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Living In Sin
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 11, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ruth 1:1-18 Luke 7:31-50
Once again, the only item to make the news out of our General Assembly was sex. You may have noticed last week, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, the vote of our denomination’s General Assembly to reaffirm, definitively, the manner of life requisite for those whom the church would ordain. Simply put, if a single, ordained Presbyterian knows anything personally and unrepentantly about living in sin, she had better keep that knowledge to herself. As it goes in the Pentagon concerning these matters, so it must go in the church: the “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy remains on the books—the Book of Order, that is--when dealing with us solitary sorts. How strange, then, that you are about to bless my living in it for the next four months! Now that I have your attention, let me explain! Those of us who are of a certain age in the congregation grew up hearing the sermon’s title as a euphemism. In the Midwest, during the fifties, it was employed coyly to imply that two people were cohabiting—living together without benefit of marriage. In the sixties, we placed tongue in cheek when asked if so and so from our graduating class were married, saying with a grin, “No, they are just living in sin.” These days, the question seldom is asked nor is notice taken, unless the couple in question shares the same sex. In New Testament times, there was no need to ask because simply everyone knew the woman wiping her tears from Jesus’ feet with her hair was a sinner…about as sensuous a sinner as the New Testament has to offer. From those times until these, living in sin has had to do with people living closer to each other, more intimately with each other, more mixed-up with each other (socially, racially, economically, sexually) than they ought. Such sin includes not only inappropriate sensuality (as in the case of this woman at Jesus’ feet), and improper sexual goings on (as in the case of the woman caught in adultery), but more broadly, sin and living in it has always borne an uncanny resemblance to breaking the rules of “normal,” (read “acceptable”) social behavior (as in being a friend of tax collectors and sinners): sin as intimacy with the wrong people…sin as not keeping a proper distance. Mark Twain’s Miss Watson comes to mind once again. You remember that “tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on,” who had come to live with the Widow Douglas and, according to Huckleberry Finn, had taken a set at him with a spelling book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up…Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, ‘Don’t put your feet up there Huckleberry,’ and ‘Don’t scrunch up like that Huckleberry—set up straight;’ and pretty soon she would say, ‘Don’t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry—why don’t you try to behave?’ Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I waren’t particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn’t say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it….Now she had got a start and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together. We smile, but just beneath the surface we recognize in Miss Watson and Huck the instincts which have brought us to blows in our common religious life. Put very simply, for some the moral life, the mark of being a Christian in the world, is being set apart as those who live so as to go to the good place. A Christian is one who lives within a set of norms based on Biblical texts--though as the Christian ethicist Paul Lehman noted, they are often norms based on texts employed in support of an ethical position really taken on other grounds! So on one hand, a Christian is one who lives within biblically sanctioned norms and therefore at a distance from…or at least in a stance of judgment toward…any who behave outside those norms. “If this man were a prophet,” thought the Pharisee, “he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner”: sin as intimacy and as not keeping your distance. But for others, the heart of a faithful life has to do with standing by and going down with those exceptions to the socially defined norms, with those for whom Christ was born and lived and died. God’s mercy, says Lehmann, is “making room for the exception.” For Huck, the sin would have been to live at a distance from this intractably human and so flawed being he was given to befriend. The point for Huck was not where he was going ultimately, but the one with whom he would spend all his days until then. Huck chose to be with Tom Sawyer—the good, the bad and the ugly—come hell or high water. Where in scripture is there warrant for such an understanding of the faithful life? Taking Paul Lehmann’s critique to heart, no doubt there are prior reasons I am more definitively guided by the Book of Ruth, say, than by one verse in Leviticus as I search the scriptures for clues about the fabric of human faithfulness. Time does not permit a retelling of the tale, but suffice it to say, in migrating from Bethlehem to Moab, Naomi, Elimelech and their two sons had sojourned as Israelites into foreign if not forbidden territory. According to Kathy Sakenfeld, “Tradition remembered that Israelite men became sexually involved with Moabite women and that apostasy resulted from the involvement.” Furthermore, Moab’s king had ordered the destruction of Israel, adding political as well as theological weight to a Moabite widow’s refusal to leave her Israelite mother-in-law. “Entreat me not to leave thee,” we sing at weddings in words spoken between these two widows. Daring the scorn of the little town of Bethlehem, Naomi takes Ruth in as though she were her own. Then as if to underline God’s hand acting in Ruth and Naomi’s refusal to abide by the social norms of their day, the author’s genealogy at the end of the story confirms the centrality of this breach of boundaries for the sake of God’s purposes in history: King David turns out to be a direct descendant of Ruth the Moabite’s son! According to some, apostasy did follow in a wine-bibber and friend of sinners who issued generations later from the same line. For of even greater significance to us is Matthew’s genealogy, leading to the birth of Jesus. It includes only four women, three of whom are non-Israelites—Tamar (of Genesis 38), Rahab (the harlot of Jericho) and Ruth—stories each suggesting sin would have had more to do with maintaining boundaries [and so thwarting God’s purposes] than transgressing them [and so trusting alone in God’s grace]! To wit: “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” He was known, this Jesus, not by the distance he kept, but by the intimacy he dared with those outside the bounds. Yet from the beginning, Simon could not imagine, for the life of him, by what logic or even by what love a holy man would allow a prostitute to touch him. Centuries later, Augustine’s definition of the church as a hospital for sinners caused only hostility in Pelagius, who believed the church to be a society of the morally perfectible. So too, according to Martin Luther in his Sermon on Good Works, the chief difference between Rome and the Reformers had to do with whether fellowship with God was to be on God’s own level, on the basis of holiness and so our moral achievement, or on our own level, on the basis of sin and so God’s forgiveness. Are we called to be Miss Watson bent on living so as to go to the good place or Huckleberry choosing to be wherever Tom Sawyer is? How could it be, after all these centuries, we who read the same Bible, claim the same history, worship the same God, follow the same Christ, how could we come to such different conclusions about the nature and direction of the Christina life? Yet for reasons held within the mystery of God, the Christian community is a mixed body (a corpus permixtum said Augustine), made up of earnest men and women on both sides no doubt, who almost take turns being broken into pieces by one another for Christ’s sake; men and women who are incomprehensible to each other; men and women who, in Christ’s name, are living at a distance from those whom they were given to love in the church and the world. In other words, the church as the church is living in sin, is alive but in pieces, is in need of a great forgiveness. What to do? Well, again according to Lehmann, “If one doesn’t believe or has not sense for the fact that God can and does pick up the pieces, then one is indeed reduced to the dismal alternative between the irrelevance of ethical absolutism and the expediency of ethical relativism. But if one does believe and live by the fact that God is picking up the pieces, it is incumbent upon one to be clear about what the pieces are.” “A certain creditor had two debtors,” began Jesus, in a parabolic attempt to clarify for Simon which pieces were in need of being picked up. Then as now, the one assumed to owe God the most, the one in need of a greater forgiveness, surely was the one whose sin was the sin of intimacy, of not keeping her distance. This seems to be the case, according to Jesus: “Her sins were many,” he says, though not her sins but her love mattered more to Jesus, the love lavished on him by one whose pieces his love had picked up and redeemed for a whole new life. The pieces still to be picked up, the one left in sin at the end, is Simon. His distance from Jesus, on the basis of his principles, is palpable. Yet in the end, the words Jesus spoke over the sin of the woman could be heard as words of an incredible mercy, if only Simon can listen for himself, if ever the bright blows of God’s grace should break through his better behavior. As with the elder brother of the prodigal, so Simon righteously will absent himself from the party the father has thrown for his wayward children. But the gospel is that the God who in Christ is picking up the pieces, the pieces even of Christ’s church, has taken upon himself the sins and sin of us all, be those sins the sins that come from loving too much…or loving too little, leaving us with neither the expediency of ethical relativism or the irrelevance of ethical absolutism, but with Jesus Christ. Therefore, because of God’s mercy toward those with whom we take exception no matter our side, whether we believe ourselves headed for a hospital or a holy war when we get up of a Sunday morning, the gospel is that one cannot be the true church without the other. In God’s grace, we are stuck with each other. Which brings us to each other and returns me to your blessing the prospect of my living in sin for these next four months: of my living at a distance from all of you whom I have been given by God to love! Here the sin is our separation from one another, or at least, as I understand my ordination, is my living without you for a season. It is not that I will miss the church’s decently ordered life. It is that I will not be the person I was born to be, given the pain I will be too far away to bear beside you, the tears not caught, the births whose announcement I cannot herald, the hands I may miss holding for the last time in death, the gospel I will not have the privilege of proclaiming week in and week out. That will be the sin, the separation in which I will live. But the God who is able to do more than I can ask or imagine, is also able to forgive this sin too, and by God’s grace I pray, return me to you, you to me, redeemed for a whole new life together! Thanks be to God. |