Uncovering Sin: A gateway to healing and calling

By Rosy Fairhurst

This approachable Lent course invites us to view sin as something to be understood, rather than condemned. It argues that our darker traits must be coaxed into the light in order to manage them and work towards healing and renewal. An intriguing choice for both personal and group reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Nov 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780281068807

Book preview

Week 1

God’s pharmacy

1 Strong medicine

Genesis 12.1–4

Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

John 3.1–17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, You must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

‘Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’

There is a hoary old preaching story in which Mrs Coolidge, wife of US President Calvin Coolidge, asks him about the subject of a sermon he heard: ‘Sin’, he replied. When asked for a bit more detail about the content he said, ‘On the whole he’s against it.’

If that had been a contemporary preacher, I’d be tempted to wonder whether he was saying, ‘It’s a bad thing, we know that – and just look how bad it is’, or ‘It’s a bad idea to think about; we’ll only feel terrible, so let’s not bother.’ Standing where I am, it’s the second that’s more likely, though it’s the sight of how bad it is that has pushed them into turning away. But in fact I want to explore why we need uncover sin, easy though it might be to ignore it when we associate ‘sin-talk’ with being made to feel worse – more condemned, more blamed – rather than anything potentially liberating.

The purpose of sin-talk

It’s impossible to understand the Christian view of sin unless we see it in terms of the whole ecology – that is to say, how it fits together – of the Christian faith. And this is an ecology founded upon God’s love, and all our understanding being set in the context of our relationship with God. The trouble with a lot of sin-talk is that it has been taken out of that context. Alistair McFadyen¹ says that the proper function of sin-talk is to turn us to our healing and rescue, to salvation: ‘Sin-talk has to serve the communal and personal practices of confession, penitence, intercession, love and forgiveness.’² Blame, on the other hand, fixes us there. Even the context of law and sin is covenant – which is relational not contractual. Who would have thought? The way we’ve tended to think about sin is like ripping Paul’s words, ‘The wages of sin is death’, apart from, ‘but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6.23). We need look no further than the two passages above, among the best known in the whole Bible, to see that this is in fact the way the Bible’s sin-talk works.

The Genesis passage, the story of the call of Abraham, comes after 12 chapters telling the story of human sin – first of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden after eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then the killing of Abel by his brother Cain, the breaking of the commandments, the loss of the capacity to communicate with each other in the story of the Tower of Babel, and the story of Noah, by which stage desperate measures are required to save the sinful world from destruction.

We need to hold on to the fact that we have been given the dove and the rainbow as the sign of the covenant between God and humankind in the Noah story. Now, in this hinge story in Genesis, God turns his attention to show what that covenant of love – God’s insatiable desire to bless rather than curse, to rescue humanity rather than condemn – is going to look like in this dire situation. And God does it by focusing on one family, that of Abram and Sarai – one family, whose story and destiny will emerge so that God can show God’s love and salvation ‘for the nations’. Far from narrowing it down to one family, it will open it right up beyond the people of Israel to all the peoples of the world.

The sin of sin in isolation

Why do we associate sin with cursing and with condemnation? It’s partly because the Church has been less than our best self in joining a wider culture that has forgotten the Christian story, and started to think of sin in isolation – as if we were autonomous beings and as if it were a choice between our freedom or God’s freedom, without the surrounding story of our relationship with God. As soon as we take sin outside the context of our relationship with God, it isn’t a Christian understanding any more – because fundamentally that is sin, to imagine that we stand autonomously, independently, on our own, removing ourselves from the warmth of God’s love. Putting it back into that context reminds us that we are creatures, dependent on God for our very breath, interdependent and connected with the whole of the cosmos.

If I think of the most destructive situations I have encountered recently, they are characterized by a standing apart, by an imagining that there can be no relatedness to the ‘other’, so that everything is interpreted through a lens of malice and legalism, of the other as dangerous and hostile rather than fundamentally connected. This requires room in which to wonder what the other person’s intention was in an action that may have offended us. And it is the consequence of sin, of our separation from the love of God – that we get separated at all levels (from our own bodies even), all our relationships become disordered and disorientated, we lose the capacity to trust and our desires get muddied and misaligned.

Original sin/original blessing

‘If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?’ (Psalm 130.3). Answer: no one, of course. The accounts of the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel and of the Tower of Babel take us into the territory Augustine calls ‘original sin’. The way that idea was developed over time has provoked a mighty reaction, articulated most eloquently in Matthew Fox’s book, Original Blessing.³ He wants to remind us that God’s intention is to bless and not to curse, or as the conclusion of the story from John puts it, Jesus’ purpose is not to condemn the world but to save it.

Julian of Norwich makes a beautiful counter-voice within a Church that focuses so much of the time on sin in a way that sees us as already separated from God. She is so clear that this world is one that God made, God loves and God keeps, one that Julian is able to see, with the image of the hazelnut in God’s hand as all that is, the interdependence of all things in the light of God’s loving gaze. ‘It lasteth and ever shall because God loveth it.’⁴ Yes, we do need to remember the original blessing and that it extends to the whole of the cosmos, as both Matthew Fox and Julian spell out so eloquently. But Julian knows that we also need to understand that ‘sin is behovely’⁵ (necessary), and perhaps we need to retrieve a sense of how that is so.

Sin and attachment

I have a friend, a priest and training to be a psychotherapist, who gave her colleagues a set of definitions of Christian concepts in relation to therapeutic terms. She explained original sin in relation to attachment theory – the understanding of how when a child is born, if things go right, a process of attachment takes place between mother and child, and indeed between all the close members of the family and the child. There is a context for love, intimacy, trust, the conditions needed for human beings to thrive. If it fails, if for some reason children aren’t able to bond, they will be in big trouble. It’s going to be difficult to stay safe because they won’t trust their parents, and difficult to form intimate relationships in later life. Depending on what kind of attachment disorder it is, it’s going to be difficult for them to stay in relationships at all and might result in all kinds of destructive behaviours.

The clearest example of this in my experience came when I was in touch with a Congolese asylum seeker, Rebecca, and her little son, Monange. Rebecca had been through terrible traumas in the violence in the Congo before escaping to the UK. She got ill and had been admitted to hospital. I was visiting her after she’d been sent home. Quickly it became clear that she was in no fit state to care for her infant son – who with his huge luminous eyes looked like the angel he was named after. I decided there was nothing for it but to take him away and make sure he was looked after