The Prison of Our Sin

“ … where for forty days, Jesus was tempted by the devil.”  Luke 4:1

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

1 Lent 2013

I am going to take a risk on this first Sunday of Lent. I am going to talk about ‘sin.’ And not only do I hope to talk about ‘sin,’ but even more foolishly perhaps, I shall endeavor to persuade you that ‘sin’ is still a theologically important category, a helpful and true way of talking about the human condition, even if the concept is, at the same time, in need of some serious rehabilitation. What makes this a risky strategy is the fact that our broader culture (perhaps especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is convinced that the language of sin is unspeakably out of date. Indeed, there are even priests in our Church who seem to choke on the word ‘sin,’ and seek to push it to the far reaches of our theological life. These critics insist that sin-talk is anachronistic, no longer useful for assessing the human predicament, and even worse, downright repressive and -- sin of all sins -- illiberal. 

There are, of course, good reasons for these views and the Church itself, let’s confess it, is largely responsible for misusing and abusing the concept of sin in ways that have left generations of people not only deeply scarred, but profoundly alienated from the Church. Historically, the language of sin has been used to distort perfectly healthy forms of human sexuality and to condemn people whose sexuality is different from the heterosexual norm; it has been used to justify social institutions such as slavery by ruling classes eager to protect certain social arrangements by calling them divinely sanctioned; it has been used to subjugate women and to keep them from their rightful place in society and in the church; it has been used to explain mental and physical disabilities by so-called ‘normal’ folks eager to rationalize their own unwillingness to care for those who struggle with impairments of one kind or another; and from time to time the Church has used the language of sin as a way of wielding power over its people by terrorizing them into believing that if they did not conform their lives to a certain interpretation of Christian rectitude, then their souls would be in jeopardy of eternal damnation. Most of us, for example, read in a college Western Civilization class Jonathan Edward’s classic sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a tour de force in using hellfire-and-brimstone rhetoric to “awaken” the religious sensibilities of complacent New England churchgoers.

And yet, if we attend more carefully to the biblical text, we see that sin is susceptible to another reading altogether, one that is less about the total corruption and depravity of humanity and more about a fracture or fissure in our nature that keeps us from being the people we are called to be. The Greek word for sin – hamartia – means literally ‘to miss the mark.’ Sin is thus a way of describing the gap between what we aspire to and what we in fact do; the gap between who God wants us to be and who we are. We aim to be considerate, kind, and just in our dealings with others; but often, we end up acting thoughtlessly, giving in to mean-spiritedness, or favoring our own interests and desires over others. We strive to be reasonable, engaged and responsible in our conduct; but often, we act on irrational impulse, yield to laziness, or choose the expedient course over the right one. 

The reasons for these discrepancies between our ideals and our actions are myriad and complex, of course, and frequently their sources remain obscure to even the most searching examination. As St. Paul puts it in Romans, “I [often] do not understand my own actions. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot [seem] do it. [So often] I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”  The Christian concept of sin insists that this fracture within the human soul of which St. Paul speaks – the gap between who I want to be and who I am – is a real and enduring brokenness, and one in need of God’s gracious healing. We needn’t fall into the despair of self-loathing to recognize this simple truth about the human condition.

Today’s gospel reading about the three temptations of Christ is, on one level, a framework for understanding how some of the structures of sin routinely ensnare us. The devil tempts Jesus by urging him to misuse his divine authority in three different ways: in order to satisfy his own personal desires and appetites, to seek power over others, or vainly to achieve his own spectacular glory. Historically, commentators have interpreted these temptations as representing different types of sin – the lures of appetite, of power, and of glory – temptations to which we all regularly fall prey. In his humanity, Jesus fully feels the draw of these temptations; but in his divinity, he resists them. In each case, Jesus refuses to exercise his own freedom to satisfy his own needs or pursue his own agenda. Rather, he adheres to the Father’s will, remaining grounded in a life of humility rather than hubris, a life of self-giving rather than of self-aggrandizement, a life offered for the good of the community rather than for individual gain.

On another level, within the broader narrative of the Bible, this story is a parable about the cosmic struggle for the human soul, with Christ redeeming what Adam had lost. For lurking in the background of this temptation story is, of course, that other story from Genesis. Whereas Adam and Eve were cast out of paradise into the wilderness for having yielded to the temptation of hubris, so Christ here, as the new Adam, goes into the wilderness on our behalf, and reverses the storyline, by selflessly resisting the temptation, so as to lead us from the wilderness back to paradise. For just these reasons, John Milton places these two temptation stories at the center of his poetic masterpieces, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

It would be a mistake, though, to view sin solely through the lens of our individual struggles with virtue and vice, or merely in terms of this cosmic drama of salvation with Christ as the new Adam. For there is another important dimension to sin: Deeply embedded in the biblical text is the view that sin is also a social reality. It is not just that individuals are inclined to sin, and commit sins; it is that our social institutions are themselves subject to the vicissitudes of sin. Each of us is born into a social context which itself is plagued by a basic brokenness. We see, for example, in our own society a seemingly intractable gap between rich and poor; an educational system that fails to reach many of our most vulnerable children; a market-obsessed culture prone to commodify every aspect of human experience and objectify people to serve its utilitarian ends; institutionalized forms of racism and sexism and other structural biases in social arrangements that are designed to preserve power in the hands of some and take it away from others; and an environmental and energy policy built around values of dominion and exploitation rather than care and stewardship of the natural order. 

All of these social dysfunctions – all of these –isms – are manifestations of sin precisely because they push us apart as human beings, alienating us from ourselves, from our natural world, and from God. Social sin is so insidious because of the power of its external reality. These social sins can so overwhelm us that we often feel impotent in their grasp. These social sins are so big and yet we seem so small.
  
As you know, I spend most of my time serving as chaplain to the Episcopal students at Harvard. Within our chaplaincy community, we have made it a priority this year to focus on one particular social sin as a focus for prayer, study, and action:  namely, our badly broken prison system. Partnering with our Jewish friends at Harvard Hillel, in November we formed the Harvard Interfaith Prison Education project, nicknamed HIPE. HIPE is an interfaith coalition of Harvard graduate and undergraduate students committed to mentoring incarcerated women and men who are working towards their bachelor degrees through Boston University's "College Behind Bars" Program, with the support of Partakers, Inc. HIPE currently has 21 members from many different schools within the University. Although started by our chaplaincy and Hillel, our members include not only Christians and Jews, but Hindus, Muslims, and a Buddhist. We are divided into 3 interfaith and inter-school teams, each assigned to mentor a different incarcerated individual.

During our project, we’ve learned a great deal about the American prison system: we’ve learned that America today imprisons more people (over 6 million) than Stalin did during the height of the Russian gulags; that America imprisons vastly more of her people than any other country on earth, both in total numbers and on a per capita basis, more even than China, a country four times our size; that more black men are trapped in our penal system today than were slaves in 1850; that more women are imprisoned in the United States than any other country on the planet; that every day more people wake up in the cruelty of solitary confinement in this country than could fill Fenway Park; and that America has begun to hand over its prison systems to for-profit-corporations whose economic incentives are the exact opposite of what they should be – their interest is to build as many prisons as possible, to incarcerate as many people as possible, and to keep them there for as long as possible, all to make a buck. This is sin, my friends.

But more important than these impersonal statistics, through their visits to Norfolk prison, our students have experienced in a very small way what life inside a prison is like and what it can do to a person. Through our relationships with our incarcerated companions, we have begun to put a human face on the prison system. We have listened to their stories, we have met their wives and children and brothers and sisters in the waiting room, we have shared their hopes and dreams for the future, we have sought to help them with their studies, and we have tried to be a friend along the way.

Our HIPE project is a very, very small step in an ongoing struggle with one form of social sin. But the truth is that the only way to combat sin, whether on a personal level or in a social context, is one small step at a time, one day at a time, all with God’s help.

In a few minutes, during our Eucharist, we will pray as we always do that prayer Jesus taught his disciples. At the center of the Prayer is the plea, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I invite you today, and throughout this season of Lent, to pray on these words, reflecting on all those temptations and evils in your own life that keep you from being the person God has called you to be. Let us all evaluate honestly the bad habits, destructive behaviors, and distorted attitudes that prevent us as individuals from connecting with God and with each other, and let us commit to some simple disciplines and practices that help us to draw closer to God’s heart.

But my prayer for us this Lent is that we don’t stop there. Let us consider not only our personal sins, but also the social sins that envelop us all. In honesty and humility, let’s shine Christ’s light in those darkest of corners of our social life – the poverty, the gun violence, the economic disparities, the prejudices, the pollution and waste, and yes, the prisons. Let us pray on these things too. And more than pray, let us open our hearts to God’s merciful power so that he might make us instruments, in small ways and big ways, to heal these fractures in our world and to be a balm for its sins, all for the sake of his son and our savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

______________

Sources: For a compelling account of the American prison system that has informed our ministry, see Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," The New Yorker (Jan. 30, 2012). Our HIPE project is also deeply grateful to Partakers, Inc. (www.partakers.org), and its Executive Director, Arthur Bembury, for their support and guidance to our students.

Please Forgive Me

A Sermon Preached at St. James's Episcopal Church, Cambridge for Ash Wednesday
Tiffany Curtis
February 13, 2013


Joel 2:12-16

¹² Yet even now, says the Lord,
   return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
¹³ rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the Lord, your God,
   for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
   and relents from punishing.
¹⁴ Who knows whether he will not turn and relent,
   and leave a blessing behind him,
a grain-offering and a drink-offering
   for the Lord, your God? 

¹⁵ Blow the trumpet in Zion;
   sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
¹⁶ gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
   assemble the aged;
gather the children,
   even infants at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room,
   and the bride her canopy. 

Edwin [Rev. Edwin Johnson, Assistant Rector at St. James] often refers to what he likes to call the “side hustle”-- a job you do on the side to generate income or just out of pure passion. As you probably know, Edwin himself has a few side hustles, teaching dance, for one. I guess you could say that I have a side hustle, too--as an anthropologist. It doesn’t bring in much in the way of cash, but it does make for a lot of unique experiences, like two years ago when my side hustle brought me to an Eastern Orthodox Christian community to journey throughout the holy season that they call the Great Lent.

Rather than Ash Wednesday, the Great Lent began with a service called the Forgiveness Vespers: It consists of a dramatic series of chanting, censing, praying, removing all the vestments from the altar, the lights dimming slowly to black, all leading up to the heart of the service.

Slowly, one by one, we began to form a large circle around the sanctuary, prostrating ourselves in front of one another, our bodies flat on the ground, our faces in the dust. When we came before each person, we said to each other: “Please forgive me” or “Sister, forgive my sins” crossing ourselves and pressing ourselves downward, the crowns of our heads often almost touching as we placed our foreheads on the ground. As we rose, we embraced and said to one another “God forgives. And so do I.” During this time, the choir was chanting softly. They were the last to line up for this ritual, the room finally going completely silent. After every single person in the room had bowed down and forgiven every single other person, the lights turned back on, waking me up out of the intimate darkness and dull pain in my body from having done hundreds of prostrations.

I don’t think I need to tell you that this was a powerful invitation into Lent--it was incredibly moving and humbling to be reminded so viscerally that our sins are not against some disappointed God in heaven, but against one another. That which I have done or failed to do to my neighbor, to my partner, to my friend, to a person I don’t even know, clumsily bowing in front of me, I have done or not done to each and every person in this room.

Today on Ash Wednesday and throughout the season of Lent, we are not asking for God-our-Powerful-Father to forgive us our appalling sins, seen only by His penetrating gaze. Rather, we are asking forgiveness for the ways in which we hurt one another, we are addressing that vulnerable divinity that was born to us so recently in our Church calendar--the infant God within us, the baby Christ--the God incarnate in our fragile bodies.

We ask forgiveness because we are heavy with shame and guilt and disappointment because we mess up all the time, failing each other in profound ways, violating that tender divinity within each of us rather than honoring and kindling that sacred spark.

We cling to petty bitterness, we develop self-indulgences and self-loathing, we get lost in waves of ennui in the face of injustice. We are caught up in systems of oppression beyond our own doing; we are overwhelmed by the dire environmental crisis, by the inequity of distribution of food, wealth, power, by the ways that people are systematically and personally denied the opportunity to flourish and live into their truest selves. Our own choices and the choices that seem to be made for us elude us, and we become frustrated, too afraid to take responsibility for our mistakes, for our failures, for our fear and clinging.

If Advent and Christmas are about the miracle of incarnation...Lent is an exploration of its challenges. Living a human life is hard. It is full of suffering, pain, temptation, and death. We sit with this discomfort for the next 40 days, mirroring the story of Jesus in the desert for 40 days, which in turn echoes the Israelites wandering for 40 years in the desert. Jesus went alone into the harsh wilderness, whereas the Israelites went together, and in a way, we do both.

This time is a time of personal introspection and it is also communal. On silent meditation retreats I have often heard that we are practicing being “alone together”--and Lent provides just such an opportunity: to pray, to meditate, to fast, to contemplate...alone-together. We reconnect with our vulnerability and our failures so that when Holy Week comes and we follow Jesus on his journey into Jerusalem, into his death, and into his miraculous and history-making triumph over death, we might better understand the power of the Christian witness--what it means to have the hope of resurrection in the midst of the desert journey, in the midst even of death.

In the reading from the book of Joel we heard the exhortation to call a solemn assembly, to gather all the people, the whole congregation from oldest to youngest, to drop everything to return to God in weeping, and mourning, with this stunning image to rend our hearts--to tear them open.

Like the Forgiveness Vespers I experienced, Joel asks the people to gather together to weep and pray. We are not isolated in this 40-day journey we are entering, we are a solemn assembly of fellow travelers, bowing our heads in prayer, humbling ourselves before God and one another and asking for grace, asking that our hearts be transformed to love.

With these ashes we affirm our rootedness in the earth, and we reject the narratives of scarcity, distrust, and fear that permeate our world. When we remember where we come from and where we are going (from ashes to ashes, dust to dust), we remember our finitude and our beauty as human creatures, we remember our connectedness.

And down in that dust, our faces flat on the floor in regret, we hear a voice, then another--ours and our neighbor’s, and they say softly: God forgives, and so do I.

We offer these ashes as a tangible reminder of this grace: a love that holds us all, no matter who we are.

“The living act of perception”: Thoughts on Transfiguration Sunday

a reflection by Emily Garcia, our Kellogg Fellow

And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah"--not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.        -Luke 9:28-36

            In this moment, it seems that the disciples became convinced of something. They saw something—the glory of God—they couldn’t understand, but then, they also suddenly knew something. Now, just eight days before, Peter had “confessed that Christ is Lord”—that is, he said something true in words about the being of Christ. But now, he sees. And seeing it, he grasps for a response in words.

            William James, near the end of his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, concludes “Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.”

            This is something the poet James Wright knew very well. Here’s his poem, “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

            Here, the speaker’s gaze takes in the landscape, the beauty and wonder of the scene. And then, in this “living act of perception,” suddenly he knows something.

            This sort of experience, this mystery, is what Transfiguration Sunday’s Collect points us towards. We pray, “Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory.” The disciples, seeing the glory of God in Christ’s face, seeing Christ’s beauty and majesty as they had not seen it before—the disciples were changed, somehow. Strengthened. Changed. Peter’s hasty wordy response may not have been perfect—he may have been grasping with words at the “something which glimmers and twinkling and will not be caught”—He couldn’t catch it, but he’d been changed.

            St. Paul says that “seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,” we are “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” In the Church, we’ve got a name for this: “sanctification,” the lifelong process in which we are drawn closer and closer into the light of God, passing through and into the refiner’s fire, casting off what doesn’t belong to God and holding onto glory after glory of his presence.

            The Transfiguration suggests to us that this process doesn’t always happen in words or ideas. As William James says, “truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.” When we see God’s glory, we are changed. And we can see God’s glory everywhere, can’t we? We see it in the beauty of the natural world; in the bravery of our heroes; in the love, gentle and fierce, that we have for one another; in the way adults love children, and children love adults; in the rise and fall of the cello suites by Bach; in the way light falls through stained glass windows; in the love of friends for each other. In all of these things, we come face to face with the glory and love of God; and suddenly, we know something.

            But the story of the Transfiguration doesn’t end in that one moment, in that gaze between the individual and God. Remember what happens next—Peter, having perceived something true, makes a gesture towards responding to it in the way he believes fit—and a terrifying cloud surrounds Christ and all the disciples, and God’s voice says, “Listen to Him.” And this is where this particular episode ends, on that deceptively simple command: “Listen to Him.”

After we’ve seen the glory of God, our work isn’t done. As we make responses, reaching with words and actions for that glimmer of what we’ve perceived, we must also listen to what God is saying to us in the voices of others. God speaks in the Scriptures, and in the traditions of the Church. When we listen carefully to these things, we listen to Christ.

This back and forth—between beholding the face of God, and listening to the Spirit with others—is part of what sanctification looks like in the Church. This is one way we come closer to God.

When have you seen the glory of God?

            How do you listen to Christ?

More HIPE!

As I have written about before, we recently founded the Harvard Interfaith Prison Education project (HIPE), and I am so excited about all that has happened so far, and the promise of more to come. In particular, I am thinking today about the event we will be hosting tomorrow--a conversation with Dr. Kaia Stern, Co-Founder and Director of the Prison Studies Program, visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, and an ordained interfaith minister. Prof. Stern's talk will be accompanied by group discussion about goals for the semester and the meaning of interfaith prison work. She is a leading thinker and doer in this area, and we are thrilled that she has graciously offered her time and expertise to us. I look forward to sharing more about this event after tomorrow! 

In case you aren't familiar with HIPE, here is some background information I wrote earlier today:

Founded in November 2012, Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE) was jointly organized by the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard and Harvard Hillel. HIPE is an interfaith coalition of Harvard graduate and undergraduate students committed to mentoring incarcerated women and men who are working towards their bachelor degrees through Partakers and Boston University's "College Behind Bars" program. HIPE currently has 21 members from the College, the Graduate School of Education, Hillel staff, Episcopal Chaplaincy staff, the Divinity School, the School of Public Health, and the Law School. Although started by Episcopal and Jewish student communities, HIPE is very multi-religious, and its current members self-identify as Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist. These members are divided into 3 interfaith and inter-school teams, each assigned to a different incarcerated mentee. 

HIPE was founded by Hilly Haber (HDS '12) and me, growing out of a brainstorming conversation we had at a coffee shop in Harvard Square early this fall. Hilly and I are both working in campus ministries at Harvard this year -- me at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard as the Micah Fellow for Social Justice, and Hilly at Harvard Hillel as Coordinator for Graduate Student Programming -- and so we were excited to find ways to do interfaith work together. Remembering a shared experience as members of Harvard Divinity School's prison mentoring team, we hatched the idea to form a similar interfaith prison team open to participants throughout the University, with intentional interfaith reflection built in to the model. We are now coordinating the HIPE team together and providing opportunities for theological reflection and support for team-members--like tomorrow night's event! 

Our team is one of 26 teams throughout Massachusetts that Partakers has connected with incarcerated students in the College Behind Bars program. We follow the protocol that Partakers has laid out for visits, and we had Arthur Bembury, the Executive Director of Partakers, come and do an orientation with our teams about visiting policy, expectations, and procedures. Members visit Norfolk prison in pairs  (2 visitors allowed per prisoner at a time), and the travel time provides a perfect opportunity for reflection on the experience, which we hope will be used for interfaith dialogue and make the project one of true praxis--action/reflection. In between visits, team members also write letters to their mentee, primarily to coordinate visits. Letters are the main form of communication we have with the prisoners, so we need to coordinate visits well in advance. The letters are also important for catching up about different aspects of their education. Sometimes they will send an essay they wrote for class, or ask us to find some information for them for a project.  

When we do visit the prison, we go to the visiting room in the prison as normal social visitors, and basically just have a conversation. For many of the folks in the program, this is one of the only contacts they have with the outside world, so they love the opportunity to have someone to talk to, especially someone who is passionate about education and is encouraging them in a very difficult endeavor of pursuing a college degree while incarcerated. We provide support and a listening ear about the papers they are writing, the projects they are working on, the ideas that are intriguing right now, their plans for classes for the next semester, and so forth. Topics of spirituality and life's meaning and big questions tend to come up, too, and for me, it has been a great experience to have those conversations, especially across divides of religion, class, race...
The act of accompaniment in spiritual and educational journeys is truly prophetic, and one that we are excited to be engaging across lines of separation in our society.