Original Sin-suality

I bought Chris Hedges' (I) Don't Believe (in) Atheists yesterday and spent most of yesterday reading through it. I also bought Bart Ehrman's God's Problem (I admit, most just to yell at him). Comments and reviews on both to come in time.

Something in the Atheists book sparked a rather interesting realization though. Hedges writes that we do not need to afraid of anyone who does or does not believe in God. We should, however, be afraid of anyone who does not believe in sin. The concept of sin, Hedges writes, is the recognition that we human beings can never be omnipotent.

Wow, I thought, and read it aloud to a friend. He looked at me rather puzzled and said, "That doesn't make any sense at all." After a few moments of debating back and forth on why that didn't make sense to him, I finally asked, "What is sin to you?"

"It's when you do something wrong."

Well no wonder. I explained where Hedges was coming from, that one of the biblical views of sin is not the act of doing something wrong, but a state of imperfect being. It wasn't small-s sin, that you list during your weekly confession, tallying up as either venial or mortal, or even take up to the altar call and swear you'll never do that again lest you make Jesus cry. We're talking about big-s Sin, the stalking monster, the disease that gets within in or is within us and in the end makes us do what we do not want to do and not do what we should do.

"Oh," he replied. "Now that makes sense."

We are both christians, mind you. You'd think that we'd have the same basic understanding of what sin is. And yet. It never ceases to amaze me to discover how often we human beings who speak the same language actually translate our words with different meanings.

And what a difference this makes! Sin as something external that you do vs. Sin as something that lives within your soul. Sin as a medium in which we live, breath, think, love, laugh and be human, vs. something that we commit.

Sin as something that we can wrestle to the ground with Jesus as our tag-team partner. Sin as the acts we commit, the vile thoughts we think, the decisions we make. And if we can do right,well so can anyone else.

Or.

Sin as the inner unconscious mystery that drives us to do the act, think the thought, make the choice, the boiling force inside us that's as fundamental to our nature as our taste in lovers that makes us choose one woman over another, without really understanding why. Something that, despite our best intentions, will usually lead us to hell if we refuse to look at it fully and claim it as our own. And which will lead us there even when we do.

That's the Sin that makes grace make sense to me, that underneath our human veneer lies a beast, and every hair on our heads is loved anyway despite this, even when and especially when we fall.

So, I ask you: What is Sin? Try not to use the words you grew up with. Try not to rely on words that are comfortable. Take your best shot. No wrong answers.

Truly inclusive?

It occurred to me the other day that the problem with "inclusive" thinking is the sure certainty that the other person who isn't of the inclusivist's faith tradition is welcome in the inclusivist's afterlife, but the inclusivist doesn't necessarily conceive of the fact that the she is might be welcome in the other person's afterlife.

Do we truly respect another person's faith or the person himself if we carry around the assumption that our worldview is the right one? Is toleration the same as respect?

I will admit, my christian agnosticism/apatheism leads me to be pretty suspicious that it comes down to Jesus alone at the end (Why not Buddha? Why not Odin?), and I'll also admit that I'll claim christianity simply out of sheer laziness: Seeing as that's the religion that most influenced my worldframe, I've decided to work with that instead of going out to find another one. But I also find myself a little excited that maybe just maybe it's Buddha's compassion that saves me instead of God's. I'm good with that, too. Not very "Christian" of me, but I reserve the right to redefine what christian means for me.

Of course that makes me wonder where we draw the line between faith and blindness, between skepticism and over-thinking-it.

Morning at the Homeless ministry: a haiku

Convoy of hybrids
delivers meals, compassion.
Christian love on wheels.

Survey says

From BeliefNet:
Survey: 'Unchurched' Americans say Church is 'Full of Hypocrites'

OK, no great shocker there. Maybe a "Wait, if you're not there, how do you know?" query. Although I was "unchurched" for 15 years for that very reason. That, and a preference for sleeping in after working until 1 a.m. on Saturday nights. Yes, working, not partying.

But then we hit this graf:

Researchers, affiliated with the Southern Baptists' LifeWay Christian Resources, defined "unchurched" as Christians who haven't attended church in six months as well as non-Christians such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.

... and we go "Huh?" If your religious tradition doesn't actually have a church, can you really be unchurched? Could perhaps they choose a better word for non-Christians so they don't actually fulfill the unchurched view of Christians being 'judgmental and hypocritical'? Un-templed? Non-churched? Simply lapsed? Nonpracticing?

Sometimes I "attend" UCC services in Second Life, but I haven't in about a month, so if I keep that up will my avatar be virtually unchurched in five months?

I'm soaking up some of my Intro to Theology texts before school begins at the end of the month, and they stress that the importance of Christian life is found in community, so being "churched" does seem to be a fairly important deal. However, I think I've accomplished the same deep fellowship at the bar over cheese fries and coin $2.50 pitchers, and I wonder where the "church" part comes in. A modern take, if you will, on the meal in Emmaus, as there's a starchy main course and plenty of realization that the stranger in front of you might be the gal with the answers. So was I in church when I was unchurched?

What, then, is church? Church is never the building, as pretty as we make them, and it cannot be just the 11-to-noon-on-Sundays hour, which is still a fairly segregated hour. Do we take church with us or do we leave it behind to be picked up later? Is it the declaration of your religious affiliation that is church? The friends you make and family you create who share that burning need to orient themselves and the world to a new vision of how things really are or should be? Or is it just the world, as imperfect as it is, and all the lives you touch as you go through, trying to love a lot and harm as little as you can?

Are there walls, or just places where the light leaks in? Is it divided by time, or can the words on a page written millenia ago that let a reader commune with an author be one of the bridges that transcend the clock?

So I guess my original question is, is being "unchurched" a relavant state or just a judgment call?