Spiritual Hiccups - Dealing with Sin

I have known a few Christians who seemed to think that as long as you believed in Jesus, nothing else you did mattered.  But in truth, rare is the person of faith who does not think her faith demands a certain ethic or morality.  Most all of us know that Jesus demands we love God and love neighbor.  And more careful readers of the Bible know that Jesus says he fulfills the Old Testament Law, not abrogates it.  But at the same time, most Christians know that Jesus talks a fair amount about forgiveness.

Out of all this and more, we Christians have developed a complicated and messy relationship with sin.  For starters, we prefer to think of other people as the real sinners rather than us.  I see this in my Presbyterian tradition, where corporate prayers of confession are long standing part of worship.  This is the element of worship I hear the most complaints about and the most suggestions that we should either drop it or at least tone it down.  (If you'd like to see this in action yourself, try getting folks to recite the answer to Question 5 from the "Heidelberg Catechism."  In response to the question of whether anyone can keep God's Law it says, "No, for by nature I am prone to hate God and my neighbor.)

But if we are prone to downplay our own sin, we have no such problems with it comes theirs.  Of course this requires that we tend to be appalled at their sort of sins while being understanding about our more banal sorts of sin.  I am convinced that the current battles over homosexuality in the Church come about because of how safe the majority feels concerning this particular "sin."  I think people on both sides of this Church fight can agree that we're not likely to ban those who practice "unrepentant greed" from being members or pastors or anything else in the Church.

In today's gospel reading, Jesus is confronted with how to respond to someone's sin.  The religious leaders bring him a women caught committing adultery, and remind him that the Law proscribes death by stoning for the offense.  Jesus' response doesn't really uncomplicate things for us.  He doesn't speak against the Law, asking only that one without sin himself begin the rock tossing.  When no one in the crowd is willing to follow through, Jesus states clearly that he will not condemn the woman.  But he also tells her, "Go your way, and from now on do not sin again."  Too bad the story doesn't continue on and have Jesus meet her a second time when she's been caught again.

It seems to me that religious people often want to use their sin as markers and boundaries.  Their sort of sin puts you on the outside.  But in this story Jesus won't draw a boundary, even though he tells the woman to change her behavior.  I realize this doesn't neatly solve any debates about what is or isn't actually a sin, but it does seem to speak of a different sort of relationship toward "sinners." 

I wonder what it would look like for the Church to be a place that took very seriously the need to live in conformity with God's ways, but where "sinners" still heard, "I do not condemn you."

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