Grace Cathedral

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“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low… and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3).

How does the idea of sin function in a mature person’s spirituality? For nearly six months a 92-year-old woman living in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles heard what sounded like raccoons in the crawl space under her house. Then about a month ago at 10:30 p.m. on a Thursday night the police responded to a call there. They discovered a naked 27 year-old-man living under her house.

The crawl space is only two feet high. At first the police tried using dogs to remove its occupant but he ignored them. They used tear gas twice and finally arrested him at 4:25 a.m. the next morning. The newspapers quoted the son-in-law of the house’s owner who said, “It’s a bizarre thing, but it’s not probably uncommon, you know, in this day and age, people are looking for shelter.”¹

People are looking for shelter. In the first few months of studying Hebrew a student learns the word for Egypt.² It is mitzrayim and literally means “the narrow place.” One might regard the whole Bible as the extended story of escaping from that narrow, confining place where people are degraded and dehumanized. This is what Egypt represented for the ancient Hebrews. We too yearn for a society where people do not have to live in crawl spaces. In our day we also long for freedom to be complete, to have lasting joy.

The Puritans had a simple three part sermon structure that I sometimes use. It begins with a text from the Bible. Then they describe a doctrine, that is a Christian way of seeing the world (like for instance the idea of sin or the nature of God). And finally they close with an application to life so that listeners can use what they learned for the sake of God’s realm.

Today I am going to do this in reverse. We will start with what the world around us is like. Then we will go on to talk about sin and the unique way that Christians experience our existence. And finally we will conclude with a brief meditation on Luke’s introduction to the New Testament prophet John the Baptist.

1. We have beliefs that lie so deeply lodged in our consciousness that we cannot even conceive of the possibility that they are not true. These include big communally shared ideas and ideologies about capitalism, technological progress, democracy and race.³ But they also include our individual sense of self-worth and the value of others. We tell ourselves stories about deserving love and good things, and about not having them. We hold a constant conversation with ourselves about how people are responding to us (I’m even doing it right now!).

If we were to meet a perfectly self-confident person, that one would be so different from everyone else that we would hardly know how to respond. That person would be fully grounded in God. That person would be like Jesus.

The twentieth century psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937) wrote that, “To be human means to feel inferior.” He invented the idea of an inferiority complex and noted that humans usually respond to this feeling in one of two ways: either with shyness and low self-esteem or overcompensating with pomposity and narcissism.⁴ Oprah Winfrey’s style coach Martha Beck gives advice about, “party anxiety” and “party-impaired people” who in their interactions with others feel “shame, fear and cruel judgment.”⁵ Our social circumstances vastly exaggerate these natural tendencies.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett write at length about the dangerous modern myth of meritocracy in their book The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being. They point out that inequality may be America’s most serious problem. From the 1930’s to the 1970’s inequality was significantly reduced in our society. However from the 1970’s to today inequality has dramatically increased.

In the 1970’s the differences in pay between CEO’s and production workers averaged between 20:1 and 30:1. In the first decade of this new century they increased tenfold to 200:1 or 400:1.⁶ I could make this point in dozens ways. For instance, the bottom half of Americans hold only 2.5% of the overall wealth in our society ($51,000).⁷ 40% of American children live below or near the poverty line.⁸ This is the reason people resort to living in the crawl space of another person’s house.

When I talk to young people about the years before they were born inequality is the change that I most emphasize. Wilkinson and Pickett have compared nations and American states that have different levels of inequality. They found that unequal societies have worse health: lower life expectancy, higher rates of mental illness and obesity. In Japan and Germany one out of ten people have experienced a form of

mental illness. In the United States it was more than one in four.⁹ Unequal societies experience more violence, higher rates of imprisonment, lower levels of well-being.

Trust and community are more broken in unequal societies and this makes life worse for everyone not just the people suffering at the bottom of the wealth scale. All of us are negatively affected spiritually when we live in unequal settings. It has become destructive for us to believe that one’s station in society has mostly been determined by our industriousness, talent and competence, because it justifies terrible inhumanity.

2. For my second section I want to say a word about sin. I could offer a phone book sized summary of statistics but it would not be enough to curb our belief in meritocracy, that hard work means people get what they deserve. We know that some people feel superior because of their wealth. Some people feel superior to others because of their race or nationality. But this is true also – believing in God and not believing in God also makes people feel superior to others.

Believing in God is never simply an objective matter. Because having faith means that something is expected of us. Trusting in God changes how we experience our life and how we use it. For Jesus, believing in God means that we do not have to feel superior or inferior to others. They can simply be our sisters and brothers and siblings.

This week I’ve been listening to an audio recording of Alan Jones’ last book The Scandal of God: It’s a Metaphor Stupid! Why Fundamentalists (the Religious and the Atheist Kind) Have it All Wrong. He writes, “Religion promises to get us out of… self-absorption by giving us… a set of stories to guide us through the ups and downs of life in a confusing and conflicted world. This is what religion does. It binds things and people together, but not always in good ways…” Alan contrasts religion and science to what he calls “The Scandal of God.”

“The Scandal of God – which not so much answers our questions but questions our answers… [places] us before the ever-expanding horizon of wonder and amazement. I believe in God, in part, because it saves me from believing in anything else! Part of the scandal of God is that it brings us to the place where turning our ideas and prejudices into gods is seen to be absurd.”¹⁰

The idea of sin in a society of vast inequality and in our impoverished hearts reminds us of our natural limits as God’s creation. It helps us to not take our social conditions for granted but to find our own ways to contribute to justice and love. It releases us from the bonds of our ego so that we might discover our truest potential as human beings. It

also gives us the possibility of repentance. If you don’t believe in sin there is no reason to repent.

3. This brings us to my short final chapter on a picture of radical equality in Luke. Of the four gospels Luke cares the most that significant events have antecedents, causes, preparations.¹¹ And so he describes the story of Jesus as beginning in the 15th year of the reign of Emperor Tiberias (28-29 c.e.). In those days Pontius Pilate was Procurator (not governor) of Judea (26-38 c.e.). After the death of Herod the Great his kingdom was divided into fourths (a Tetrarchy is one fourth of a region) and ruled by four kings. The Chief Priests had authority for life tenure over the Temple and the Sanhedrin (a kind of Supreme Court) although the Romans tried to control the chief priests by appointing and deposing them.

Listing these great names Luke concludes (echoing the beginning of Jeremiah) writing that, “the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah” (Lk. 3). The transformation does not come from the halls of power, but from a person inspired by the Holy Spirit in the wilderness around the Jordan River.

John has come to preach, to share good news of a baptism of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. The Greek word for repent is metanoia. It means a total change of mind, a new pattern of thought and life. The Greek word used here for forgiveness is aphesis and it means to be set free.

And so I imagine being set free from this curse of inequality. John goes on, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, “every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill made low… and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Lk. 3). How is the idea of sin part of a mature person’s spirituality?

The idea of sin helps people with mature faith to see beyond the deeply lodged falsehoods of our unconscious minds. It exposes the dangers of inequality and our own egos. We know that people are looking for shelter. Sometimes our existence can feel like a two foot high crawl space. But this Advent we are being drawn more deeply into holiness.

Let us pray: O God you know how our worldview confines us and we pray to be free. Protect us from our egos, from the thoughts that put us in competition with others. Take us from the narrow places of hostility, resentment, addiction, apathy, stress, greed and fear. May the example of Jesus always transform our hearts so that we may be filled by your generous openness. Amen.

¹ Amanda Holpuch, “Man Found Living in Crawl Space of Los Angeles Home,” The New York Times, 12 November 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/us/man-crawl-space-arrested-los-angeles.html?searchResultPosition=1

² Jo Ann Hackett, A Basic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010).

³ Free trade, economic output, unemployment, etc.

⁴ Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (NY: Penguin, 2019), 10.

⁵ “If you are reading this with mounting excitement, thinking about the wonderful parties you’re going to throw or attend this holiday season, allow me to congratulate you. I’m one of the millions of party-impaired individuals who stand in awe of people like you—people who love to entertain, meet new friends, cavort with fun-loving crowds. When you invite the rest of us to your celebrations, we are honored, even though it brings us the same joy we’d feel if you handed us a large, angry scorpion.” Martha Beck, “Party on: A Survival Guide to Social-Phobes,” O Magazine, 23 November 2011). https://marthabeck.com/2011/11/party-on/

⁶ Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (NY: Penguin, 2019) 253.

⁷ https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/#:~:text=In%20the%20first%20quarter%20of,percent%20of%20the%20total%20wealth.

⁸ Ibid., xii.

⁹ Ibid., 44.

10 “Religion promises to get us out of the idiocy of self-absorption by giving us a story or a set of stories to guide us through the ups and downs of life in a confusing and conflicted world. This is what religion does. It binds things and people together, but not always in good ways. This is what we might call “The Scandal of Religion” in that it can take us in either direction – into slavery or into freedom. It’s like wandering in the desert looking for water. In our desperation and need we think we see an oasis, only to discover that it’s a mirage. Mirages are everywhere-the mirage of connection, the mirage of freedom. Part of the scandal of religion is that it peddles such mirages. Science is “scandalous” too in that it tends to promise more than it can deliver. Science is as prey to mirages as is religion. The “silent majority” to whom this book is addressed seeks to avoid the scandals of both science and religion. I argue for a third way – The Scandal of God – which not so much answers our questions but questions our answers by placing us before the ever-expanding horizon of wonder and amazement. I believe in God, in part, because it saves me from believing in anything else! Part of the scandal of God is that it brings us to the place where turning our ideas and prejudices into gods is seen to be absurd.” Alan Jones, The Scandal of God: It’s a Metaphor Stupid! Why Fundamentalists (The Religious and the Atheist Kind) Have it All Wrong (San Francisco, California: Grace Cathedral, 2023) 11. Also available on www.audible.com released on 08-23-23.

11 Biblical critical scholars point out the gospels differ in the amount of verses they dedicate to preparing the way for the ministry of Jesus and John. It takes Mark only 14 verses. It takes Matthew 75, and Luke 134 verses. Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990) 45ff.