First Parish Unitarian Universalist, Bridgewater, MA – and on YouTube
“Lent: Mindfulness and Self-Denial”
Sunday, March 6, 2016 – 10:30am
Reading “Sin,” Fred Muir, Minister of the UU Church of Annapolis, MD, from the
book Heretic’s Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals
Given the antiquity of the Genesis 3 story of paradise lost, humankind has been
fussing over where we went wrong for a long, long time. A lot of the confusion intensified when
Christians jumped onto the scene, because they significantly altered the religious landscape
by changing the accepted understanding of sin. You see, for Hebrews what Adam and Eve
did was not sinning so much as simply growing up—they were learning that life was not
only about the comforts of paradise. The Garden story was all about cheyt, the Hebrew
word meaning “to miss the mark,” which was their definition of sin—like shooting an
arrow at the target and missing. After you miss, of course it’s a disappointment, but you try
again, you try to hit the mark. In other words, sinning is a part of life, no different than
breathing, eating, or sleeping. So we sin—what else is new! But Christians took a
different slant on it—Christians went and made it personal, as if it was an affront to God.
They spoke of human flaw and evil as though sin was a significant breach of the life contract that
every person signed by default just by being born. Christians dogmatized sin, which reminds
me of a story: An Eskimo encountered a missionary priest after morning mass and asked, “If I
had not known about sin, would it have been necessary to be saved?” “Of course not,” the
priest told him. “Then why did you tell me?” replied the Eskimo….
Well, sin is not irrelevant for religious liberals nor is its theology misguided. Sin can
still be a significant word and reality for our faith community, it’s just that it needs some
reframing, which is why I’ve always clung to the fact that the Garden story is a myth. A myth, I
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remind you, is based not on the facts of historical time and place, but on the facts of
reoccurring themes from the human psyche. In a myth, the facts are from the story of human
development. As a myth that rehearses the reoccurring themes of human denial,
responsibility, and isolation, the Garden myth of Genesis 3 is as truthful a fact as World War
II, troops in Kosovo, or Hurricane Floyd.
Sin then is anything that I do that isolates, ostracizes, or separates me or others
from the human community (and by extension, from the web of life) which results in
robbing or denying human uniqueness and potential. Call it evil or flawed behavior; call it
missing the mark; call it brokeness; call it denial, repression, or reaction formation—it’s all
sin if it separates, ostracizes, or isolates us from the ground of our being, from that which
defines us as human beings. Sin is behavior that prevents a person from living out their
potential for human being-ness….
The truth is we do commit acts, we have thoughts that miss the mark, that are sinful: if
we don’t then we are not of this planet! That’s what the Adam and Eve story is all about: it
tells us that to be human is to fall short of expectations, to not live up to our ideals. It is a
given that we will miss the mark. And yet we never quit trying to be whole, seeking oneness,
completion, at-one-ment.
Sermon “Lent: Mindfulness and Self-Denial” Rev. Paul Sprecher
Hi, I’m Paul and I’m a procrastinator. I procrastinate in big things and in little
things. I always find some little thing that I haven’t gotten around to that morning when
I really need to be some place on time, so I’m constantly just about late to things. I
have a really hard time writing my column for Bridging, so I don’t actually always get
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my submission in by the deadline. Strike that: I never get my article and
announcements in by the deadline – which is, for any of your other procrastinators out
there, the 20th of the month. I procrastinate in taking out the trash. Actually, I’m feeling
a little vulnerable here right now. I’m Paul, and I’m a procrastinator. Are there any
other procrastinators out there? You can say it too if you’d like: I’m x, and I’m a
procrastinator. Go ahead, if you sometimes are.
Okay, so now that we’ve all admitted to a tiny fault…. Sorry, let me just finish
writing this – I got a little distracted this morning. [Pause].
If I ever do actually arrive in this pulpit without having finished my sermon, just
shoot me! Though it’s true that I do procrastinate in getting started with my sermons,
too.
The thing about procrastination is that it’s actually a pretty minor fault, a venial sin,
if you will. And let me be very, very clear that I don’t mean in any way to mock
Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step or other recovery program; for many of us,
those programs are vital lifelines that help us acknowledge our addictions. Addictions
of all sorts come to have enormous power over our lives. The recent rise in opioid and
heroin addiction here and in the towns and cities around us are serious enough to cause
tears in our social fabric. One of the key steps in 12-step programs is an
acknowledgement of how we have hurt others, howour self-absorption hurts those all
around us. One of the more compelling images of alcoholism I have heard is in the
form of a joke: “How many alcoholics does it take to change a light bulb? Just one;
they hold on to the bulb and the world revolves around them.”
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Alcoholism – probably more commonly referred to then as “habitual drunkenness” –
was undoubtedly one of the sins that would have denounced from this pulpit and many
others in the parishes founded by our Puritan – Calvinist – ancestors. And we certainly
understand today that addiction has many of the characteristics of illness and can be
treated medically as well as psychologically. But one common aspect of addictions is
that they start out as minor indulgences and then come to have more and more power
over us. And so, I would argue, addiction starts with a choice. Some of us are more
vulnerable than others. But, ultimately, addiction starts with a choice; and then, little by
little, it grows to have more and more power over us and our ability to choose becomes
severely diminished.
It’s pretty clear that allowing ourselves to fall prey to addictions fits the definition of
“sin” that Fred Muir offered in our reading:
Sin then is anything that I do that isolates, ostracizes, or separates me or others from
the human community (and by extension, from the web of life) which results in
robbing or denying human uniqueness and potential. Call it evil or flawed behavior; call it
missing the mark; call it brokeness; call it denial, repression, or reaction formation—it’s
all sin if it separates, ostracizes, or isolates us from the ground of our being, from that
which defines us as human beings. Sin is behavior that prevents a person from living
out their potential for human being-ness.
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Now, I’m not suggesting that procrastination is nearly as isolating or as sinful as
addiction, not to mention armed robbery or murder. What I am suggesting is that it can
– like other kinds of brokenness – rip at the fabric of relationships with those we care
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most about. I am imposing a hardship on Jamie, our administrator, when I miss the
deadline. I then force her to work a little harder to make her deadline for getting the
newsletter out. I distress my wife Deedee when I’m perennially late getting ready to
leave for meetings or movies or events we go to together.
Hold on; this meeting is confidential, right? You’re not going to tell them I admitted
this, right?
Actually, this is sort of a public confessional just now. And what better place than
this our beloved community of memory and hope to own up to the damage I sometimes
do and to motivate myself to change?
It’s pretty easy for us as religious liberals to lose track of the ways in which we miss
the mark. Some of you may remember having to go to confession and making up sins
to confess. I’m not recommending such a practice, though I think there are definite
advantages to regularly acknowledging to someone else the places in our lives where we
fall short, where we miss the mark. There are times when each of us misses the mark.
In other terms, there are times when we all trespass, or sin, or incur debts to one another.
Sometimes we choose to excuse ourselves of our own faults because the faults – the
trespasses – of others are so much greater than our own. Leo Tolstoy retells this old
legend about that:
Two women approached a wise man and asked for instruction. One of them
regarded herself as a terrible sinner. In her youth, she had deceived her husband, and
she tortured herself constantly with the memory of her infidelity.
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The second, on the other hand, had lived her entire life within the law and by the
rules. She wasn’t conscious of any serious sin, had nothing much to reproach herself
with and felt quite pleased with herself….
The wise man said to the first woman, “Go, daughter of God, and look for the
heaviest boulder you can find — one that you can barely manage to carry — and
bring it to me.”
And you,” he said to the second woman, who could not recall any serious sin, “go
and bring me as many stones as you can carry, but they must all be small ones….”
[When they returned,] the wise man examined the stones and said, “Now do as
follows. Take the stones back and replace each one of them exactly where you
picked it up, and when you have put them all back where you found them, come
back to me….”
The first [woman] very easily found the place from where she had taken the huge
boulder, and she replaced it where it had been. But the second had no idea where she
had picked up all her little pebbles, and had to return to the wise man without having
carried out his instruction.
“You see,” said the wise man, “that’s how it is with our sins. It was easy to take
the big, heavy boulder back to its place because you knew exactly where you first
found it. But it was impossible to remember where all those little pebbles came
from.”
And to the first woman, he said, “You are very conscious of your sin. You carry
in your heart the reproach of your husband and of your conscience; you have learned
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humility, and in this way you have been freed of the boulder of your wrongdoing.
You, however,” he said to the second woman, who had come back still carrying her
sack of little pebbles, “you, who have sinned in many small ways, do not know any
more when and how you did wrong; you are not able to repent. You have grown
accustomed to a life of little sins, to passing judgment on the sins of others while
becoming more deeply entangled in your own. It has become impossible to free
yourself of them.”
We are all broken. We all miss the mark from time to time, sometimes in small
ways, sometimes in great ways. As Fred Muir puts it, I and you and all of us from time
to time engage in sin that “isolates, ostracizes, or separates me or others from the human
community … [and] from the web of life.” All of us leave stones large and small lying
about, and all of us need forgiveness from others and from ourselves as a result. Or, in the
language of 12-step programs, all of us must make amends insofar as we can.
Lent is traditionally a time for reflecting on the ways we have fallen short in our lives.
The religious tradition in which I was raised didn’t observe Lent as a formal part of the
church year, but I know many of you were raised in traditions that did observe Lent. It’s not
a general practice in our Unitarian Universalist tradition, though it is certainly observed in
some of our congregations. Taking these forty days out of the year to attend to our sins is not
exactly comfortable for many of us, whether because it was forced upon us or because we are
not, after all, great sinners on the whole.
Rev. Kate Rohde, minister of our Unitarian Universalist congregation in Omaha,
speaks of the season of Lent this way:
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I did not observe Lent until I became a Unitarian Universalist because I had never
understood its purpose. In elementary school, when one of my more pious friends
asked me what I was giving up for Lent, I responded with the clichés of schoolgirl
humor. “Liver, Brussels sprouts, and spelling tests.” Much later, I was able to see
that giving something up is an attempt to move out of self-concern through a ritual of
self-denial.2
Christianity is not unique in setting aside for reckoning with the ways we have
chosen – intentionally or otherwise – to tear at the fabric of relationships with one
another and with the whole web of life. In the Jewish calendar, the 10 Days of Awe
from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur are set aside for reckoning with the ways in which
offense has been given and seeking and offering forgiveness for wrongs done to others.
It is said that on Yom Kippur God will forgive us only insofar as we forgive one
another. There are similar times of seeking forgiveness in most religious traditions, and
of course the practice is embedded in the practices of 12-step programs, especially in the
4th and 9th steps, which say that we “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of
ourselves,” and then “Made direct amends to such people [as we have harmed]
wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
So Lent is a time to bring to particular awareness the reality that our selfish and
thoughtless behavior causes harm to others and, of course, to ourselves as well.
Choosing some small sacrifice in our daily living can serve as a small wake up call to
bring us back to mindfulness, to take a little time to reflect on who we might have
harmed and then to seek forgiveness. By denying ourselves something we value but
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don’t need, we become open to giving ourselves the gift of mindfulness, of paying
attention to the real sources of meaning and purpose in our living.
Kate Rohde, who came to understand the purpose of Lent when she became a
Unitarian Universalist, offers her own unfolding understanding of the meaning and
purpose of Lent:
Experience teaches us repeatedly that we forget our own egos most quickly
when we fully attend to something beyond ourselves. W.H. Auden defines prayer in
this way. “To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.”
As he goes on to say, whenever we so concentrate our attention—on a landscape, a
poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that we completely forget
our own ego and desires, we are praying.
Lent is a time for reflection and prayer, a time not to deny our own needs
but to attend to, “to stretch toward,” those who are in need of us.3
Lent is a season for mindfulness, for reaching beyond ourselves and our immediate
wants and desires, for opening ourselves yet again to what is of true value, to what will
last, to love.
So my vow for Lent is to notice when I’m distracting myself, procrastinating in small
ways and in large ways. By noticing, I will give myself just a little time to reflect on
how my tardiness can offend and harm others and then re-commit myself to avoiding
that harm. I won’t say I will give up all procrastination for Lent, but I will commit to
practices that will help me avoid missing the mark in that way; and to noticing and
making amends when I do.
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What will you choose to give up for Lent? What small, everyday thing could you
deny yourself for just these forty days to bring you back to mindfulness each day?
What can you do to remember to attend to what will last, what really matters, what thing
of worth you want to cultivate? Find that thing and your life will be fuller, richer, and
more meaningful. You will find this the path to your true self and away from the
inevitable selfishness, the brokenness that is our lot as human beings.
This is a season for repentance and new beginnings, for teshuvah in the Hebrew.
This is a season for returning again to our true selves, to our commitment to bring
harmony rather than rupture to our relationships; to mend the web rather than to tear it
apart; to return again to the home of our souls. [Sung:]
“Return again, return again,
Return to the home of your soul;
Return again, return again,
Return to the home of your soul.”
Amen, and Blessed Be
1
Fred Muir, “Sin,” Heretics’ Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals, Annapolis, MD: UU Church
of Annapolis, 2001, pp. 192-194
2
Katherine Rohde, “Observing Lent,” In the Simple Morning Light, Boston: Skinner House, 1994, pp.
12-13.
3
Rohde, pp. 12-13.

Topics: Guilt