The Sin Myth

Sin is one of the most off-putting and cringe-worthy aspects of Christianity to society today. This is mainly to do with the prevalent winds of reaction to religion. The deep corruption that has been exposed recently has fueled these winds of change, like a hurricane, to radically transform the uniform beliefs of society. That which was meaningful to my parent’s generation, like commonly held beliefs about sexuality, marriage, gender, freedom, social classes, education and church are now challenged and refuted.

We are the ‘you do you’ generation. Tolerance of each other's self determined purposes and morality is the name of our game, and challenging anybody’s personal truth is not. 

So no wonder talking about the concept of sin is ridiculous to many. It’s probably already hackling your defence systems, as you may have reasonable expectations of me raining down hell fire and brimstone on you.

Many of our views are easily polarised; reactionary opposites to the previous generations or opposite views. We react to the known, wanting to be the opposite and often end up replicating that which irritated us in the first place. And that is true for polarised views too.

Take the view on sex for example: a taboo subject of the church and the obsessive subject of society.  Polarised in their views, one extreme appears to consider it dirty, condemned and unmentionable— the religious view of sex— ‘Holy people don't do the dirty'. The other holds a liberal, permissive (but also can't shut up about it) view.

The concept of sin is similarly polarised. The religious idea of sin is a concept that has built institutions— it holds forth the idea that you are basically evil, and mostly everything you do is tainted by that. In accepting that, people are shamed into submission. Rightly so, there is a reaction to it. A rising up, a refusal to live under that oppression and then the polarised extreme that celebrates sin in rejection of their previous captors.

Both points of view are militant, both passionate about what they hate about the other view. 

At this point I bring you the Bible. This collection of books was written over about 5000 years, different languages, different cultures, and many many different contexts.

The theory of sin that is in the Bible does not comply with either of the ideologies I have described. It will not fit with the religious propaganda of fear and control, neither will it stand with the permissive revolution that has produced. 

So what does it say about Sin?

Sin. To deconstruct the cultural baggage which claws at my back every time I hear this word— it helped me to look into the history of the term. It comes from the Greek word "to miss the mark" in the sport of archery. When someone shoots at the target and misses the bullseye the distance from the arrow to the bullseye is called the sin.

The Bible says all have sinned and fallen short. This is not a blanket of condemnation, this is a ground leveler.

Sin cannot be reduced to a list of things we do wrong at the end of the day that we have to tally up, check and recheck in some sort of ridiculous Santa Claus situation. We cannot possibly live under such a regime. It is oppressive and soul destroying. God in this picture is, what Brennan Manning calls, the legalistic customs officer— rifling through our moral baggage— sorting the good from the bad. I won't live like that. We have proved this throughout our generations, breaking free of regimes, whether political or religious, with a suitably rebellious “no” to living under the thumb of organised control.

So if it's not defined by this list of actions, choices and behaviours, what is it? The Bible describes it as a state of heart we are all in and calls it also “separation" from God. 

Separation causes grief, and grief is an individualised experience. I have in my head that the term grief can only be applied to death, but by experience I know that not to be true. I've experienced the grief of death, the senseless type, the ‘I wasn't ready for them to leave’ and the little three foot coffin types. Separation from what we love deeply changes our lives, often leaving it unrecognisable.

This theory poses some challenges to popular beliefs. To the liberal ‘you do you’— it would say that there is a meaning and a cause behind what you do which needs to be addressed. To the religious— it would say you cannot control your destiny by correcting your words or behaviours.

I still hear the voices I heard at 7 years old that blazed their definitions of my body.... that became value statements about my life. Powerful words took root by my believing in them. This is a belief that would shape my life, my choices, behaviour and relationships for the next 10-15 years— infiltrating how I saw myself and the world. This belief is the complete antithesis to the Bible, which declares a love more powerful than death and as specific and personal to me that it knows the numbers of hairs on my head. It is the type of love that Girls dream of.

The distance between the truth of the word of God and the missed mark of the lie is the sin I lived in for many years. The places, actions, choices, thoughts and emotions that came with that were comparable to an oil spill in a small harbour. There was nothing left untouched. 

Sin does not get to win.

This is not the indie film where the prince doesn't ride in on time to save the princess. I am not a Disney fan but I am a rescue fan— I love me a gutsy happy ending. Not unicorns and butterflies and men with flexing jaws, but a happy ending where the shit is seen, understood and dealt with. 

Jesus wasn't some handsome dude with a flexing jaw singing Backstreet Boys songs— he was the ultimate rescuer. He usurped the power of sin/separation, he dealt with it. He went to the depths of it, pulled the plug and now holds the key to usurping the dictating beliefs in our thoughts, emotions and relationships so we can live free of the system of sin.