Sin, Advent, Race, and "Immoral Society"

Many years ago, I typed an agenda for a December meeting of the Session at the church I was serving. (Sessions are the governing councils in Presbyterian churches.) At the beginning I included a verse from an Advent hymn as a way of opening the meeting. I've never been all that good of a typist, and this is what appeared on the agenda.
     Come, Thou long expected Jesus, Born to set Thy people free;
     From our rears and sins release us; Let us find our rest in Thee.

I underlined and bolded "rears" so you couldn't miss it, but I never saw it until we were singing it at the Session meeting. I christened it the dieters version of the hymn, and we all had a good laugh. But over the years, I wondered if we don't see God more as a divine self-help coach than one who releases us from our sins.

Sin has never been the most popular topic, and those religious folks who do talk about it often like to focus on other folks' sins. My own, Reformed theological tradition has tended to view sin more as condition than act, something that makes us especially prone to act in ways detrimental to others as well as to ourselves. But we Presbyterians have not been immune to  consumerist, self-help notions of religion that see God and spirituality as one more item to help us become happier, more fulfilled, and so on. In some congregations, it is much easier to get a Jazzercise class started in the Fellowship Hall than it is to have a serious discussion about sin. From our rears release us, but don't worry about the other.

All this started bouncing around in my head after reading an article entitled "Reinhold Niebuhr, Eric Garner, and White Privilege" in Baptist News Global. If you don't know of him, Niebuhr was one of the more famous theologians in 20th century America, and this article recalled his 1932 work, Moral Man and Immoral Society. It spoke of sin's hold on groups and communities as even more tenacious than that on individuals. Niebuhr saw societies as nearly impervious to moral or rational arguments against such problems and as more selfish than individuals.

He was speaking of economics when he wrote that “it has always been the habit of privileged groups to deny the oppressed classes every opportunity for the cultivation of innate capacities and then to accuse them of lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.” But even though it was decades before the civil rights movement, he saw how the problem of sin was also at work in that arena, and concluded that society would not change on its own. “However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”

Forced to do so... That speaks to the reality of sin's hold on social forces, a reality that has spent a great deal of time in the headlines of late. The anger from Ferguson and Staten Island, as well as on college campuses around a "rape culture," is anger at an immoral society that is caught up in the grip of sin, that, in the words of the hymn, needs to be "released" from its grip, being incapable of freeing itself.

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As Christians prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus, it seems an especially fitting time to think about God's Incarnation into a sinful world, an event that evokes quick push-back from immoral society. (Don't forget that Herod's attempt to kill the baby Jesus is a part of the story of the "Wise Men.") But many of us are too busy singing Christmas carols to dwell for long on the problems of immoral society. We may even lash out at those who try to drag us back to Advent, accusing them of ruining the season and undermining the "joyof Christmas."

But the anger over Ferguson and Staten Island, and especially the almost comical blindness of that Staten Island grand jury, remind us that there is a real problem here, one that all the Christmas joy in the world can't quite paper over. And we Christians, those who seek to follow Jesus, can never simply celebrate Jesus' birth. We must also join him in his work, work that terrified the powers that be, the keepers of the status quo, and those who valued peace and order over the needs of the weak, the vulnerable, and the downtrodden.