Bishop's letters: January 04 +James : If we say we have no sin

I once came across a wonderful misprint in a Parish Magazine. “Do you enjoy sinning?” it said. “If so, why not join the Choir? We practise every Friday at 6 pm.”

The organist may have been surprised by the response - as too was the contributor to a local radio ‘Thought for the Week’ slot who happened to mention that the Bible mentions 572 sins. He was inundated with requests for the complete list. Presumably, people thought they might be missing something.

We can joke about sin because we know it’s such a serious subject. But for many of our contemporaries, that’s all it is: a joke. Some months ago, I watched a drama on television called ‘The Planman’. In it, the hero, played by Robbie Coltrane, said “I don’t believe in sin”. At about the same time, an article on ‘Fidelity’ appeared in ‘The Times’. “I don’t think there’s anything especially wrong with sexual activity outside marriage” wrote its author. And, of course, the old phrase ‘living in sin’ is only used nowadays by politically incorrect dinosaurs.

And yet, all of us are ‘living in sin’. So I’m content to be counted with the dinosaurs, among whom ranks St John. “If we say we have no sin”, he says, “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”. That’s because sin is an attitude as well as something we do or fail to do. St Augustine described it as “believing the lie that you are self-created, self-dependent and self-sustained”. William Temple went even further, remarking once that he could contribute nothing to his own salvation, except the sin from which he needed to be redeemed. And G K Chesterton sent a famous letter to a newspaper in reply to someone who asked what was wrong with the world. “Dear Sir” he wrote. “I am”.

Unfortunately, other people’s sins - rather like their headlights - tend to seem more glaring than our own. We need constantly to be reminded that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23). Real Christians are as horrified by their own sinfulness as by that of their neighbours; and Jesus clearly had little time for the self-righteous arrogance he found among the Pharisees. He would have been equally short with those churchgoers who could only be persuaded not to sit in the back pews by a little notice saying ‘Sinners Only’!

The result of sin is obvious. In the short-term, it corrodes society and dissolves the soul, much as a surfeit of fizzy drinks dissolves the enamel on our teeth. In the longer term, ‘the wages of sin is death’, and liberation theologians such as Jon Sobrino, point out that our sinfulness in the West (evident in our use of the world’s resources and pollution of its atmosphere) deals death to thousands in the two-thirds world. Sin is essentially a breach of covenant, which means that all sin against others is also a violation of God who is at the heart of covenant.

How extraordinary then that Christ died for us ‘while we were yet sinners’. If we deny our sinfulness, we deny the Gospel and make Jesus irrelevant. If we are not sinful - where is the “good news”? But, if we confess our sins (and in case you ever need it, one Church in San Francisco has a “quick stop” confessional for those with 3 sins or less!) he is ‘faithful and just to forgive us our sins’. That is the simple message we’re called to demonstrate as well as proclaim in a desperately complacent world.

James Newcome