Love and Sin

Exodus 12: 1-14
Romans 13: 8-14

For 2,000 years the Bible, often unaided by any human intervention, has transformed the lives of those who read it, many times dramatically so. St. Augustine is a good example. For most of his life he was a famed academic in the Roman Empire. He was very successful in rhetoric, a noble profession. But he lived a thoroughly dissolute, self-indulgent, immoral life. The time came when he began to consider the claims of Christianity.

He was alone in a garden one day when he heard a child singing out a line from a game: "Pick it up and read, pick it up and read." He turned to his copy of the Scriptures, which was opened to Romans 13. His eyes were drawn to the following words: "Not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.”

Deeply convicted, he surrendered to Christ, and the Roman rhetorician went on to become the Christian bishop of Hippo, the greatest theologian after Paul, and one of the most formidable intellects of Western civilization.

This leads me to ask what is a sin? In Augustine’s eyes, before he began to know Jesus Christ, he did not consider his life sinful. We could quibble about the definition of a sin and about what makes something sinful. However, I have to think that a sin is whatever keeps us from God. If there is anything in our lives that keeps us out of God’s arms; anything that keeps us from going toward God – then that is what is sinful, regardless of what anyone else says. Sin separates us from God. God is not sinful and will not accept anything sinful.

Jesus Christ died for our sins so that we may enter heaven instead of being cast out. Jesus didn’t just whitewash our sinful pasts to make them look clean, he took all that sinful behavior away. Most of us in here today understand and accept that part of our faith. We understand that sometimes we will lie or speak hatefully or maybe even fudge our tax return and that when we come to God with these sins, Jesus will make it right with our Father in heaven.

In fact, I have to say perhaps we are all a little too accepting of this part of our faith. Perhaps we have gone from being truly repentant to just being lazy. There are many kinds of sin. There are many ways to sin. One of the things I’ve always envied about the Catholic religion is their ability to organize and simplify certain things about God and Christianity. Catholics have categorized their sins into venereal and mortal. Basically they figured out there are some sins that we all do and then there are the special sins that require a bit more effort on humanity’s part. I think we are all comfortable being forgiven for the really bad stuff so that sometimes we forget to pay attention to the not so bad sins.

We become comfortable with the news we see on television or read about in the newspaper. We start seeing nothing wrong with three deaths to gang violence last night or when a mother shakes her baby to death. We begin to accept that sometimes children go to bed hungry in this town and we accept that there are others that have the brains for college, but lack the funds so they will work at Sheetz for the rest of their life when they could have been a doctor. We accept the homeless in the cities and the children that grow up without direction from their parents. We shake our heads at the gangs and the violence while talking about how it was different when we were kids. We say things like, “Teens didn’t act like they do now; we respected our elders.”

We forget what brought us to the point we are at. We forget that many of the kids that are in gangs join so they won’t be picked on in school because some parents didn’t teach their children to ignore differences and to accept everyone. We forget that because the economy isn’t prospering that many parents are working when their children come home and so now many teenagers have no role models to teach them how to be responsible. We forget how every generation of children and teenagers rebel against their parents in some way and we tell ourselves we never did the same thing.

I’m not sure how we get to the point where gunshots and screams are okay background noise. I’m not sure how we start to accept that twenty soldiers were killed in Afghanistan this weekend. I’m not sure how we allow children in this town to go without food in their stomachs and I don’t know how we accept that some children will just not have the guidance they need while others will have more guidance than they could ever want. And I’m really not sure how we can look Jesus in the eye after we die and say that we did all we could for these people.

These are the people that will never ask the church for help. These are the people that don’t even know that the church COULD help. If there was ever an untapped source of humanity it is the people that live right outside these walls. In every town and in every city, churches are surrounded by needy people. Every day that a church ignores that need is a day the church has ignored the chance to change a person’s life by showing them the transforming and life changing love of Jesus. When we help someone that cannot do anything for us, we show them the true love of God because God does everything for us when we have nothing to give in return.

You see, this passage today is a reminder that the love of Christ is all encompassing. It is a reminder to us that love is the fulfillment of the laws that God has created and love is about caring for others more than we care about ourselves. Love is the essence of discipleship, the basis for transformation. Love involves all we are and do, individually and as faith communities every single day.

Love defines the attitude, behavior, and norm by which the Christian community takes account of its life. This love has two feet: love of God and love of neighbor. Loving God and loving our neighbors are inseparable. If you do not love your neighbor you are not loving God and if you love God you will love your neighbor because God IS your neighbor. We do not help others to put butts in the seats of this church. We help them because that is the right thing to do. We help because that is what Jesus calls us to do. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors.

What is a neighbor? Not just the person across from you in the street. Think of someone that annoys you. Someone that constantly does things that hurt you. Think of someone so completely different from you that they could be from another planet. These people are your neighbors. They are to be loved with the same fierceness as we love ourselves and our family.

We are to be the light of the world. We are to be the voice that cries out, “You are God’s beloved child!” We are to be the ones that change a life by offering Christ’s Good News. And every day we pretend that is not our mission, every day when we say we are too tired or too busy or we don’t have enough money to make any real difference is a day that we go away from God instead of toward God.

And that is the danger of sin. It takes away our urgency to help others. It takes away our ability to be kind and compassionate to those less fortunate. It takes us away from God and God’s voice that reminds us that our mission is about making sure every single person has the chance to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It takes away from our commitment to our families and to our community and it distracts us from our purpose.

We are here in these pews to worship the Lord. We worship by praying and singing. We worship by offering ourselves to do Christ’s work. It is not for others to do. It is not for another church to do or another mission group. It is our work. It is our duty. Christ’s great commission before he ascended into heaven was to spread the gospel to all four corners of the earth. And that means our mission is clear – we need to educate the person across the street from us just as much as we educate the people across the world from us. With every person we help, that is one more person who may help us spread God’s word and that is an exciting thing to realize!

Amen.