They why did Jesus come? God told us and showed us how to live. We have the commandments. We have the prophets. We have Rabbi Jesus. We know what God wants. Wouldn’t God just insist we study harder and harder and save ourselves by finally becoming obedient to everything God wants from us? If that was the God we worship, then God would demand perfection from our soul, mind, heart, and body. If that was the God we worship, Jesus wouldn’t have come.


This God sees what we have done with the gift of will, soul, body, heart, mind, life itself. We’ve betrayed God. We’ve hurt one another and hurt ourselves. Like Isaiah imagines, just admit that. Repent. Not that repentance saves, but repentance, humility opens the door to an honest acceptance of our weakness to sin anew, and our complicity in ignoring or justifying sins of old.


So where are we? Evil is anything that resists God. Sin is the human activity or silence to evil. Sin is both the choice to act in evil ways, or not act against evil, and a condition in which we live, the downstream effects of all the sins that came before us. We today are responsible for sin, the sin we choose, and for unravelling the sin in the system others chose.


Prayer

Amen? Amen.

Charge

 

Benediction

Now blessing, laughter, and loving be yours, and may the love of a great God who names you and holds you as the earth turns and the flowers grow be with you this day, this night, this moment, and forever more. Amen? Amen.

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