There is But One Sin

June 6, 2024

“Sin” seems to define the slippery slope of Christian living. Which is odd, because pointing out sin involves judgement on another person and their actions — something that Jesus specifically charges us NOT to do.

We are not to judge because however we may view a particular act or behavior, we are not the person doing it, and because we are not, we have no clue as to either the motivation or justification that the other person feels obligated by. It is easy to condemn a shoplifter — but not so easy when that shoplifter has taken some food to feed his hungry children. Even the most egregious of sins — murder — is justified in self-defense or the defense of others in immediate danger. And it is jarringly celebrated in the clinical cold killing of war.

We are not to judge others, yet so many do. It seems like in many congregations the race is not to see who is the purest Christian, but to tally the sins of everyone entering the church building. Sometimes it just serves to bolster our own self-righteousness as we walk down the street and compare ourselves to the great unwashed. This, I would imagine, is exactly why Jesus speaks against judging others. While we concentrate on the “sin” of others, we tend to not see the “sin” we perform on a daily basis…

And there it goes — the first shot in the volley fired over your daily “sins”. It makes you wonder how a faith based on loving others gets so tied down in being the scorekeeper in the Divine Sin Olympics. It is well past time to look at this whole situation.

But first — some definitions. What is “sin”?

According to many, sin is disobeying God and it traces all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There’s a story about a snake and an iPhone (or some sort of apple). By the end of it Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, and we are all marked as filthy sinners, forever, because the first Mom wanted a piece of fruit for a snack.

I am making fun of the concept here. Not of the story of the Garden of Eden, which when read with nuance and understanding, does have lessons to learn, but with the entire concept of “Original Sin” which makes little sense to the War God of Israel — Yahweh specifically says sins do not pass on to later generations (Ezekiel 18:19–23, Deuteronomy 24:16, for example). It makes far less sense of the concept to be endorsed by the loving father God that Jesus preached.

There have been volumes written about the error of the Doctrine of Original Sin. It is not my purpose to parse those arguments here. That would be another entire volume all to itself. For my purposes here, I do not accept or promote the Doctrine of Original Sin. You are not damned because two people were ill-informed about the rules several thousand years ago. If you are not damned for this, neither is anyone else on the planet. No one living today is damned because of the actions of God’s prototypes.

But if no one is damned because of Adam and Eve, what do we need Jesus and the Church for? That is the question that rises up, isn’t it?

I do not use the after-the-fact apostle Paul for a lot, but he does provide some useful quotes to wrap arguments around. Anyone who has spent time in nearly any Christian church has heard Paul’s admonition in Romans 3:23: “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. That is a continuous theme throughout the Bible. People, in their nature, tend to “sin”.

I keep putting quotation marks around the word sin, because, we still haven’t defined it. I have chosen to define it NOT being the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, but really? Think about it. Do we really need to reach back to the original humans to find some sketchy behavior on our parts? Is it just sketchy behavior? We took a quick look at that and depending on your perspective, there are an awful lot of things that can become justified.

The word translated as “sin” in the Bible is translated from a Hebrew word (cheit) meaning “falling short” — as in striving for a goal, and not quite reaching it. “Missing the mark” is another accurate translation. So “sin” according to the word used in Genesis, is not a deliberate affront to God, but just not quite doing our best. Which seems a much easier burden to bear.

So, what is “missing the mark”? What is “sin”? We have the Ten Commandments of course, literally thousands of commands in Mosaic law, and an ever-growing list of secular laws defining all sorts of sins against societies. But to go back to our original premise that most acts, from a proper perspective can be justified, we really cannot define sin as a single act or choice.

Paul reminds us that we all sin. A theme through all of the Abrahamic Holy Books is that mankind is awash in sin, steeped in it. There is no escaping sin. It is part of our very nature. If it is part of our nature, then logic would hold that it is part of our biology.

This would be an interesting time to switch over to science — because if something is in our nature, it was hard wired there by our biology. There would be a survival imperative need for sin hardwired into our very being. “Sin” would be genetic.

That’s a lot to digest. Most sins are things that we consider bad. Killing, stealing, raping, deceit — it’s a long list and there are no positive activities on it. If we repeat the list of Seven Deadly Sins (which do not appear in the Bible) they are — pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. They are all unpleasant traits — all of them point to excess, of going over the line in acceptable norms of behavior — eating a slice of pie is dessert, eating the whole pie is gluttony. One sin seems to encompass them all.

Everyone likes to choose pride here. There is an old saying that pride makes every other sin possible, but I tend to disagree. Pride is an excess of self-worth. Just as Gluttony is an excess of eating, or wrath is an excess of anger. Excess is even defined as one of the sins — greed.

And that might be our genetic predisposition to “sin”. The Prime Imperative of all life is survival, what serves survival becomes favored genetically. Of the many conditions that serves individual survival the best, would not the champion be greed? When you don’t know where the next meal is coming from, how much is too much food? In the genetic wars, those with an excess of sexual partners spread their genetics around the most. Anger is required to fight; wrath is required to conquer and subjugate. It is the appetite for excess that serves humanity as a species. Perhaps this greed, that is genetically wired into us as a survival mechanism, is what Jesus and God ask us to strive against.

Is this the idea that Jesus presents to us when he asks the wealthy young man to sell all of his possessions for the benefit of the poor, and to follow him? Or when Old Testament societies fell under God’s wrath for their disdain of the poor, refugees and outcasts? Is this why the gift of one penny from a widow to the poor was more honored than the silver pieces given by the Pharisees?

What if all God is asking us to do is to check our genetic wiring for greed? To see that yes, I have enough, and this person has none, so I should give that person some — be it a corporal need, such as food or clothing, or a spiritual need, such as love or hope. Our biology rightly tells us “Mine” — mine is an important concept. God asks us to rise above our animal nature and to consider others. There is a time when “mine” is not only “enough”, but “plenty”. God asks us to share our “plenty” with those who need, and to even share some of our “enough” to those with “none”.

Perhaps we are not in an eternal war of belligerence to God, perhaps our “sin” is only when we fail to live up to God’s request to rise above our biology and become human.

If, then, by rising above our biology and keeping God’s request of us that we provide care for others, we can define “sin” as the opposite. Sin is, for our purposes, causing harm to others — either deliberately, or by negligence.

By that definition, endless volumes of law are reduced to one concept. There is but one sin — to through deliberate act or negligence cause harm to another.

So, let’s sum up. I have long ago said that in this physical world, certain laws and principles (which we call science) are pretty much immutable as functions of the universe. Gravity, the speed of light, the cycle of life and death, that we need oxygen to breathe — these were the necessary things to put in place before a physical universe could exist. These things, in and of themselves are not bad or good — just necessary functions for everything to keep working. Sometimes the results of these functions do not balance in favor of humans (death, disease, famines, earthquakes, etc.), but they are necessary for us to experience our lives here on Earth. While there may be ways around them, we haven’t figured them out yet.

If certain universal laws are immutable, perhaps our greedy, “sinful” nature was hardwired into us as a means of survival as a species when we were running around slaying mammoths and warring over shelter. When you have no certainty of survival, greed is the ultimate self-preservation tool. It is a good thing.

In the hundreds of millennia since we took the first steps out of our animal nature, the larger brain capacity that we have made survival less and less of an issue. Our social natures took us out of the caves and had us build civilizations.

Some of these civilizations became prosperous and powerful. They took to ruling over people who were not as far along on the civilization continuum. Another great law of the universe is that the strong dominate the weak. This, too, would be a genetic imperative. Evolution would favor the stronger and the smarter over what was weak and unable to adapt. Another genetic marker that points to what we now define as sin.

In the Old Testament days God emerged in some of the more advanced cultures, not just as an angry being who demanded sacrifice as a quid pro quo for prosperity, but as a God who wanted us to rise above our genetics and care for the weak among us.

This is another unique feature that we do not observe often among the other species. All higher animals care for their offspring. Few care for their adult members who cannot or will not carry their weight in that species social order. There are exceptions, but the rule generally holds.

We actually don’t do it very well as humans either. If you live in the United States, we are all economically in the top percentage points of human experience. Yet crime and hunger run rampant here. As do homelessness and hopelessness. We engage in warfare solely for profit by killing random people from random far away places, and enriching our own ruling class. It is morally reprehensible.

If we define our nature before God as sinful, then our sin is greed. Greed that is hard-wired into our genetics as a survival mechanism. Greed that was necessary at the time man emerged from the rest of creation as the “thinking animal”. Sin is not rebellion. It is who we are.

God is aware of this. God is aware that to make a system is not the same as having an optimized system. God’s call to us to step away from sin is not a call to some nonsensical standard. God is merely asking us to rise above our biology and become that greater being which he intended in the earliest days. It is our time to rise up and be better, by taking care of those who cannot care for themselves.

When Jesus told the rich man who complied with all of God’s laws to “sell everything and give it to the poor, and follow me”(Matthew 19:21–24) he is not condemning the man. He is saying that you have more than enough. It is doing no good gathering dust in your store house. Share from this abundance with the poor. Keep what you need. Share the rest. Rise above the animals and be what a human is supposed to be. The living image of a loving God.

We are not in a war against God. God wants the best for us. We are in a war against other humans, and for no good reason. Most of the complaints that we hold against God, are for problems that we have caused ourselves through greed and apathy. We are called to fix those as well. No one sins against God. We all sin against our fellow humans every day.

God does not hold this against us. He understands what was necessary for us to become the successful species that we are. God now calls us to rise above that animal nature and strive to be the fulfillment of the promise that God has for us. When we say we were created in the image of God, it does not mean we look like God physically, it means that we too, can strive in the love that God holds for all of us.

Can we all make an effort to try for that today?

In Faith, Peace and Love,

ECC. RL Brandner, New Ecclesiastes Ministries