When I was 17, I got my first traffic ticket. That was my only ticket for many, many years…but then I moved to Florida and shortly thereafter doubled my total on the long, wide open stretch of Alligator Alley. Now, like most of us, when I’ve done something wrong I don’t really like getting caught; but even so, I have very different feelings about these two tickets. The one I got in Florida – well, I was speeding, I got caught, I went to traffic school, and that was that. End of story.
But the one when I was 17? Not my finest hour. I still cringe when I think about it. Let me tell you what happened….
It was a dark and snowy night in February of 1968, and I was driving home from youth group at the First Congregational Church of Wilmette, Illinois – my home church in my hometown. I was also giving someone else a ride home. I no longer remember who was getting that ride, but I do remember that because of this act of kindness, there was even a witness to what followed!
Well, after I’d gone a few blocks from the church, I looked in the rearview mirror and, to my great surprise and even greater confusion, I saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car.
“That’s strange,” I said to whoever my companion was. “I wonder why that’s there. It can’t be for me; I didn’t do anything wrong.”
And so I continued to drive, obviously not remembering the part in Driver’s Ed about pulling over for an emergency vehicle. I continued to drive…and drive…and drive, with this police car right behind me, lights whirling like the Fourth of July. We even went through one of the busiest (and most well-lit) intersections in town, so that lots of people got to see the police car in hot pursuit of a Ford Falcon going 35 miles an hour.
I kept saying, “Why are they following me? Why don’t they pass me and get where they’re going?”
It was only when they turned on the siren that I finally realized that they were where they were going, thank you very much, and that it was in fact me they were after…and so yes, I finally pulled over.
The officer was very kind. He said he figured I hadn’t seen him because my convertible’s plastic back window was fogged up. He officially ticketed me for having made an improper left turn back at the church – which is a total crock, by the way – but I think both of us knew that I was really being ticketed for stupidity!
So now you know why I cringe. I was so sure I hadn’t done anything wrong; I was so sure, in fact, that I ended up being hindered by my sureness. To draw on today’s collect, I was sorely hindered; sorely hindered by my own claim to innocence. It never even occurred to me to pull over; it never even occurred to me that maybe the police officers wanted to tell me about a broken taillight or something like that. All I could see was my own belief that I had done nothing wrong. I was sorely hindered by my pride, and by those self-righteous blinders that only let me see the perspective I chose to see. I was sorely hindered by my sins.
“Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us….”
This Third Sunday in Advent is a Sunday with several nicknames and, in the readings, a bit of a lighter spirit – except for that “unquenchable fire” part we just heard! Today is variously known as Gaudate Sunday because “gaudate” is the Latin translation of the imperative “rejoice” which is part of today’s traditional readings; it’s also called Rose Sunday because we light the pink candle in the Advent wreath today, reflecting that same sense of rejoicing – and, very Anglican, today is also known as Stirrup Sunday because of the opening words of the collect: “Stir up your power, O Lord….” Following that, I also have it on good authority that this is also the day that one “stirs up” the Christmas pudding, theoretically adding more whiskey to the mix as it ages.
All things considered, and with my first traffic ticket to boot, today sounds like a perfect day to talk about…Original Sin.
Now, the whole concept of Original Sin is distressing and even offensive to many people today, including many Episcopalians. From the Enlightenment onwards, western Christianity has had an increasingly ambiguous attitude towards sin, and this ambiguity has been made even more complex by the things we now know about human psychology, about the underlying motivations for behaviors, about theories of personality, and so forth. The idea of Original Sin as something inherited and passed on from one generation to the next without their consent is seen as archaic, and even as unfair in our culture that emphasizes individual action and individual responsibility: “What’s this ‘we sinned’?” we say. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t sin.”
We don’t generally feel that “one bad apple” taints all of us here in the bushel like the children of Israel did when God through Moses was leading them through the wilderness. In that day, if one person sinned, it was guilt by association for everyone else: the whole clan paid the price for that one person’s sin. Even so, if we say that we don’t believe in the concept or the reality of Original Sin, then I think we need to make sure we know what we’re talking about. We need to know exactly what it is that we say we don’t believe.
Even though sin was a late arrival, Genesis tells us that sin got its start in the Garden of Eden. All of creation, including us, had already come into being and been declared good when sin came along, so the serpent, who was sin’s original vehicle, had his pick of creatures to approach. More subtle than all the other inhabitants in the Garden, the serpent singled out the woman, and he asked her what God had said about the fruit of the trees in the Garden. The woman said that according to God, everything was OK to eat except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God had told the man that if they ate of the fruit of that tree, they would die.
“You’re not going to die,” said the serpent, quietly baiting his hook. “It’s just the opposite. One bite of that fruit and your eyes will be opened. One bite of that fruit, and YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD.”
Well, how cool is that? Bait just doesn’t get any better! There might be lots of reasons we’d love to be like God, but the most compelling reason of all is that God is all-powerful – and the siren call of power is just as seductive today as it ever was.
So the woman believed the serpent, took the bait, took the fruit, and she and the man were hooked – hooked by pride and disobedience; and as they ate, they experienced the first irony of the human condition. In their attempt to be like God, the man and the woman actually went so far wide of the mark that they ended up about as unlike God as they could possibly be. Their pride and their disobedience introduced SEPARATION into their, and our, relationship with God; separation, and self-centeredness; and so, doing what we will has become a lot more appealing to us than doing what God wills.
That’s Original Sin, and my guess is that the overall dynamic sounds pretty familiar to us…but we do still have a problem with that “passed on from generation to generation” part. When we look at babies, for example, we don’t want to see them as anything but the gifts from God that they are, and so we reject any suggestion that they also participate in Original Sin; and even St. Augustine of Hippo, who did a lot of the definitive work in this area for the western Church, even St. Augustine insisted that each soul is newly made by God…but Original Sin doesn’t contradict that; the theology of Original Sin doesn’t say that babies are evil or bad or not newly made by God.
What it does say is that simply by being human, simply by being born into this world, babies are separated from God – just like their parents. It says that babies are self-centered (which they are; that’s how we know what they need), and that babies are concerned with the fulfillment of their own desires – just like their parents.
The Bible tells us that we were created good and that we ourselves compromised this goodness by deciding that we were the ultimate good. From this decision, this choice, have come selfishness, hatred, arrogance, infidelity, abuse, and all the other negative behaviors, on the corporate and national levels as well as the personal, all of the behaviors that continue to exalt the one at the expense, or to the detriment, of the other; or of the many; all of the behaviors that we continue to model for those babies who come after us so that they can pass them on to their children too.
All that is Original Sin, capital O, capital S. We don’t have a choice about whether or not we inherit Original Sin any more that we have a choice as to who our parents are…but we do have a choice as to how we respond to Original Sin; and in choosing our own response, it helps to see how God responded to it. Because of Original Sin, we had to say goodbye to Eden. In spite of Original Sin, God never said goodbye to us.
It’s easy to track God’s response to our disobedience because God’s response is the whole story of salvation that we find throughout the Bible. This is a love story, the story of God continually calling us back to God in spite of what we’ve done, in spite of Original Sin. It’s the story of a righteous God working to guide our behavior so that we too can be righteous; the story of God weeping over us, getting tough with us, but always standing by us with chesed, standing by us with steadfast love. Ultimately, this is the story of God coming to be with us in the muck and the mire; of God being the one who goes first because we can’t; of God being the one who blazes the trail home to show us the way. God’s response to our sin is the story of God continuing to invite us into relationship – again, and again, and again. As St. Augustine has said, “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.”
How we respond to the spiritual reality of Original Sin is up to us; and we here as Anglican Christians, as Episcopalians, have chosen to respond positively to God’s love, to God’s invitation into relationship, by receiving baptism for ourselves and for our children, believing God’s promise that in baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection, and that in fact we are marked as Christ’s own forever. We believe that through the power of the Holy Spirit, baptism heals our separation from God and from each other; that our relationship with all of creation is restored and made new…and so we here choose restoration and new life; but let’s not forget my traffic ticket and my conviction of my own innocence.
Even baptized, we have freedom of choice every day of our lives, including the freedom to say that we have no sin, the freedom to backslide into arrogance and self-deceit, to backslide into all the “compromises of daily life.” One author talks about John the Baptizer’s call to repentance today as a call for “a moment of truth, a call to abandon all [the] devices [we use] to maintain [the] illusion of [our] innocence” so that we can “come clean” and “come empty” to receive the gift of God in Christ.
Abandon all the devices we use to maintain the illusion of our innocence; abandon them so that we can come clean, and come empty to the manger of God’s love; this is the call of Stirrup Sunday.
“Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us….” Amen.