Joel 2:1-2,12-17
Isaiah 58:1-12
Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
6:1-6,16-21
103 or 103:8-14
"For our sake he made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
To my mind, that is the most profound and mysterious sentence in all of Scripture, a summary in twenty-four words of the whole story of salvation. It seems to explode the very meaning of its own words: what can it mean to say that God made Jesus to "be sin"? After all, Paul says elsewhere that Jesus was "like us in all things but sin." How can he now say that Jesus was, not a sinner like us, but sin itself?
This kind of language asks us to question our own identity: are we not merely sinners, but sin? We would prefer to think of ourselves as really good people who occasionally commit sin, but can we hold to that in face of this statement? Or is Paul just exaggerating for effect (something he was quite capable of doing)? That's what most of the commentators seem to think: that this is just a kind of over-the-top expression. But I wonder.
Some time ago I got involved in an e-mail discussion about Original Sin. It started because a student asked her professor: "Do you have to believe in Original Sin to be Christian?" and the professor passed the question along for discussion.
When the question came up, I was expecting to welcome my first grandchild very soon, so in answering that question in the e-mail discussion, I had him very much in mind. Here is what I said:
"When my grandson is born, either his mother will nurse him, or he will be given bottle feedings. If she nurses him, he will take in some pesticides along with her immunities and the good nutrients he receives. If he gets a bottle, he will be ingesting genetically-altered soybeans and more pesticides, and he will also be benefiting by low milk prices that are causing farmers to suffer. He will wear not only the sweaters his grandmother knits for him, but other knitted clothes made in sweatshops and possibly by slave or prison labor. Eventually he will begin to eat vegetables picked by underpaid migrants doing stoop labor, and meat raised on land where the rainforest has been cut away. These things are just symptoms: as he grows older and becomes self-aware, he will have reinforced for him, by things like these, the natural human tendency to prefer his own wants and needs to those of others, and to turn a blind eye to the injustices he can't do anything about, because it hurts too much to see them."
That's what I was thinking about in the weeks before Andrew was born. And then he came, reluctantly, into the world, and I held him, and he was perfect: all those marvelous fingers and toes, with fingernails and toenails all complete; and eyelashes and eyebrows and dimples. He's a perfect human being. He's completely innocent of sin and evil. And yet, all those things I said before are still true. He's nearly three years old now, and I can see it all working out, just as it does for each of us. He was born into a web of sinful behavior-of bad choices made deliberately, or even without malice, but still with heavy consequences-and he will have no power to turn those things aside. They will detract from the fullness of his life and even draw it into the web of deliberate sinfulness in time.
A couple of weeks ago about 900 people of faith from all over Minnesota spent a day in St. Paul talking to members of the legislature about the proposed budget. You all know what we're up against: the majority party is pledged not to raise taxes, but there's a huge deficit in the budget, so programs are being cut or even eliminated- programs that make life sustainable, even possible, for maybe ten per cent of Minnesotans. I went to that day, and have gone to other meetings with legislators, especially because I am a deacon, and it is a deacon's charge to care for the poor and the needy, and to bring their needs before the eyes of the church. But most of the people there are just people of faith, people like you.
Every one of those meetings brings home to my heart the way our world is in the grip of sin. All the powers that control, all the loudest voices are shouting at us: look out for number one! Take care of yourself! And that is just the opposite of what Jesus is about: Jesus, who became one of us, lived and died and lives still with us. The very last thing he ever did was take care of himself. For him, number one was never himself: it was always us.
As Paul says, "for our sake," for yours and mine and baby Andrew's, for the sake of every abused child and abandoned homeless person, God has, God's very self, become subject to that same condition of sin that has us in its snare: born a baby boy just like Andrew, nursed at his mother's breast just like Andrew, fed with grain raised by a suffering and exploited peasantry just like Andrew-only not drawn into the web of deliberate sinning, not adding to the buildup: "like us in all things but" that kind of sin, but nevertheless part of our sinful condition in order that, from within it, he could turn it inside out through his death and resurrection.
We can truly say that we are the sin that binds us, because it catches us up from birth and becomes part of who we are. In that sense, Jesus too was sin, as we are, because he was human, as we are. He was-and is-the sacrament of the presence of God in humanity. And because of him we, too, can be the sacrament of God's presence; we can become the very righteousness, the very holiness of God. "He became what we are, that we might become what he is," according to one of the early Church Fathers. Sin and salvation are not about doing, but about being. We who enter into the love of God manifested most fully and mysteriously in Jesus are no longer subject to the nexus of sin, even though it still clings to us like dirty cobwebs and hampers our movements. We are something different, the very holiness of God in the world.
Archbishop Rowan Williams says that once we have recognized God's great secret, that we are all destined to become God's sons and daughters, "we can't avoid the call to see one another differently. No one can be written off . . . We have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others . . . because Jesus is drawing us together into his place, his company." Sin is not somewhere else, in someone else, someone else's fault. We're all caught in it, and we're all redeemed from it so that, like Jesus, we can be God's presence in the world.
Sin's great power is to drive us apart, to push us away from each other, to bind us up within ourselves. During Lent we will revisit the story of Adam and Eve, because it shows us how that happens: the first thing that happened to those two, after they did the forbidden thing, was that they were no longer together: they began to hate and fear and resent each other, to blame each other for everything that had happened. Jesus enters into that state of things to draw us back together, because it is only our coming together in love, coming out of the web of sin that he has broken for us and entering into the network of his companions, that can drive sin out of our lives and out of our world.
"Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also," Jesus says in the Gospel. That is why God became one of us, you see: because we are God's treasure. It's a frightening thought-that God loves us that much. In the end, the only way to deal with it is to do the same: when we are God's people in the world, then our treasure is each other, and our hearts are invested wherever other people need to be loved. We might think about that during Lent, sit still with it, and start to ponder where it could take us. One place it might take some of us is to one of those meetings with a legislator to say "Listen, we are resolved: We are all in this together, and there's not a single one of our neighbors we can do without. So see to it that there is room for all, and care for all, in Minnesota-whatever it costs." Amen.