ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

ASH WEDNESDAY, 2006
HIGH MASS

Fr Alan Moses

“Sin doesn’t really exist as a serious idea in modern life.”

So said Brian Appleyard in the Sunday Times a couple of years ago. Now Mr. Appleyard is not just any old hack journalist told to produce a few hundred words on something he knows virtually nothing about - but an informed and respected commentator on the contemporary world. He even knows a bit about religion.

He does not mean that our society is one without sin or sinners - but rather that most people do not conceive of themselves as sinners; think of themselves in those terms. Sin has been either trivialised - “naughty but nice” – or in the language of much therapy it has become something which is not our fault.

The language of sin which the Church has used is difficult for many of our contemporaries to grasp. In part this is because of the way it has been communicated by us in the church over the years. Sin has been seen primarily in terms of a law code, a rule book, to be either obeyed or broken. To keep the rules is to be good. To break them is to be a sinner. This rather legalistic approach all too easily degenerates into a belief in salvation by works and a hard-hearted self-righteousness - quick to condemn those who do not conform. It is one which downplays the place of relationship - with either God or other people.

Much of contemporary western culture has little place for the “other”, certainly not of God but also of our neighbour, in its understanding of human fulfilment. We speak much of self-fulfilment but less of finding it in relationship with God or others. Others may be tools for this but are all too often evaluated simply in terms of their usefulness to us in our quest for fulfilment. They can be discarded if they fail us. They have no intrinsic value in themselves.

Scholars have pointed out that the place which sin and guilt once occupied in a mind formed by the Christian faith has now been occupied by “shame”. This term is used to describe the response of people confronted with the distance between their ideal of themselves, that to which they aspire, what they most want to be - and the harsh reality of shortcoming - and their seeming powerlessness to do much if anything about it. A different language has not liberated us from what we Christians call sin. It has left us imprisoned in it - desperately seeking liberation by one therapy or another. It has left us blaming others because, while we fail to see sin in ourselves, we are quick enough to see it in others.

What are we to do about this? The Church has to go on using the language of sin, even while it understands that this is not understood by many hearers - even by some within its bounds. It must not do this to be judgemental or self-righteous but because it believes that human beings are moral creatures made in the image and likeness of God. If we can say no more than that we are people entirely dependent on forces beyond our control, then we demean humankind. It is a higher dignity to be able to choose between good and evil, than to have no choice.

But it has to speak of sin, it has to tell the Christian story, in ways which help people to see that there is forgiveness as well as judgement, relationship not just regulation; that there is the possibility of change.
To do this it has not merely to tell the story but to live it. It has to act it out in both in rituals such as we celebrate tonight but also in the daily business of its life - so as to communicate the real possibility of healing and liberating relationship with God and with others.