The language of sin is foreign to the positive and encouraging faith of Unitarian Universalism. But the High Holy Days remind us that we all stray occasionally from the ideal selves we can imagine and hope to be. To deny our transgressions would be to suffer yet one more transgression against the ideal. Instead, the healthy spiritual path is to recognize where we and others fall short, and, admitting our imperfection, ask for and offer forgiveness.

            We are looking, this year, at the fundamentals of faith.

            A year of considering during worship the building blocks of a solid, dependable, useful, faith.

            What do I mean by a useful faith?

            I mean during those times when life gets tough:  like when a hurricane whips through your community, or your nation is under attack, or a looming Presidential election makes you doubt your neighbors, or threatens your personal safety.  Or during those personally significant challenges like the death of a loved one, or losing your job, or receiving troubling health news.  When tough times come, is your faith able to comfort your spirit?  Can you still find meaning and purpose in your life in the face of tragedy or danger?  Do you still have a sense of who you are?  Is there still right and wrong in the world and values worth standing up for?  Can you hold on to a sense of hope and trust?  Can you still get up in the morning and face the challenges and say with conviction either, “It will be OK”, or at least “I will be OK”?

            This is what I call the Hard Times test of faith.

            When times get hard, is your faith useful to you?  Does your faith do the job of getting you through the hard times, or does your faith fail, just when you need it the most?

            Thirty years ago, when I served one summer as a hospital chaplain as part of my training to be a UU minister, I encountered a troubling example of a faith that didn’t do what a healthy faith should do.

            This was a family whose mother was in the hospital, gravely ill, and dying.  I wanted to pastor the family through their grief and make peace with their mother’s imminent death.

            But the family denied that her death was inevitable and wanted me to resist it with them.  The faith of the family was that God was all-powerful.  God could perform miracles.  Even a person as close to death as their mother could be saved.  God rewarded righteous people who professed unwavering faith.  They believed that if they prayed hard enough with no doubt in God’s power, that God would restore their mother to health.

            So they prayed.  And they called on God’s mercy and the power of Jesus.  And their mother died.

            So their faith then required them to believe either: a) that their mother wasn’t worthy of God’s rescue.  Maybe she had some secret sin that God needed to punish.  Or b) that their prayers weren’t strong enough to persuade God to do something they believed God could easily do.  Their faith taught them, during that hard time, that either they weren’t good enough for God to listen to, or that their mother wasn’t good enough for God to care about.  That’s a terrible faith to have when your mother is dying in a hospital bed.

            That’s not a useful faith.

            A useful faith would have brought understanding to the situation.  A useful faith would have brought calm to the room.  A useful faith would have comforted the family, and given the mother peace in her final moments.

A useful faith should be able to place the tragedies of life and the beauty of life in the same system following the same rules of the spirit for both good times and hard times.  A useful faith lifts us higher when we’re feeling good and pulls us up when we’re feeling low.

            That’s my intention for our worship this year.  I will share what I find useful to my faith, and encourage you to consider the same issues and find answers that are useful to you.

We started this year-long look at the fundamentals of faith by recognizing the importance of community in shaping our identities.  We are individuals, born in unique bodies with a unique set of gifts, and we are members of communities, shaped by and dependent on those around us.

            Next, we took an look at the question of freedom, which we’ll come back to look at again, later.  As individuals we are free to do as we please, yet as members of communities, we’re responsible to those around us, including in the ways we curtail our personal freedom for the flourishing of all.

            And last week we looked at the question of whether human beings in themselves have what it takes to win the world we seek, or are we doomed to fall short of our goals unless something supernatural comes to save us.

            I offered my personal answer in the form of my elevator speech about Unitarian Universalism:

            “Unitarian Universalists believe that human beings are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough, to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we share.”

            I think we’re enough.

            But hear the limits of that word.

I think we’re enough.  I don’t think we’re everything.  I don’t think we’re all.  I don’t think we’re perfect.  I don’t think our goodness, wisdom, and strength is so great that creating lives of health and joy is easy for us, or automatic.  I think we’re enough.  Maybe just enough.  Maybe just barely enough.

I think we have enough of what we need to make pursuit of our goals worth our effort, but winning them will be a struggle.  We will slip backward occasionally, sometimes fail grossly, even as we by and large inch forward.  Progress is possible, which means it’s worth a try, but not guaranteed.

So implied in this belief that we are enough in the long run, is the admission that we will surely miss the mark sometimes along the way.

We are good enough, but we’re not all good.  We are sometimes good, but we’re also petty, and mean, and selfish, and cruel.  We’re honest and courageous and self-sacrificing, just enough to tip the balance toward the positive.  But we also deceive each other, and run away from necessary conflicts, and neglect the needs of others who are just as deserving of happiness as we are.  We are good, but not completely.

We are smart enough, but not all wise.  Our intelligence is an amazing thing.  And look at the great achievements we’ve made with our human smarts.  But there are problems we haven’t solved yet.  And in solving some problems we’ve created new problems because of unintended consequences we weren’t smart enough to foresee.  I believe we’re smart enough to solve our problems, even the problems that we create for ourselves, but we’re not all wise.

And we’re strong.  But we’re not all powerful.  We can do a lot.  But we cannot do everything.  There are feats beyond our ability.  We are strong enough, I believe, to win the world we seek, but the limits to our strength means that some work just won’t get done.  We can do a lot.  But we’ll always look at some needs of the world and have to admit, “We can’t do that.”

This acknowledgement that our portion of morality, wisdom and strength, comes with limitations is what I mean by sin, the foundational element of faith I want to talk about today.

Because we are not entirely good, completely wise, all-powerful, sometimes we will be motivated by our darker sides, we will choose badly, or we will fail to do something that needs doing.

We sin when we act in a way that leads us away from the ideal world we seek, rather than toward it.

When we make a bad choice deliberately, with clear intent, knowing it’s morally wrong, with full knowledge of the consequence of our choice, and when we had the ability to make a different choice, that’s evil.  Evil is a special case of sin.

But sin, merely meaning any action less than the ideal action possible, makes sin merely a corollary of the limits of our human natures.

            An entirely good person would always choose the path toward the ideal.  But we aren’t entirely good.  A completely wise person would always know the best path to choose, but we aren’t completely wise.  An all-powerful person would always be able to do what the ideal path needs us to do, but sometimes we don’t have the strength, and so we make a lesser choice.

            Because our human natures are limited, our sinning is a natural part of ourselves.  It’s not an aberration.  It’s what we do, regularly, often, naturally.

            Not always.  We don’t sin in every action, which is the doctrine of Original Sin, the doctrine that our natures are so twisted that it’s impossible for us to act in a way pleasing to God.  In the orthodox doctrine of sin, our natures are sinful, so sin is something we are.  Whereas I believe sin is something we do.  It’s unhealthy theology to say “I am a sinner”.  But it’s useful, when we make a bad choice to be able to say, “I sinned.”

Sometimes.  And sometimes not.  Much of the time we make good, healthy, positive choices that move us forward on the ideal path.  I would even say that most of us make good choice most of the time, that gives me faith that we are enough to win the world we seek.

            But all of us, including me, including you, sometimes, make a choice that is wrong, or stupid, or weak.

            I confess.

            I have withheld, when I could have given.

            I have delighted in the suffering of others, when I thought they deserved it.

            I have consumed more than my share, and made waste that future generations will have to clean up

            I’ve shifted work that is properly mine on to others

            I have treated strangers like obstacles standing in the way of me getting what I want.

            I’ve prioritized my present pleasure in ways that my future self will probably suffer for.

            I’ve asked for sympathy for my failings while blaming others for their failings.

            I’m not a terrible sinner.  But I’m not perfect.  And that’s the point.  We are, none of us, perfect.  As Chaim Stern said in our Call to Worship:  “Who can say:  I have purified my heart, and I am free from sin?  There are none on earth so righteous that they never sin.”  And, because I strive to hold a reality based faith, I admit it.

            I am going to screw up.  I am going to fail.  I will make mistakes.  I have made the path toward the lives of health and joy for ourselves, each other, and the world we seek, harder and longer than it had to be because I made bad choices from time to time and the path will continue to be longer and harder than it needs to be because I will make more bad choices in the future.

            I’m sorry.

            This is what the high holy days of the Jewish calendar are about.

            Once a year, just as the new year is getting started (and we’re just getting started in our church year) The High Holy Days, or Days of Awe are ten days to reflect on the past year, and note dispassionately all the times when you made a choice that was less than the best.

            Sin doesn’t need to be more than that.  It doesn’t mean you’re a monster, just that you’re human.

I confess to being human.  You know, I wasn’t perfect.  There were times, many of them, when I could have made a better choice, and my life and the lives of those around me and the world we share, could have been a little closer to the ideal than it actually is, in consequence of what I did.

            That’s sin.

            And after rounding up that list of sins.  To let them go.  Again, as Chaim Stern says, “Cast away all the evil you have done, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.”  Cast away your sins.  Name them.  Confess to them.  And then get rid of them.  Don’t carry them around with you, like a middle-schooler’s overstuffed backpack.  Don’t push your past mistakes down into your soul until they become part of you.  Say you’re sorry.  Ask for forgiveness.  Let it go.

            I think of God’s encouragement toward the right path and patience for human imperfection, to be like the way the GPS on my phone gives me navigation.

            There’s a best path toward the goal.  The GPS tells me to turn right up ahead at the light.  I don’t turn right.  I keep going straight.  The GPS doesn’t say, “You idiot!  You should have turned back there.  I told you to turn.  Now I’m done with you forever.”

            Instead, the GPS simply is quiet for a moment, figures out a new best path toward the goal, based on where we actually are now, and then gives me a new suggestion.  We’ll still get there.  It’s OK.  It just might take a little longer.

            And the next time I get in the car and ask the GPS for directions it doesn’t say, “Now remember.  You’re a terrible driver who can’t be trusted to follow instructions.”  The GPS simply figures out the path and we get started.

            The Jewish religion offers several rituals that make atonement for sin by symbolically throwing the sins away.  Tashlich is a ritual of throwing pieces of bread into a body of water that flows to the sea.  Literally casting your sins upon the waters.  The idea of the scapegoat comes from Leviticus (Leviticus 16:10).  It’s a ritual in which a literal goat is symbolically loaded with the sins of the community and then driven into the desert taking the sins with it.

            The idea is not to mope around feeling guilty, weighed down by the awfulness of our past, but to let it go, and to start again.

            On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the faithful stand all together and confess the many ways we fell short of the ideal in the past year.  Individually and collectively.  We make atonement as a community, because even if personally I didn’t commit some sin, we’re all part of a system in which we fell short.

            It’s a powerful day.  It’s a solemn day.  It’s a long day.  And then it’s done.

            That’s the point.  It’s done.  You’re forgiven.  The year is over.  Let it go.  “We forgive ourselves and each other; we being again in love.”  A new page.  We start from here.  

            Now is the time.  The only time.

            We have choices to make.

            Let’s make the best choices we can, but, you know, being human, this coming year, we will compile a new chapter of errors.  We won’t be perfect.  We can’t be perfect.  Because perfect is not our nature.

            But we will be good enough, smart enough, and strong enough to move our lives and the lives of others, and the world we share, a little closer toward our goal.