Becoming Human Part 5 - Good Old Fashioned Sin

Two Sundays ago, the second Sunday of Lent, i spoke in church about the grand narrative of the Fall in Genesis 3.  

I am following a traditional arc of stories for the Lent season at our church to try and reconnect what we do with the greater Christian tradition.  I also feel compelled to explore the contours of the topic of sin.  

Why would i choose this focus?  I have been trying to discern that myself.  I think one of the reasons is my belief that we need to know our own hearts.  That is, we need to develop some awareness about what motivates us to do what we do.  This is not just some obsessive-compulsive project but more than that.  It is the desire to have a sense of the contours of our inner life.   

I find lots of corroboration for this view point from various writers.  I am thinking of Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Kathleen Norris, and Parker Palmer as representatives of a school of thinkers that believe we are living under a number of false illusions.  Each on of these believers are encouraging their readers to look more deeply into the patterns of the heart.  The reason for this is straightforward.  We are living in a time of great spiritual and social apathy and indifference.  Rather than exploring our personal malaise through prayer and heart searching, popular culture encourages the life of diversion, escapism and consumerism.  Christians are those who inhabit a tradition that would seek to resist this latter approach.  

But facing the heart is hard work and takes a level of focus and resolve that popular culture does not necessarily support. Kathleen Norris has noted how when she was growing up people spoke of being guilty but now the center of concern seems to be reduced to the problem of "feeling" guilty.  For a society that is deeply influenced by media in all its forms, the line between "the actual" versus "the virtual" seems to be a blurry one indeed. As Mark Twain once quipped, "denial ain't just a river in Egypt."  

I believe that the sin language of the church can help the society look deeper into the motives and goals that lie behind social behaviors.  It should strike us with some sense of irony that Alcoholics Anonymous seems to encourage this kind of honest heart examination more thoroughly than the church.  As a pastor i find this to be a curious development.  And it teaches me that the church is probably more committed to image management then they would care to admit, or better, confess!    

So, why is the sin language that might bring liberation from the denials, justifications and hedgings that go on in the world being omitted or ignored in many Evangelical churches in favor of warmer, therapeutic language?  Why are Christians shying away from the kinds of language that might actually create more responsible and honest people? Perhaps it is  a legitimate beef with the wounds of the past.

But i think that the wounds of the past cannot totally make sense of the resistance of humanity to admitting failure and sin. Something is at work within our hearts that leads us away from the truth about ourselves. It is a combination of fear, despair, anger and other such things.  I think it comes from a word that is dropping out of sight. What do you think?