The necessity of sinning

There are an almost infinite number of ways you can divide Christians in two. That’s Christians as a group: as individuals there’s a strictly limited number of ways to divide a Christian, at least before the police arrive. Even with official permission, if you’re following strict anatomical sections, just three ways, if, that is, you want two more or less equal parts. Though as many a saint could attest, while there may be a very few goemetrical options for cutting a person it two, there are many, many ways of making it more interesting when you’re doing it.

However, this isn’t an episode of Midsomer murders— there’s too many non-white people in this room for a start— we’re talking conceptual division, into two, of the mass of Christianity. Unlike the forensics chop there’s an almost endless ways in which Christians can be divided.  It’s like cutting a very large pack of cards: you rarely get the same result twice and you can just shuffle once more and keep the divisions keep coming, slice, slice slice.

The most fundamental division, perhaps the oldest,  is between East and West, but it hardly stops there. Barely started. There are Nestorians and Chalcedonians,  scholastics and pietists, predestinarians and arminians, Augustinians and Pelagians, those who are called John Calvin and the fortunate many who are not. There are Anglicans and those without an unwarranted superiority complex, those who thrust their hands in the air when singing and those who’d rather cut that appendage off than let it do anything so vulgar; those who recognise universal Papal authority and those who don’t; those who must sit in the same place when they attend church and those who rarely attend the same church twice, those who write all over their Bibles and those who roll cigarettes with it, conservatives and liberals, homophobes and angels, catholic and reformed, primitive and Wesleyan, religious and secular, ordained and lay, confirmed and non-confirmed, orthodox and heretical, high church, low church every one a true church

And then there are important but really niche ways the mass of Christianity can be divided in two such as those who attend the Easter Vigil Mass, and those who do not.

Those who have been to the Dawn service on Easter day will generally be recognisable by the bags under their eyes and a slight-becoming-pronounced sidewards list as the day goes on, but their salience for this sermon is that they will  be members of that minority of Christians who have heard The Exsultet, that ancient hymn of the church, sung by a deacon as dawn breaks on Easter morning. If you are a member of clergy who can carry a tune you’ll probably end up singing it a lot in your ministry, comes with the job. Even a deacon with a vocal timbre akin to the sound a cat makes being neutered without anaesthetic will at least have to try to sing it once. The present congregation will  be inspired by their deacon’s suffering, even if it does make their ears hurt. Anyway, the Exsultet is a truly ancient song, a foundational text, a primal exposition of  resurrection faith. Sung fully it goes on for about 10 minutes,  and I mention it only because it contains this particular line which I want to serve on your plate today:

O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam.

The cheerful mistake here, the sin it was necessary for Adam to sin was of course, the Fall, capital ‘F’, the very first sin, the one that had Adam and his spare rib thrown out of paradise, giving the rest of us childbirth and the working week. Eve listened to the hissing of the serpent, the first couple gorged on the fruit of the forbidden tree and inadvertently introduced time to its first division: prelapsarian and after. That sin. The start of sin.

O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam,

Back to Eden. There is something it seems in the human character that renders us incapable of being given paradise on a plate; we’ll just knock it off the table or spill it down our front, trample the manna under our feet. We must earn Elysium the hard way, discover the truth for ourselves or we’ll never truly appreciate what we’ve got. We simply can’t take in what’s in front of our eyes. Surrounded by the indescribable unmeasurable intricate beauties of the created world we still somehow want to listen to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Not only are we hardwired to look the gift horse in the mouth, all too often in Human nature, prohibition is an invitation to transgression in disguise. Once God said ‘you must not eat of the fruit of that tree’ its future for snacking was guaranteed.

O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam

It would be entirely wrong to say that God wanted Adam to sin; but God certainly must have considered it a very real possibility that he would. God knew what he made and what he made it to be like. And then, knowing all that, gave it free will anyway. Heaven may have been dismayed at Adam’s sin; but perhaps not surprised.

Now in the context of the Exsultet Adam’s sin was necessary because it made a Redeemer necessary; the joys of Christ risen could not be celebrated without first man Fallen. But there is further we can go here and say something about growth, maturity, progress. Because Spiritual growth, growth in faith,  comes through getting it wrong, not by getting it right.

In Eden Adam and Eve were infants, ignorant of good and evil before they ate of the tree. Yes, ignorance is bliss, but it is still ignorance; you may be blissfully happy, but you haven’t grown. Infancy is never a permanent state, it is the first stage of growth; towards adulthood, fullness and maturity. 

Spiritual growth comes through getting it wrong, not by getting it right. It is only by failing and losing and falling that we come to realise how utterly dependent we are upon God; it is only when we are thrown out of Eden that we realise  what we truly want and need and have now lost, it is only when we realise we have sinned that we can see the limits of our pride

Now, the fault may be happy, the sin necessary, but of course that does not mean that sin is a good thing. St Paul writing to the Roman church is clear.

’Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin”

and a bit later he says

‘The wages of sin is death’

I think we can agree that doesn’t make sin sound like a good thing.

‘The wages of sin is death’

Happily for us, payday is a long time coming.

Patently, there are not going to be many people left in the world if the first time we get anything wrong we immediately receive the payback for our sin, if every snake slides us straight off the board, if we are subject to inexorable instant karma. Precisely one person left to wander the earth in fact. 

So what gives?

We have free will and that means we are free to sin, which we will and we do. 

And so, God forgives. We err and we learn. We repent and  we turn.  How are we going to learn, if not by our mistakes? We are children of Adam, we have to find our own way, make our own mistakes, discover the truth for ourselves.

And so, God forgives.

Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times

Not quite a ‘Get out of jail free’ card; there is a condition: repentance, an expectation that we will learn by our mistakes, however long that process of learning may take, whenever it is we finally realise the error of our ways. God is infinitely patient, his nature always to have mercy. 

‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners’ Jesus exclaimed.

He is still calling. Calling us. Calling us to repent, calling us to learn, calling us to grow. We won’t grow to full maturity this side of judgement day; we will keep making mistakes. But we can learn when we err and grow when we do.