Unforgivable Sins; Forgivable Sinners

2 Pentecost  Cycle B  proper 5 June 10, 2012  

Psalm 130     Genesis 3:8-15
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1   Mark 3:20-35

Lectionary Link
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Dutchman was the inventor who used mercury in glass tubes to standardize the recording of temperature.  Using this measuring standard, scientific laws have been stated, like "water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level."

And so I ask the question: Does stating this Scientific Law, actually make water boil?  Of course not, which leads me to my favorite quote from the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead.  He said, "The laws of science are statistically approximate; not causatively absolute."  This was his fancy way of stating that just because science states a law, the stating of the law does not make the event happen.

Many religious people treat the words of the Bible as though they were causatively absolute: Because of the words written in the Bible, this made life happen in the way that  it did and does.

Actually, the words of the Bible are "statistically approximate" explanations of inspired people who were trying to grapple with the great problems of life.

The Genesis story as a causative scientific law does not make any sense; the Genesis story as inspired insights about human life and the human dilemma is brilliant.

Christians have wanted to make an actual historic event call the Fall into a causatively absolute event.  Why do you and I sin?  Well, it all started at a sure and certain historical event when Eve was tricked by the serpent to eat of the forbidden fruit and invited Adam to do the same and this has caused everyone after Adam and Eve to be sinful from birth.

Eve said, "The devil made me do it."  God said, "You have sinned and now that you are imperfect, you cannot live in a perfect environment because your imperfection would ruin it and so you are banished from perfection and you now must bear the effects of your sin.  And that sin will infect your environment and your environment will be full of competitive systems.  Weeds will grow and compete with your crops.  Earthquakes and hurricanes and fires will not be coordinated with your human schedule and people will be in harm's way.  People will be born with physical defects, imperfection and impairments."

Fundamentalist use the Bible in a "causatively absolute way."  Things are the way they are specifically because the words of Bible caused them to be this way.

On the other hand, one can see in this inspired story, the beautiful account of how each baby is expelled from the perfect Eden of mom's womb and is forced to live a separated life outside of mom  and learn to "fend" for oneself.  And in fending for oneself, we all eat the forbidden fruit of "selfishness," and we learn the knowledge of good and evil from the actual experience of losing our innocence by being held more and more accountable in our loss of the infant state of naïve innocence.

Life outside of the garden of Eden of mom's womb can get very complicated because we don't end up getting perfectly mentored.  We pick up the imperfections of our environments and the influences found there.  We can forget how to treat everyone with respect because as separate agents we are perpetually fending for ourselves even if it is at the expense of others.  We find ourselves craving for larger and larger pieces of the public pie even as we know that some are getting more and some less.

We can come to be frightened by our own actions and our own motives for why we do the things that we do.  And there can occur all variety of internal turmoil within ourselves.  Each of us, is more or less successful or failing in knowing how to deal with our internal lives.  There can arise the apparent lack of control of the interior lives in such chaos that there seems to be inward, powerful and impure forces which dictate acting out behaviors of addiction and harm to self and others.

In the time of Jesus, there were religious classification of psychological and spiritual states:  In the purity code of Judaism, a person's inner life could be designated as "Impure" or "unclean."  A person whose behaviors did not properly comport to some obvious community standards of "sanity" could be designated as having or being possessed by an "unclean spirit."  In the Greek of the New Testament, such also came to be call a "daimon" or demon, meaning a personified controlling impulse.

Part of the healing work of Jesus was spiritual and psychological.  Jesus was like a shaman; he had a way of getting inside of people to whisper them to peace of mind.  The ability of Jesus to whisper such wild people, fascinated everyone whose lives had suffered at the hands of such wild people.  How could Jesus be such a people whisperer?  He had to have a profound authority of an extraordinary kind, of a spiritual and divine kind.

The healing success of Jesus is something that should make all people glad.  Why wouldn't people be happy about someone being healed?  It's as though a sick person from Rochester, MN, home of the Mayo Clinic, came to Stanford hospital and got cured and the people of Mayo Clinic responding: "The cure happened because those quack physicians at Stanford used methods of the devil to make the person better.  Only authentic healing can take place through the Mayo Clinic."

The Gospel lesson is a lesson about professional jealousy that became so bad that when Jesus whispered a man back to spiritual and mental health, his competitors said, "he made a pact with the devil to accomplish this."  Those who wanted to discount the ministry of Jesus were so vicious as to call something good, evil and done through evil means."

After eating the forbidden fruit, Eve said, "The devil made me do it."  When the religious rivals of Jesus saw the healing work of Jesus, they said, "The devil made you do and assisted you to do it."

Jesus, who did spiritual work because of the Holy Spirit,  said that such a sin against the Holy Spirit was unforgivable.  And if this seems extreme, it could be that all sins are unforgivable since God cannot say any sin was or is ever "okay."  Sins are behaviors which come from a person who is sinful.  The sinner is forgivable even while the sins are not.  It may seem like a subtle distinction but it's an important one.  The sinner while in the state of sinning is not in a state of forgiveness.

The Gospel for us today is coming to know ourselves in the family of God as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.  John's Gospel states that we are "born not of the will of the flesh, but born of God."  We show our family identity by obeying the will of God.  What is the will of God?  The will of God is to know ourselves as forgiven.  Each of us got evicted from the perfect Eden of our mother's womb and we have come to know ourselves as wounded and separated from each other with some behaviors of alienation, behaviors of sin.  We express the will of God by loving God, our neighbors and ourselves as God's valuable children.

Jesus came to remind us that even though we lived in mother's womb we have always lived in the great womb of God, or as St. Paul quoted, "We live and move and have our being in God."  We are in God and when we don't act as though we are part of God's family, living "in God" we act out in sinful behaviors which derive from our sense of alienation from God.

Doing God's will, begins by acknowledging and discovering that we live and move and have our being in God.  Knowing this is to live a life of being forgiven and learning to cooperate with all goodness, love and justice wherever we find it.

Jesus Christ came to teach us what forgiveness means.  He came to help us tolerate and survive the effects of our "unforgivable sins" and make our hearts pure by giving us his Holy Spirit.  And in the power of the Spirit, we receive the freedom to do the will of God.  Amen.