I’m not imagining here a Lent in which no one sins, I do understand that we are all human. I’m just wondering what it would be like to go through the whole season of Lent without using the word “sin” or “sinful” or the one I’d really like to try to live without, “sinner.” Who knows what the church might learn from such an exercise?
I took painting classes some years ago from a painter who, when he came around to critique my work, would often say, “too much white.” I finally began to understand that colors lightened with too much white start to look grey and washed out. Too much white can kill a painting in a hurry. I have since talked to other painters who know the temptation to use too much white and how difficult it can be to learn to get by without it. Some have told the story of being challenged by instructors to try painting without any white in order to learn other ways of making a painting work.
So what if on Ash Wednesday we shifted the language of Lent. Instead of “lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness,” we might “remember the call to love and renew our commitment to follow Jesus.” Don’t both of those statements end up in the same place, wanting to go forward participating more deeply in the good? Don’t both statements say that we want our lives to be worth something, to live into a standard we believe in even though we sometimes lose sight of it?
The traditional language of sin is so often not just about what we do, but about who we are. To define ourselves as sinners, as happens often in our prayers, especially in Lent, seems to me to be a pretty harsh and unhelpful judgement. I have looked out on congregations of folks I know to be struggling with all sorts of misplaced guilts, all kinds of burdens and questions….I’ve looked out on a Sunday and said to myself, “they don’t need to hear this stuff. They just don’t deserve it. It doesn’t apply.” This harsh judgement of humanity is tied to the idea of original sin. The idea of original sin has been around since the fourth century, and for many of us, that’s about sixteen centuries too long.
I keep meeting other Christians, most of them clergy, who, like me, have given up on the idea of original sin and the language that flows out of that doctrine. Many writers are reminding us of other veins of thought running through ancient tradition, lines of thinking that challenge the idea of a fallen humanity defined by sin. Matthew Fox wrote his book Original Blessing as a counter to the idea of original sin. Other writers are mining the Celtic tradition which sees God permeating all creation, meaning that at our center we too are still essentially good.
Of course we screw up sometimes, of course we break the hearts of others and of ourselves. When that happens, the language of sin can be rich and descriptive of the situation in ways that help lead to reconciliation. But that language has to be used sparingly or it can take over.
I don’t actually think we can escape all of the “sin” language during Lent. We can, though, try to imagine, when we hear it, what the language would sound like and what it’s message would be if it were turned around. When we hear, “We have not loved others as ourselves,” we might try to hear that we are not only called to love others, but must be capable of that love or we wouldn’t be discussing it. When we hear of our “forgetting” we can move quickly to a new call to remember, which again must be possible for us, or why mention it. Maybe in the midst of all that penitential language, we will begin to hear that we really can love well, care deeply, match our actions to our best hopes, live thankfully……..you get the idea. And those good qualities and possibilities we find within ourselves, and not our sinfulness, will be the story of who we are.
John
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