The Biggest Problem of All

September 18, 1988

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Scripture: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23

Jesus talked about it, Paul talked about it, In the early Church it was a central, pivotal issue....Augustine wrestled with it almost daily for the first 36 years of his life, both lured and repelled by its insidious power. It almost drove Luther crazy until he found reconciliation...the first time he served communion he was so aware of it that he literally fainted.

John Wesley thought for the first one third of his lifetime that he could overcome it with will power and discipline, and the harder he struggled, the more entrapped and insufferable he became. THE THEME THIS MORNING IS SIN, a theme I find, surprisingly, I haven’t preached on with as much consistency and clarity as the pulpit office probably requires. I can’t say I’m proud of that, because the truth is sin is probably the most universal subject a preacher could have. You can dismiss it, you can ignore it, and we often try to, but it’s the one topic, the one human experience, along with death itself, that hits everybody.

Call it a somber subject, if you like, I suppose it is, we’ve still found only one way of dealing with it.

Now I know there are a lot of people today, even in our churches, who would discard as totally outmoded any concept of sin. Surely you don’t still hang on to that old bugaboo, they say.... That’s Medieval. There are many people, especially up-to-date, modern, sophisticated people, who, frankly, don’t believe in sin anymore. They think, perhaps with perfect sincerity, that it belongs to another day, another era, something in the same category with the wagon wheel, or the concept of spontaneous regeneration.

But it’s interesting, and really rather sad, that even as sin as a real force is pooh-poohed,

there has grown up among us a sense of emptiness, a sense of internal vacuum, a lack of something in the very center of life, which makes us know something is missing. Even as we have pretty much eliminated the confessional, we’ve correspondingly filled up the psychiatrist’s couch.

Andre Gide, the French author, has written a little short story about a young girl who was blind from birth. Her blindness really protected her so that she had a childlike, naïve picture of the people around her, an impression her family and friends never tried to upset. Then one day an operation was performed on her eyes and she could see, for the first time in her life. 2 things immediately stuck her with crushing meaning. One was that nature was more beautiful than she had ever dreamed....light, color, shading, form in space.... The other was that the faces of people were sadder than she had ever imagined they would be.... all lined with care, and restlessness, and anxiety---she said she almost wished that her eyes had never been opened.

Our theme this morning is that sadness in people’s faces. SOMETHING IS WRONG... SOMETHING is missing... We all know it. And it’s a fundamental teaching of the Christian Faith, that absence, that emptiness, that vacuum, that malaise, call it what you will, that uneasiness is the result of a reality to which we give the name SIN.

Would it be too strong to say---I don’t see how you can ever talk about Christianity unless you start here....as far as I can tell, Christianity doesn’t have anything to say to the person who really feels that he’s whole, and complete, and adequate within himself. Maybe that sounds a trifle strong, but I don’t think so. Let me say it again. So far as I am able to tell, Christianity really doesn’t have any message for the person who feels that she’s perfectly whole, and complete, and adequate within herself. It may offer some beautiful ethics, and some moral injunctions, but nothing beyond that---AND THAT’S NOT WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS ALL ABOUT.

Christianity is a religion of RESCUE, and to the person who doesn’t feel the need of rescuing, its message, its central thrust, its GOSPEL is irrelevant, no matter how beautiful and inspirational its specific teachings might be.

Let me say it in a slightly different way. Christianity is based on the assumption that people, all people, have something fundamentally wrong with them, down in the heart... There is something out of kilter in the “natural man”, as the old scholastics used to express it,

and something radical has to be done before that situation can be remedied.

Classical theology puts it even more bluntly. Classical theology simply says we’re sinners---that’s our problem---and this is the human predicament to which Christianity claims to speak.

Now I want to invite us to dig in here for a little bit and examine this assumption. Let’s look at it, wrestle with it for awhile and see if it makes any sense, if it speaks to us in terms of life as we know it.

1. And I think the place to start is with those sad faces that so disturbed the heroine of Gide’s story. Let me make the simple statement, in the first place, that all people, even the best people, even the finest people, have a sense of having lost God in some way or another.

The Bible doesn’t explain it.... There are a lot of things the Bible doesn’t explain. The Bible doesn’t explain it---it just states it--- Isaiah: All we like sheep have gone astray.... Paul: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And let’s be clear on this. When the Bible speak of SIN, it means something much deeper than just individual sins. It means something much more profound than just sinful acts, like smoking behind the barn, or tying a tin can on the tail of a cat, or overturning outhouses on Halloween.... If that were all sin meant, it wouldn’t be such a problem. If that were all it meant, we could get away from it, we could isolate ourselves from it, and even be proud of it, like the Midwestern college I read about that used to advertise in its catalog, “Our campus is located 7 miles from any known form of sin.”

No, that’s not what we’re talking about. Sin in the Biblical sense is something far deeper than that. It’s an inner thing, a tendency, an attitude, an irresponsive attitude. It’s the shattering realization that ALL OF US HAVE PROVEN OURSELVES TO BE UNFAITHFUL TO GOD’S LOVE.

I remember one day when I was Chaplain at Florida Southern College, a girl, a co-ed, came into the office to talk about her boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend, and about their broken relationship. She went on a while discussing this and that aspect of what had happened, and then she said, “You know, it’s not so much anything specific he ever did. I think I could take something like that. It’s really more what he didn’t do. After a while, he just never even thought of me.”

That’s it, you see. That’s really worse than misconduct. That’s the sin behind sins, and that’s what the Bible means by sin, not so much what we do, but our basic treason to God, our hardness of heart, so that God can say about every one of us at times, “Ol’ Tom...ol’ Denis...Mary, Al....He never even thought of me.”

Every one of us, EVERY ONE OF US, has made that betrayal. We’ve lost God, we’ve become separated from him. We’ve put ourselves at the center instead of him. We’re what someone has called “inveterate idolators”. Now you say, Look, that’s a pretty pessimistic picture of the human situation, and I have to answer, “Yes it is. It IS a pretty pessimistic picture of the human situation. It also happens to be, unfortunately, a rather realistic picture of the human situation. It’s a lot more realistic than those shallow interpretations that try to cover everything up

and pretend there IS no problem.

You remember the high school boy who had to write a term paper on David in the Bible. He wrote: “David was a great and glorious king. If there was anything wrong with him, it was a slight tendency toward adultery.”

Well, there it is.... just a slight tendency.... nothing seriously wrong. Nothing wrong with people a little time and tinkering, and better playgrounds can’t cure. That’s naïve. THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG, something radically wrong, and deep inside we know it. It’s reflected in the feeling of anxiety, and the feeling of meaninglessness that grabs us from time to time.....The poet has called it “the distance of God”, and that’s not a bad definition of sin—THE DISTANCE OF GOD.

We’re like the character on T.S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party”, who says, “It’s not the feeling of anything I’ve ever done which I might get away from, or of anything in me I could get rid of, but of emptiness, of failure, towards someone or something outside of myself, and I feel I must.... atone, is that the word?”

Christianity starts here, with the recognition that this is the truth about the relationship

between me and my Creator. All the theories about the human situation that don’t come to grips with SIN, not just with the sense of guilt, but with GUILT itself, are hopelessly naïve

and shallow.

We all, somehow, even the best of us, have a sense of having lost God. “All have

sinned and fallen short....”

2. Now that leads to a second point, the next step in this perusal of what we mean by sin. Having said that each of us has a sense, somehow, of having lost God, Christianity goes on to say that that sense of being lost comes to us in different ways.

We’re not all alike, We’re not all cut from the same mold. We have different backgrounds,

different makeups, different personalities. Your experiences may not be the same as my experience, but that doesn’t make your experience any less valid because it’s different from mine.

Jesus knew that, of course, and what a marvelous Teacher he was, What a Master Teacher. He didn’t argue about lostness.....Instead, he just described people who were lost. He told penetrating, incisive stories and people said, “Hey, that’s right. That’s me. That’s exactly the way I feel. He’s talking about ME.”

He said, some are lost.... some people are lost like sheep. Some are lost like a misplaced coin that got shunted aside. And some are lost like a boy, who, thinking he knew what was best, turned his back on his home and on his Father. One of those stories, he implied, probably fits your condition.

A lot of us are lost like sheep. I sometimes think this is the 20^th Century sin, maybe the peculiarly Church member’s sin. We’re not bad, We’re not evil.... really, we don’t go around deliberately doing harmful things to people---of course not. In fact, we have a pretty decent record externally.

But when we stop once in a while from our hectic, frenzied activity, and think deeply

of the rat race we’re in, we become aware of how aimless much of it is.

What’s the point, really, Where are we going? What’s the goal? I know a man who has had 6 jobs now, 6 different jobs in the last 5 years. He’s 55 years old. And every time he changed he said, “Well, I’ve finally found myself...This is what I’ve really wanted to do all along.”

And then in just a few months, something else. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t almost a parable. We are the 20^th Century nomads---not just geographically, but psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.... always churning, always going, always in motion... yet so much of our energy is really just an attempt to cove vacuum the emptiness, the boredom we know is inside.

Remember W. H. Auden’s poem---Faces along the bar cling to their average day. The lights must never go out, the music must always play, Lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the dark, who have never been happy or good. Do you suppose there’s anybody who doesn’t know sin in that sense? Lost, said Jesus, like sheep, wandering and aimless.

And then, there are those who are lost like a coin, a coin that’s been misplaced and can’t be found. That is, some people are lost, not primarily through their own fault, but because they’re the victim of circumstances, the sin and carelessness of others, or the sinful environment, if you please.

I guess here is the real hideousness and perversity of sin. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking of sin as just the wrong we do as individuals. That’s the mistake the sawdust revivalists make---They’re not wrong as far as they go...THEY JUST DON’T GO FAR ENOUGH. Sin in more serious than that. It’s more tragic than that.... Sin is the total predicament in which we’re caught, the total web of my self-worship, and everybody’s....

WE’RE LIVING IN A SINFUL WORLD...and there are times, tragically, when we’re caught

in situations where nothing we can do is completely good, where any choice we make will result in some kind of evil, for somebody.

Reinhold Niebuhr in our century is perhaps the one who has helped us see this most clearly. There are situations where there is no clear-cut moral difference in a choice, where whatever you decide will result in some good and bad....and yet NOT to decide is in itself a decision.

Some of you may have read the book or seen the old movie years ago entitled “The Cruel Sea.” It’s a war story about a British destroyer, sent to escort a convoy of ships and

protect them against German submarines.

Things go without serious incident until the last day out. Then, just when they are almost to port, the attack comes---2 ships are hit, they begin to sink, and the survivors are floating around waiting to be picked up.

Suddenly, the sonar in the destroyer picks up something beneath the surface of the sea...a German submarine, returning for the kill. The British Captain moves his ship into position. He gets his depth charges ready. He knows he’s coming to the spot where the enemy lies hidden below. Then, at that moment, he discovers to his horror at that very spot are a dozen survivors from one of his own British ships. Does he go ahead, or hold back? In a split second, that seems like an eternity, he has to decide. He drops the charges. He kills them all. He hopes he has also sunk the enemy sub... He doesn’t know. And every man on that ship, every British sailor on board, stands stock still, watching the Captain....watching for what? One thing...some gesture, some word, anything that will tell them whether he did what he felt he had to do lightly, and with an easy conscience.

You see, sometimes it’s extraordinarily complicated. There are times, in the kind of world we live in, and some of you have been there... maybe some of you are there now....there are times when the profound tragedy of life comes home to us. THERE IS NO SIMPLE ANSWER HERE.

Any course of action I take may result in hurt to somebody. AND I CAN’T ESCAPE. This is the deeper tragedy of the human predicament, the tangled web of circumstances, in which sin is inextricably bound.

The Cross, of course, is the supreme example. Who do you blame...humanly speaking.....

WHO DO YOU BLAME FOR THE CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS? Who CAN you blame? Judas,

Caiphas, Peter, Pontius Pilate? You see, that’s just the point. There is no single person you can put the finger on and say, “HE was responsible.” It’s more complicated than that.

It was the total set of circumstances that closed around him. The tragedy of the Cross, like the tragedy of the Cruel Sea, is precisely that victory could not come without the shedding of blood. The perversity of human sin requires that drastic an action.

Maybe that’s why true redemption is always so slow, and so incredibly expensive. It’s a tough, vicious enemy we do battle with.... deeply and powerfully entrenched. Paul called it, “the body of this death”, not just our individual wrongs, but a force, the WORLD of SIN, in its tenacious complexity. You may be lost in that world, Jesus said, like a coin, which the carelessness and evil of others have swept under the rug.

Now, finally, in what is undoubtedly the greatest little short story ever told, Jesus said you may be lost like a stubborn, obstinate son. Do you know what that boy’s sin was in that great story? Do you know what he was really guilty of?

Not that he went off and had a good time, not that he was a spendthrift, not that he got in with the wrong crowd....No, his sin was not so much that he was immoral, but that he was DISLOYAL....disloyal to the Father who loved him.

Put yourself in the Father’s shoes and watch your own flesh and blood turn away from

you and go off into a selfish hell of meaningless relationships..... Watch him waste away from a person, almost into an animal.... Watch him lose his identity and self-respect in the uncaring squalor of a pigpen existence.

You don’t really think it was harder on the boy than on the old man? You don’t if you’ve ever had a son. May I suggest you’ll never understand the seriousness of sin until you see this—the sin of treason, the sin of disloyalty, uncaring, callous indifference....and the broken heart of a parent--- “He never even thought of me.” Lost, said Jesus, like a wayward son.

Well, this is the realism of the Christian Faith, the stark reality of the human predicament, apart from God. THE ANTIDOTE TO IT? God’s gracious response is what we’re going to try to deal with next Sunday. Don’t miss it.....Stay tuned for the next exciting episode.... the mightiest truth that ever dawned on the human mind.

But there’s no meaning, no salvation, no Gospel in that until you’ve been HERE. Don’t ever call Christianity sentimental.... Call it hard, call it stringent, say you can’t live up to it.... BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T CALL IT SENTIMENTAL.

The Christian can never be shocked about life, because he’s looked deeply into his own heart and seen there, with unblinking honesty, the degradation of his own treason. “Lord, be merciful unto me, a sinner.”

When you’re able to say that, and say it truly, He’s not far away.