Original Sin

Rali Weaver

October 28, 2007

First Church and Parish, Dedham

I understand that Chris Walton (the editor of the UU World) once wrote a sermon and titled it Make All Your Sins Original. I wish I had thought of that title! It could have been great fun to stand up here today and tell you all the ways I would like to make original sins – or to explain the value of missing the mark in new ways instead of old ones.

But my topic (from the sermon topic jar) is Original Sin.

While it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint anything that Unitarian Universalists universally agree upon, I think I can say with authority that our Unitarian Universalist principles are at odds with a concept of Original Sin.

Specifically, the fact that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity in every person conflicts with the idea that any person could be born bogged down with sin.

How can every person have dignity at birth if they are considered fundamentally sinful at birth?

If you grew up in a Christian Faith tradition, you may already know that Augustine of Hippo developed the concept of Original Sin.

Augustine of Hippo, also known as St. Augustine, was born in 354 A.D.  What is most interesting about his life is that he was born to a Christian family, explored paganism for a while, and then became a skeptic, before coming full circle: he became a Bishop in the Catholic Church. He is well known for his skillful use of rhetoric in articulating Christian ideas that the Catholic Church later made into creed.

Although some of Augustine’s conclusions differ greatly from my own, in his exploration of faith and his ability to use his own reason and experience to make up his own mind, he is no different from any Unitarian Universalist.

What fascinates me about his conclusions is how a concept like Original Sin- even if I disagree with it- has shaped our culture and our world.

For instance, Augustine coined the familiar phrase “love the sinner, but hate the sin”. He struggled to make sense of a loving God in an evil world and he formulated elaborate arguments to explain how human sin was as a result of human freedom gone wrong--as a result of Eve and Adam eating the forbidden fruit and finally seeing what is right and what is wrong.

The tension he articulated between good and bad permeates our culture.

And I would argue that even though good and bad are man-made concepts, this dualistic thinking has become such an integral framework of our cultural consciousness that we have a hard time seeing beyond it.

Just pick up the newspaper and read President Bush’s rhetoric. His attempt to explain systemic evil as though there is only pure good and pure evil, with nothing in between, comes right out of Augustine's paradigm, where all of human nature is considered separate from God.

The tension between the pervasive influence of being part of a human race that has gone awry and is sinful and evil was what Augustine was trying to explain.

In some ways, sin might have become a helpful way of describing and categorizing a natural phenomenon – if it hadn’t become church doctrine.

For instance, Jesus made the point that we are all born into blindness of some kind or other, and that once we acknowledge and recognize our blindness, then we can see. But by denying and refusing our blindness, we lose our sight.

“I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.”

Theologians in the Augustinian tradition have interpreted that blindness as sin. Some churches have even formed harmful interpretations of this concept, saying that the reason people get sick is because of their sin – or some such nonsense.

But the truth as I see it is that we are all born with some type of blindness to contend with.

Some obstacles that arrive with birth are fairly obvious. For example, when my mother was pregnant with me she had German measles late in her pregnancy. I was born prematurely and had to wear braces on my legs as I grew. I had several learning disabilities, including a speech impediment, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia. All of these things made my early childhood and time in school difficult. They were the blindness I was born with.

Because of my speech impediment, I could not say my name and was often teased. Because of my learning differences, I felt pretty stupid. I had teachers who told me that college would be too hard for me, and if I had agreed with them, maybe I would have gone to culinary school instead. Or I might have dropped out of high school altogether because the struggle to learn and the number of classes that I had failed due to my mixed-up brain caused me a great deal of embarrassment.

I spent much of my adolescence struggling and feeling pretty sorry for myself, and that self pity created in me another type of spiritual blindness, or sin, that was even more of a struggle than the obstacles I was born with.

I felt very sorry for myself and beat myself up about it, until one weekend at a job I had caring for a home-bound man, my eyes were opened. The man was in a wheelchair because aside from being 96 years old, he had broken his hip falling down stairs. My job was to read to him and keep him company and bring him meals once in awhile. And one afternoon while we were chatting as we always did, he said to me, “You know what Rali, I have had an idea. Ever since I broke my hip I have been sitting here feeling pretty down on myself. I have been asking God 'Why? Why did you do this to me? What did I do to deserve this?' I have been feeling pretty bad thinking I was responsible for what happened to me. I felt that I should have done something else, that it was my fault and my problem that I fell down, as though God was trying to punish me or something.”

I listened to him go on like this for some time. I knew he was thinking this way. I had been listening to him lament his broken hip nearly every week since he broke it. To be honest, I didn’t know what to say to him about this any more. All I ever said was “I know it’s hard, your hip hurts, it’s not fair for you to suffer in this way”. I could only muster that sympathy because that is what I wanted someone to say to me.

I wanted someone to say: “I know it doesn’t seem right to get all those failing grades, you try so hard, you study, it’s not fair that your brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s.” No one ever said that to me, so I figured I could at least say that to him.

But that day he surprised me. After all his lamenting and scowling, without me even offering words of encouragement, he turned to me and smiled.

He gave me a big ear-to-ear smile and said:

“You know what Rali, I woke up this morning and I realized I could look at this broken hip in two ways. I could continue to sit here and ask 'Why God? Why are you punishing me? What did I do wrong?' or I could ask a different question. I could ask 'Hey God, what are you trying to tell me? What can I learn from this broken hip?'" He continued smiling. And he seemed so free. He even laughed. And from that day forward our visits were lighter and more fun. Instead of just sitting and lamenting his illness, we started to play games, we laughed, and he would sit in the kitchen and tell me how to make all his favorite foods. Something inside of him had shifted, and even though it took forever for that hip to heal, and even though he had multiple infections and he never walked again, he seemed to relax into his broken hip and he was happier.

And I started to understand too. By his example, I realized that all my learning differences and my twisty brain could be my suffering --or they could be my lessons.

I could let my obstacles become barriers to my life, or I could learn to navigate them, skate around them, relax into them, and have fun with them.

I recognize that the theological framework of this story may not fit in your belief system. And in fact it doesn’t really fit in mine anymore either. But creating and maintaining a belief system to make sense of our lives when life doesn’t make sense is the reason all those creeds and doctrines were created in the first place .

However, it is important to note that other faith traditions have created other ways of seeing the world. In Judaism, for instance, there is no theology of original sin, and the Hebrew word for sin is chata, which actually means "to miss the mark" as in a target. This idea of sin makes a bit more sense within the context of our UU principles and purposes.

We all have values and ideals and we are all human, so it is logical that we would miss the mark sometimes. Ideals by their nature are things we aspire to, not the things that we can already do. We strive to reach our goals and we all fall short sometimes--we miss the mark -- and then we pick ourselves up and we try again.

If we are lucky, we can make all our sins original. And we will learn from each new mistake. Always striving for good, we will ever fall short but we will keep on trying.

I love the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures because they describe a community of people who move into covenanted relationship with their God, only to fail over and over again, and they pick themselves up and dust themselves off and start all over again.

And even Moses didn’t reach the Promised Land.

This idea of sin as erring and being able to try again –not sin as an an indelible mark, but something that leaves room for us to accept our imperfections and to be able to strive and work together --this type of sin I think most of us can live with.

But in some way, if we see ourselves-- using the lens of original sin--as human and imperfect and always striving to be in right relationship, that continues to leave us – as Denise Levertov’s poem suggests- separate and divided from god.

The Buddhist ideal, as the reading from Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, is that there is no separation between you and me and life and the divine. The evil that exists is our collective evil and the good that exists is our collective good.

This is not a theology of original sin; it is the opposite. It suggests that there is oneness in the universe that sustains us, and that when we can respond as one, we can heal the brokenness of the world.

I would argue that the dualistic thinking exemplified by the concept of good vs. evil --which was borne out of theological ideas such as Original Sin -- plays an essential part in the problems in the world.

Perhaps it was when Adam and Eve ate the apple and were forever stamped with this dualistic thinking that is the true sin.

If we could remove the blinders of our categorical thinking, what a wonderful paradise might be born again.

Of course, this wouldn’t work for baseball. In some arenas, we would still need two teams. One "good" team -- for example, say, the Red Sox-- and one "evil" team – maybe the Yankees.

Still, with all the human need for vicarious competitiveness, I believe that the two cornerstones of our Unitarian Universalist faith are the affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and the recognition of the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

If we could fully grasp the meaning of just those two principles, what transformations might take place right here in our own church?

If we could fully live the values of those two principles, what change might we be able to actualize within our own community?

Today after church I invite whoever can, to stay and begin a dialog about the ways in which we can live our values in the world as a community. I hope that some day every person who calls him- or her- self a member of First Church will involve themselves in this dialog, because, in truth, I believe that if we can learn to work as one entity – moving beyond our separations - we can and will create unimaginable change in Dedham, in Boston, in Massachusetts, in our Country and in our world.

May it be so.