Scripture: Genesis 6:1-8; John 8:34-36; Romans 7:15; Psalm 145:13-14 Series: The Way of Salvation
Original sin is the empirically observable reality of human brokenness and our inward-curved distance from God, which we cannot self-care or self-actualize away, so we must awaken to our need for a savior and the prevenient grace already at work in us.
Illustrations: william-temple-empirical-doctrine, apostles-creed-empirical-test, plug-ears-close-eyes, hero-of-your-own-movie, jonathan-edwards-awakening, wesley-moravians-seclusion, self-care-influencers, aa-twelve-steps-bill-wilson, big-boy-pants, not-a-superhero-messiah
Feb 2
Original Sin
Genesis 6:1-8
John 8:34-36
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord. - Genesis 6:1-8
Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. - John 8:34-36
William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury called Original Sin the only empirical Christian doctrine. I know, so funny. It is a joke designed for like five people, but it is hilarious. Trust me. This is a joke on a number of levels.
Empirical testing is following the scientific method: observation and objectivity and repetition. Something has to be observable and repeatable and understood by a neutral observer.
Concerning Christian doctrine, there’s no way to empirically test the Trinity or the incarnation because it’s a non-repeatable event. Concerning creation, there are ways of observing the debris of the Big Bang, but not the actual bang. Similarly, there are ways of observing evidence of the birth of Jesus, evidence of the resurrection, but not the event itself. These are one off affairs. If we go through the apostles creed and look at it empirically,
I believe in Jesus Christ, his Only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
We can’t see any of that.
Born of the Virgin Mary,
I wasn’t there. Empirically, this is unlikely, and unrepeatable. It hasn’t happened again.
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Only suffered once, so not a repeatable action. There were witnesses, but you can’t test it.
A lot of Christian doctrine works like this. It is unobservable and unrepeatable, but sin, oh boy, sin. With sin, we’ve got a thing that’s both observable and repeatable. Man. These humans, they keep on making mistakes. It doesn’t slow down. We see them again and again but people keep making them and with the best of intentions they are still repeated. As Paul says in Romans 7: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Romans 7:15 ESV
Or as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.
Now, depending on what tradition you come from or your experience with Christian thought, the language of sin may leave a sour flavor in your mouth.
The language of sin within churches has often been used as a means of social control. People fixate on the actions of others, especially children and teens, so that they can conform to established expectations of social behavior. The weight of this has fallen especially on women.
For a long time, the church was focused on the fall, on the disobedience in the garden. Sometimes blaming Eve and blaming women and for being tempting.
This is an erroneous reading of scripture. Genesis 3, the fall narrative, is important, but I don’t think we should fixate on it. I think fixating on it misses the observable reality of the brokenness of our world. This was William Temple’s point. We can look at the world and see that it is not as it should be. Our world is not as it should be. There is injustice in this world. There is tragedy. There’s trauma. There’s hurt. There’s pain. There’s sickness. There’s pride. There are families falling apart, children being harmed. There’s a lot of bad stuff. What do we do about this? All this bad stuff.
Now, one of the most powerful human responses to the brokenness of the world is the plug your ears and close your eyes, La la. I don’t hear anything. I don’t see anything, la la. There are ways of doing that all day, every day. It’s avoiding stuff that doesn’t make you feel good because you just wanna feel good. And why not? This world is so hard, I just wanna feel good about myself, right? There’s a lot of ways of doing this.
It’s a classic move. It’s been done for thousands of years. We are all tempted by this move. We are tempted to ignore bad things. To ignore bad news. To ignore the sins of others. To ignore our own sins.
Another classic move is to think that people who are suffering probably deserve it somehow. I don’t know how, but they probably deserve it.
Neither of those are Christian moves. They are both pretty antichrist moves. Really, really deeply antichrist moves, which I don’t mind saying. Antichrist is not a proper noun. Christ means anointed, the one anointed. Joshua the anointed would be an accurate translation of Jesus Christ. Anti means against. anointed against, that’s what means, and that’s what plugging your, closing your eyes to the pain of this world means. That’s what us judging the suffering of others means: it is antichrist. It’s anti-Christian.
Okay, so what else are we left to do?
What helps me understand this predicament that we are in is the doctrine called original sin. Those words are not found in the Bible, but the language is found throughout. We start with Genesis, and not in the Garden of Eden. I’m gonna start with Genesis 6 before the flood. That’s the time when people are doing whatever they want. Desire becomes reality.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.
Sin continues throughout the rest of the Old Testament. Sin marks the distance between us and God. We see it through Genesis, through Exodus, through the wandering in the desert, through the early nation of Israel, the season of the judges. The people, again and again, are offered a path to follow God, and the people walk away from God, again and again and again. A good king rises up. And then his son is a bad king, and the people turn away from God and worship idols. The prophets come. They give us some language about the sinfulness of the land. If you have your Bible, turn to the start of any prophet. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, any of them. It doesn’t take long to reach the sinfulness.
Yet God is faithful throughout. As it says in Psalm 145: The Lord is faithful in all his words and loving in all his deeds. The Lord supports all who fall and raises all who are bowed down.
In Hebrew and in Greek, sin means missing the mark. Sin is not making a mistake. Sin is not wronging. Sin is when we do not live up to who God created us to be. So there could be passive sins and active sins. I think the listing out and ranking of sin often makes us too anthropocentric, too focused on ourselves and our behavior. Sin is about who God is and the goodness of God, and the distance between ourselves and the goodness of God.
Original sin is the human tendency towards this state, towards this distance. I think it is more helpful as an empirical doctrine than a genetic one. That is, focusing more on the fact that we observe it and experience it and not focusing on where it comes from.
It is the level of moral inertia that pulls us away from God and away from the people that we were created to be, so that, In the language of Augustine, we’re curved inward. Our focus is on ourselves. And the good we do is accidental. Some people have a lot of accidents of good. That’s okay, but it doesn’t change its nature.
All of this is hard to look at. We want to see ourselves as good people from the start. We want to be the heroes of our own movie. But we are not in a movie. We eat and chew and spit and spill and trip and laugh and fall and cry. We have to go pee and we hurt in weird places. It can be a bit of a shock to realize you are not the hero in your movie and that our intentions and expectations do not make everything work out.
Now, some of you probably have heard about a preacher named Jonathan Edwards in colonial Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards was a young pastor in Massachusetts and there was an awakening, to use his language, going on in the community of Northampton, Massachusetts. Now, when we hear the word awakening, we kind of think positive stuff, right? Nope, that’s not what Jonathan Edwards meant. He meant an awakening to a person’s understanding of their own sin. That was the first step. A level of accountability with the actions we take in this world.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, read Jonathan Edwards’ accounts soon after he had returned from to England, from visiting a group in Germany called the Moravians, who had showed him a way of life of following God intentionally and fully, but was still kind of secluded from society. And John, from his early days in Oxford, thought faithfulness did not need seclusion. God could transform us wherever we are. As well, sin would find us wherever we are. We all need grace. We need to be aware of our sin but also in a community where the good news of Jesus Christ is proclaimed and the sanctifying practices of the Holy Spirit are taught and offered.
Talk about original sin is not talk about being sad or making mistakes. It is about being explicit with the reality of the world and our own reality in the world. We can’t self-actualize away from sin. We can self-care away from sin. If we get up at the right time, and eat the right things, and exercise the right amount, if we do perfectly at work and care for our family perfectly, it won’t save them or ourselves. If we make all the little adjustments recommended by social media influencers, sin will still be there. And this drive promoted so much today, blinds us to dealing with the consequences of our actions and of sin in the world. It also blinds us to the people God has put in our lives to help us, not enable us.
Waking up to the reality of sin is about needing God. It is saying, I can’t save myself. Then it is about putting on our big boy, our big girl pants, and facing the consequences of our actions. Some of it is entirely our fault, some of it not. We still have to pick up the pieces.
There is a connection between this language of original sin and language of addiction. The connection is not hollow.
The first step of the twelve step program is to admit you are powerless over alcohol. Powerlessness is not a mark of weakness but a step of transformation.
Bill Wilson, one of the founders of AA, was deeply influenced by the Oxford Groups which came out of the Keswick Convention, a holiness off-shoot of Methodism. Becoming holy, becoming sober, becoming clean, starts with an awakening and a community.
When we move back from addiction to our lives in this world, we need to understand the problem before we can seek the solution.
Over the next few weeks, we’re gonna talk about salvation, about how God saves us, about how Jesus offered his life for us, how we are saved and made holy by God. You have to be saved from something. To save is a transitive verb. It needs an object. Saved is not a state someone can be in. You’re saved from something. You’re saved for something or to something.
Original sin helps us describe the nature of our world. It is a way to show the need for a savior, that we can’t patch it up on our own. And that even the good we do is often accidental and we follow it up by leaning on ourselves again and again and again and we, it all fall short.
Now, if you’re counting on saving yourselves, I’m sorry to say, but you’re not a superhero. Sorry, you’re not the Messiah. This moment, though, is where the good news starts. After this awakening, this realization, we can recognize how God has been with us all along.
In the Wesleyan tradition, we preach and we teach that this awakening comes not from our own self and our amazing intellect, but from the grace God has already sent to us that has been with us from before we were aware of it. We use this funky work called prevenient Grace.
Admitting our mistakes is not a cause of sorrow, but a cause of joy. In the midst of these moments. In the midst of these mistakes, God is there for us. This is why Gabriel came to Mary and said, Hail, Mary, the Lord is with you. It’s why Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. Why Jesus was crucified, died, and buried, and why he rose again.
We can’t fix it on our own, but we need to admit that the problem is there. May God give us all the grace to clearly see our needs. May we forgive ourselves for failing to save ourselves. May we see the problem is deeper than us, but the solution is deeper also. Jesus doesn’t save us for us, but for each other, for the world.
In the name, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.