Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen
Sin.
And
Righteousness.
And our World
View.
You’d think that
after all the years that have passed since Jesus walked among us we’d have some
degree of agreement regarding such basic simple concepts such as these.
What is sin?
What is
righteousness?
What is evil?
And what is good?
Our answers to
those basic questions form our world view.
Diversity.
Conformity.
What is good, and
what is evil?
Plato, that
ancient Greek philosopher, suggested that there existed an ideal to which
everything in the real world ought, to a greater or lesser degree, to conform
to. The Platonic Ideal.
There is in his
understanding a perfect table. And every
real table is measured against this ideal.
The degree to which each table conformed to the ideal is the basis upon
which it was deamed to be good, or bad.
That is one way
to view the world.
That everything
ought to conform to a particular ideal, and any deviation from that ideal is
evil.
But is this a
human construct, or is this of God?
Another example
of this is our yards.
Think of all the
effort that we as humans devote to getting our yards to conform to our own
vision of the ideal.
A lawn is
supposed to be 100% Kentucky blue grass.
We douse our lawns with herbicides of one sort or another so that
nothing else grows.
And then we draw
a line and create a flower bed and there we want roses, and iris, and dahlias
to grow, but no grass.
And then we draw
another line and call it a garden, and in the garden we want strawberries, and
potatoes, and corn, and peas, and all sorts of other edible plants.
And then, in
order to maintain our lawns and gardens we weed. Day after day we weed.
Weeds.
Now there is an
interesting concept.
Weeds.
God actually
never created any weeds.
That something is
considered a weed is a human idea.
We want a
Kentucky blue grass lawn and so dandelions are considered a weed, as is crab
grass, or clover.
And the grass
that grows on one side of the line we draw becomes a weed if it grows on the
other side of the line.
You see, we have
this ideal to which we expect everything to conform, and any deviation from
that ideal is considered bad.
But that is a
human point of view.
If we look at the
creation around us it is diversity, not uniformity or conformity that abounds.
And when God
looked at all he had made he said “It is good.”
This basic issue
of diversity versus conformity gets more complicated when we talk about humans,
and what is good and what is evil in our lives.
Is there an ideal
human being?
And ideal to
which all people ought to conform?
And is our basic
worth as a human being dependent on the degree to which we conform to one
ideal?
One way of
understanding the Christian faith, or any other religious movement, is that
there is an ideal Christian life and our calling is to conform our lives to
this one ideal.
OK, that sounds
alright.
But where it gets
dicey is when we seek to identify the ideal human life and being.
Every race and
every culture shares a unique perspective on life. And even within a given culture there are
variations of the human experience. Some
of those are celebrated. Some are
considered deviant.
Who I am as a
human being is shaped by where I came from, my ancestry, and my cultural
upbringing.
I’m of Norwegian
ancestry, I grew up in the farm country of South Dakota, and I have been shaped
by the values my parents instilled in me.
But my experience
is different than that of a person of another race, who was raised in another
place, and who learned different values.
If I had been
born to a Lakota family on the reservation in South Dakota my experience of
life would be entirely different.
OK, we know
that. We live with that. We know that the perspective of a person from
Tibet is going to be different than that of someone from Sioux Falls. We know that.
But where life
gets difficult, and sin enters in, is that we as humans make value judgments.
We define an
‘ideal’ human life, and judge any deviation from that ‘ideal’ to be evil.
Our own culture
has been dominated by people of northern European ancestry. Our values, and culture, and way of life have
been dominant.
That in itself is
neither good nor bad. If you grew up in
Japan, the same could be said for that culture.
But when we take
the next step and define any variation from this northern European culture as
evil you end up with the most fundamental basis of racism, and sin.
Our sinfulness
leads us to conclude that one race is inherently better than another.
And it doesn’t
stop there.
We have an ideal
regarding every aspect of life and everything else is considered inferior.
Most of us would
state emphatically that we are not racist, nor are we white supremacists. But
this sin runs deeper and more pervasive than most of us would ever care to
admit.
We would deny
that we believe white people are inherently superior to black people.
But, almost
everyone of us, deep down, believes in the superiority of western civilization
to all others.
And not only
that, we link western civilization to Christianity in a way that maintains not
only our ‘superiority’ but that this is ordained by God as righteousness.
One of the ways
that this has played out over the years is that Christian missionaries spent an
enormous amount of effort converting people, not just to Christianity, but to
western civilization.
When I was
growing up we used to have missionaries come and make presentations from the
mission field. We saw before and after
pictures.
Africans were
pictured in their traditional attire before conversion. And then after becoming Christian they
would be wearing western attire, white shirts and black slacks, for the men,
dresses for the women.
Missionaries
would use the terms ‘evangelize’ and ‘civilize’ interchangeably.
This fundamental
belief in the superiority of western civilization is probably never more
evident than in our interaction with the Native Americans. We so believed in our superiority that we
took their children to raise them as white people. That still troubles me because it was
happening even in my life time.
What is the
point?
Is diversity part
of the goodness of God’s creation?
Is it to be
celebrated and embraced?
Or is
righteousness defined by conformity to one ideal and norm for all?
I believe that
when we seek to impose our ideals on all people and force their conformity to
those ideals we are dealing with our own sinfulness. That’s my conviction.
I believe that
God created a diverse world in which the rich variety of life is the ultimate
good, not evil.
And that we are
called to celebrate this diversity, not
despise it.
Racial tensions
are running high in our world.
The “Black Lives
Matter” movement is in the forefront of the news.
Why is it important
to say “Black Lives Matter”? The reason
is that for far too long black lives have been devalued as deviations from the
norm.
It is true that
“all lives matter”, but that is not our legacy.
We have clung to the notion that some lives matter more than others,
that some humans are inherently superior to others.
We have lived our
lives believing that there are good plants, and weeds.
But God didn’t
create any weeds.
God didn’t create
any weeds.
God looked at all
he had made, and behold it was good.
Exceedingly
good. That’s the point.
It is our
sinfulness that leads us to believe that deviation from the norm is evil. That conformity is righteousness. But that belief leads to hatred and death,
the consequence of our sin.
To understand the
basic goodness of all creation is to open ourselves to love and
acceptance. And that leads to life.
Amen
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