“Sin and Why I Like It”
A Sermon by Martha Dixon Kearse
Old Testament Text: Jonah 4:1-4
New Testament Text: Romans 6:12-14
One night, when I was driving home from my seminary classes in the middle of a tremendous rainstorm, I was thinking about this sermon and what I might want it to be about. Out of the darkness of that night, the image that came to me was one of my father sitting in his chair on a Saturday night. As a teenager, I had begun to actually pay attention to what he was saying in his sermons, and became interested in what he was thinking about them. So, many times, on Saturday evenings, I would ask him, “What are you going to preach on tomorrow?” Invariably, he would lower his book or his Bible, look at me seriously and say, “Sin and why I like it.” This pattern--my question, his mischievous reply—continued for many years until it became part of the shorthand of our family litany. Driving through the rain that night, I laughed and realized that, although my dad had been teasing me all those years, he also recognized something incredibly true and vaguely disturbing in human nature—that we do like sin. That, in fact, we love our sin and fight desperately to keep those sins we cherish the most. And the names which leapt to my mind in conjunction with sin and the love of sin were Jonah, prophet and whale stomach expert, and the apostle Paul.
Let’s begin by examining Jonah. In the passage in chapter 4, Jonah is at the beginning of a tantrum. Not just any tantrum, either. This is a tantrum of epic proportions. His problem is that he knows what God is up to. God is doing what God always does—God is trying to redeem human lives. And Jonah hates that. He wants no part of it. In fact, it makes him so mad that, not once, but several times, he becomes suicidal. “Ok, God sent the storm because I’m running away from Him. Should we turn the boat around? No! Just toss me over the side!” And again, “What, God? You’re not going to kill them? I knew it! Yes, I’m angry! I’m angry enough to die!” And again, “What? You killed my gourd? I loved that gourd! I’m so angry that I want to die!” He wants to die? Over a gourd? Yep. He’s that angry.
Are Jonah’s actions sin? Didn’t he do what God asked? Jonah’s actions are, in fact, the definition of sin. Jonah eventually does what God commands him, yes, but his attitude is one of defiance. The Ninevites are saved, but in the midst of their salvation, Jonah refuses his own. He walks away from it, choosing death, consistently, over a life which would require him to rethink his prejudices. Jonah embraces his sin. God gives him many chances to control his anger, to deal with it and move on. Jonah refuses them all. Jonah can follow the example of the Ninevites and repent from his attitude of defiance and pride, but he chooses anger. Jonah can learn from the lesson of the gourd, but he chooses not to, saying that he is angry enough to die. Even his one act of obedience is done with petulance and a sincere desire for God to deny forgiveness and destroy the people of Nineveh. Every time God says, “You really ought to let me lead you on this one,” Jonah snatches back the controls and drives himself into a wall.
So, what then? Isn’t it different for Christians? After all, we’re post-resurrection. Paul assures us, time and again, that the war with Sin is over and Sin has lost. Jesus triumphed over sin and death and won new life for each one of us. God’s redeeming act allows us to be alive to God and dead to sin through the mystery that is God’s grace. Hallelujah! So how come Paul’s still writing about it all the time? Why isn’t it a moot point? Clearly, sin hasn’t just disappeared. And Paul isn’t writing to heathen who have not forsaken their sin. Paul is writing to the Christian churches. Why does Paul have to keep reminding the churches that they are dead to sin?
Well, because those of us who call ourselves Christians are like Jonah. We hug our sins to us like a brother, and dare God to pry them from our cold, dead hands. First off, we fear losing our sins. Oh sure, we repent. We see the face of Jesus and long to embrace him. We submit ourselves to baptism and are immersed in a grave of water, only to rise again, clean and new, with our eyes turned upon Jesus. And then, we look down on the ground next to us and see something lying there.
“God, what is that?”
“Well, you knew that in order to live that your old self would have to die.”
“So that’s...”
“Your old self, yes.”
“Excuse me just a moment, Lord.” (Picking up electric paddles) “Clear!”
“What are you doing?”
“Well, I know my old self has to die, but there’s some stuff in there I really need. Clear!”
“But it’s dead.”
(Pick up old self, awkwardly, and point to parts) “But see, my anger. I need that sometimes. If I don’t keep that they’re going to walk all over me. And my facility for deception. That comes in so handy. And I don’t use it for evil. Only for good. And when I need to cover my—myself.”
We’re terrified of losing that which we’ve used for so many years—all our survival techniques, all our coping strategies. How can we give those up?
Worse than that, we continue in sin because we love it. We’re endlessly attracted to perversion and defiance. Defiance is a central theme of Hollywood. Why? Because audiences universally love it. Casablanca is riddled with the defiance of authority—what is Rick but a man who answers to no one? Nothing is more satisfying than defying the Nazis. Scarlett O’Hara defies the world when she stands in her devastated field, raises her fist and says, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!” We all know how that one turned out. In the movie “Crimes of the Heart,” Jessica Lange’s character sits in the kitchen with her horrible, self-righteous cousin, who has just been haranguing her about the evils of cigarette smoke, and says, “That’s what I like about smoking. Taking a little drag off of death,” as she inhales deeply and blows the smoke directly in her cousin’s face. We adore and admire defiance in all its forms.
The reality of our love affair with sin is something like the William Faulkner story, “A Rose for Emily.” In the story, Miss Emily’s overbearing Southern father won’t let her have a boyfriend. He runs them all off. When he dies, Miss Emily, now middle-aged, finally finds a beau, though the man she picks is widely regarded as common and beneath her. They are seen together all over town. Until he disappears. Completely. And there’s a smell around Miss Emily’s house. And the neighbors don’t dare tell a Southern lady that her house stinks. So they wait it out. She becomes a recluse and stays in the house until she dies. When she dies, the neighbors come inside her house for the first time in years. And in her room, here is what they find: a man’s shaving kit, a complete suit of men’s clothes, and the skeletal remains of a man, dressed in pajamas, in Miss Emily’s bed. And on the pillow next to him, lying across the head-shaped indention in the pillow, is a single strand of long, grey hair.
In the world, that is called necrophilia, a word whose roots are Greek, from the Greek words nekron, meaning dead, and philia, which means love. A form of that word, nekron, is precisely the word Paul uses in several places in the passage from Romans 6. Paul says, “How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Our sin is dead and buried, and when we return to it, when we pour out our affection on it, we are like Miss Emily, we are like Jonah—we are necrophiles, who love that which is, and should remain, dead.
So what’s so wrong about this affection for sin (apart from the fact that it’s morbid and creepy)? If we’re saved by grace, justified by faith, resurrected by the death and resurrection of Christ, why can’t we have a little sin on the side? What’s the harm? Because it’s necrophilia! We’re dead to sin. It’s like those 1950’s horror movies—Dawn of the Dead, Frankenstein, or the all-time favorite, Dracula. Why were those monsters so frightening? So horrible and yet so fascinating? Well, the horror of them all is that they won’t stay dead. They are dead things that have, by the power of some misguided fool, been reanimated with life. The only thing to do with something that is dead is to bury it, hopefully somewhere pretty far away. When we hand our lives over to God, accepting at last God’s loving embrace and God’s wish that we be whole, God excises from us that which is decaying within us, and causing harm to the parts of us which are healthy. God gets to work on us, killing off the dead sin like a holy chemotherapy and washing us in His presence and love. And what do we do? When we think no one is looking, we run around like insane garbage collectors, picking up the refuse that God has tossed aside and stuffing it in our pockets for future use. “I can’t fight the system,” we say. “Everyone takes moral shortcuts, why shouldn’t I?” Or we say, “I am too stressed out to let go of my addiction! That’s just asking too much!” Or we stand by the stove on hour 7 of the Atkins diet screaming, “By Golly, I will have a roll with my dinner, and I may have rice, too! I’d like to see you stop me!” That’s usually when your husband walks in and says, “Who are you talking to?” Because look at what we’ve done—out of our defiance, our fear, our anger, we’ve clung to something dead and completely forgotten that it is precisely because that stuff is dead that we can be free!
I have three children, one of whom was only 3 when we first took them all to Carowinds. The older kids wanted to go on big-kid rides, so I took the little one with me, and we went over to the little-kid part of the park. The first thing she saw there was the merry-go-round, which she immediately wanted to ride. What with Drop Zones and Borg rollercoasters elsewhere in the park, there wasn’t a line for the merry-go-round, so we hopped on. Whee! Great ride! How fun! She threw her head back and rode her horse like she was Annie Oakley out to catch some rustlers. We got off, both grinning—she because she loved the ride and I because the nausea of riding around in circles was now over. “I want to do that again!” she said. I pointed to all the other rides. “Don’t you want to try something else? The swings? The balloons? The airplanes?”
Nope, she wanted to ride the merry-go-round. Since there was no line, we could just keep doing it again and again and again! Pure joy! Every time I suggested another ride, the grin would disappear and the lines on her forehead appeared like storm warnings on a radar screen.
When we refuse to let go of our sin, it’s like that 3-year-old on the merry-go-round. With all that is available to us, we just keep riding the same ride. So how do we get off? Well, for one thing, we’re not like the other riders on the ride. Paul outlines it for us in Romans. Because Christ died and rose again, and because we become part of his death through baptism, and because, through baptism, we participate in resurrection, we are dead to sin. We are not slaves, like we were before. We’re not ignorant of the possibilities like a 3 year-old. We are free, with all the knowledge and responsibility that freedom requires. We have only to do that which Jesus did—present ourselves to God. And this is a good word—present. In English, it has the connotation of a gift, a present, as well as the sense of standing in the presence of. And Jesus did it all the time. Look at how often he goes aside to pray! He is in a constant state of presenting himself to God! So that when the times come for him to make his choices, he already has God’s power at work in his life and can freely choose that which is within the will of God. It is a simple act, but so hard for us. So hard, in fact, that we must pray for the strength even to seek out the presence of God. But it is the only way.
Jonah walks away from God. At every turn, he allows his anger to control him. Consistently, he chooses death when life is mere words away. We love our sin. But sin is death, and we have been resurrected from death through the faith that God has given us and through our baptism into Christ. We have only to present ourselves to God and, through God’s power, get off the merry-go-round of clinging to that which God has declared dead. Stepping out away from death and sin, we find that the freedom which awaits us is better than anything we can imagine.
