Sin

Recent and frequent Facebook posts have attempted to suggest what or explain why the horrific event at Parkland, Florida happened.  There has been much psychological projection (putting on others what we do not want to face in ourselves)—blaming guns, blaming the FBI, blaming the local police, blaming the culture, the media, video games,  etc.  Some posts have asked, “Why did God allow this to happen?” and then answer the question by suggesting that God had little to do with it because God has not been allowed in our public schools for years (referencing the issue of school prayer). That kind of theology gets my dander up because it is so illogical.  If your god’s existence and presence in schools depends upon whether or not students pray then “your god is too small” to be my God!

Theologian Paul Tillich asked, “Have the men of our time lost a feeling of the meaning of sin?  Do they realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that ‘sin’ should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life?  To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation.”  “Separation,’ he continued, “may be from one’s fellowmen, from one’s own true self and/or from his Ground of Being” (Tillich’s term for God).  

This “separation” is as real in our time as it has been in all other times.  It shows itself in our lack of caring and concern for others (especially those who are not like us).  It shows up in our indifference, our selfishness, our apathy, our alienation, our schizophrenic behavior, our egocentricity, our projections, and our politics. 

“Suppose,” asks Toynbee, “that in the next generation the ablest minds and the most perceptive spirits were to come to Socrates’ conclusion that the most urgent business on mankind’s agenda was to close the morality gap.”  Dr. Karl Menninger writes in response: “Imagine leaders striving—not to heal the sick, not to comfort the anguished, not to feed the starving, not to terminate the waste and pollution of our resources but—‘to close the morality gap’!  To establish more firmly in national, international, and personal affairs the supreme importance of distinguishing right from wrong.  To end the concealment of sin under various euphemistic disguises, but to confess it, atone for it and desist from it.”