4 hours Ago
The thought in mainstream Christianity that we are all “sinners“ is a fascinating one to me. I understand where the idea originates, but I am disturbed that the value and orientation of it shifted from divine advice to that of divine command. The Ten Commandments were not commands, but divine “sayings” or “utterances” depending upon whether you’re speaking of the Hebrew or Greek words for what became translated into English as “commands.
” So let’s ratchet back a notch or two the weight and gravitas of the implications of our use of the word sin. It’s not to say we shouldn’t be considering the topic, but we should be looking at it through a different lens if we wish to make use of the advice. We have given the word “sin,” not too much power, but the wrong kind of power.
When you look at the instances of things which are described in scripture as being sinful, there is a pattern to them. They are all about relationships. Adultery is a good example.
Committing adultery is a break in two different relationships at the same time: that with your spouse and that with your neighbor whose spouse you slept with. You are now not only less safe under your own roof, you are less safe in your own neighborhood. The block party becomes nothing but drama.
Christianity is a relational practice, as Jesus taught it. The biggest thing you can do wrong is anything which works against the idea of being in a good and right relationship with others. How else shall we know world peace if not by fostering and creating relationships as widely and deeply as possible? That is the whole point of the dharma of Christianity which Jesus, and other spiritual prophets taught.
When it is said that “the wages of sin is death,“ what kind of death do they mean? We know that we didn’t burst into flames upon the spot where we committed our last sin. So it’s not physical death we’re discussing. Death of the soul, perhaps? That would be a fairly arrogant claim to make with any certainty.
The type of death being discussed must be of a different sort. I won’t presume to know what, with any authority. Others shouldn’t either.
So let’s leave that aside since an accurate interpretation is impossible. The sin of breaking or preventing relationships is expressed through the four types of relationships we have. They are: with others, the earth, with the self and with God/higher power.
When you do anything to prevent or destroy your relationship with any of these four things, you are doing some level of harm. How cumulative that harm becomes depends on the type of harm you’re doing. Throwing your trash out the car window is a sin of one degree, belching black smoke from a tailpipe is another.
Both have a cumulative effect, however, of causing death. A heavy wage to pay indeed. But in all likelihood, a broken relationship is not naturally a permanent state.
It is something which must be maintained by choice. We have to choose to keep on being unforgiving as if we were constantly holding down a button. Once we lift our finger off the button things return to equilibrium on their own.
If we are all connected in ways we can’t see, that connection is not likely broken by acting in ways that we can. In other words, don’t give yourself so much credit that you think you have the ability to destroy any relationship at all at the truest level of our existence. You don’t have the power to truly separate yourself from God.
You just think you do. And so you’re afraid of your own power which doesn’t exist anyway. Likewise, if we are all eternal beings, then we are likely friends backstage, even if we enact a fight scene onstage.
Don’t be fooled by the drama. So the advice then, which has been unfortunately translated into a command, is to seek to physically emulate the natural equilibrium of our soul. First remember that no break in a relationship is permanent.
After death we are not likely to hold onto a grudge. Of course I have no objective proof of this. But it is an article of my faith by which I choose to live my life.
The problem often becomes in interpreting what we think God’s beliefs are about us. We put human glasses on God’s eyes and expect It to live up to our expectations. It won’t.
We have virtually no basis to understand the mind or viewpoint of God. Ergo, it must not be for us to try. It must be that we are meant to look toward something a bit closer to the ground to understand what God might want for us.
What might constitute a “break in relationship“ with God? If we were to only use scripture to get a picture of God or what God might be, you must recognize that in scripture God does not actually punish, God recalibrates. There’s an entirely different inner directive to each of those methods of course correction. Recalibration feels like utter destruction, but really it’s just change.
That we would be given an opportunity to create a state of balance closer to that which is natural for us on the soul level, it is not a break in our relationship with God. Recalibration is a strengthening of it. To me this means we may curse about, complain to, reject, or become frustrated with God.
We may even declare our hatred for It. But that doesn’t mean it works both ways. A wise mother knows when her child is only saying, “I hate you,“ because they’re mad or afraid.
A wise mother knows how to read between the lines. We should give God more credit. A break in our relationship with God is only about how we pinch ourselves off from something which is eternally there for us.
And we do that by disavowing our connectivity with all that’s around us. We pretend to break a relationship that is unbreakable and it’s the pretending itself which is like eating a little bit of poison, every day. We take negative actions and make bad choices when we forget how we are all connected.
That’s a sin. We love to say about our own behavior, that, “It’s not hurting anybody.“ Drug abuse, in particular, is a sin in that it harms our relationship with the self at the same time it has the potential to harm our relationships with our friends and loved ones.
The Buddhists suggest we ‘do no harm.’ The pagans say, ‘and no harm come, so mote it be.’ Too often we interpret that to mean as long as we’re not harming anything or anybody other than ourselves.
But self-destructive behavior is a grave sin. For it is virtually impossible to be in good relationship with others when we think so little of ourselves. Our relationship with the earth is one of the most fragile and important relationships our biology has.
There is literally no line where the earth ends and we begin. We are physically and literally a part of it. No atom of our bodies is new.
The molecules which make up ‘me’ are not new. They once belonged exclusively to the earth. And to the stars before that.
What we do to the earth we are ultimately doing to ourselves. It’s hard to quantify the type of destruction we are capable of doing to the earth because you can’t see the forest through the trees. We are so close to it and our little destructions are so small that we become accustomed to the damage which increasingly exists all around us.
We have fooled ourselves into thinking our harm is of no consequence. But all words, all actions, all thoughts, have consequences. Some small, some large.
Some good, some bad. You have a power that you do not realize you possess. Use it for good.
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