Social Sin in the Season of Creation

A sermon preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Quebec City

Readings: Ex 12:1-14; Ps 149; Rom 13:8-14; Mt 18:15-20

"Don’t make us SAD."

Like tablets coming down from a mountain, this was the presiding moral code that descended upon us each year as we began our annual camping trip at the church youth group of my teenage years.

SAD of course, was an acronym: no Sex, Alcohol, or Drugs, or else you would make everyone sad, and be sent home, because SAD was sin.

Boundaries, of course, are good to set with youth, especially on youth group camping trips. They are meant to keep kids safe. But looking back on all those years of "SAD-sin" lectures, it strikes me now how much our attention around sin had been focused on a personal conception of bodily purity—a focus that can be both destructive and distract us from the deeper concerns of our communities and the earth.

As the Canadian Theologian Gregory Baum argued, when we focus exclusively on sin as a personal moral failure, we can lose our sense of sin as a social force, sin as a viral illness, as a power beyond our individual wills that can distort our actions, that can capture and harm us and the world God loves.

Social sin, as it’s name suggests, resides not in a person’s individual moral failure but in the larger relationships between persons, in relationships mediated by intuitions, cultures, and social practices. These institutions, cultures, and social practices together direct our actions in ways that can not only harm others, but even worse, they can also justify that harm—or make it invisible. And we can see this kind of social sin at play in many spheres of our lives.

Here is a striking example:

As I was writing that last sentence in this sermon, I accidently clicked a button I didn’t realize was there, which, like a genie in a bottle, summoned Microsoft’s’ co-pilot, an AI bot that began to re-write all the text in my sermon automatically. It turns out it doesn’t like my sentence fragments very much.

Now, from my side, I see the text in my word document changing, and maybe I think that is a good thing, because now my sentence fragments are gone and I've always been terrible at grammar.

However, what I don’t see is the invisible relationships that allow this technology to function, relationships that use up—at best—just a little bit of energy. That energy, combined with millions of similar requests adds up, becomes a lot of energy, and currently requires the burning of coal and natural gas to create it. This contributes to climate change, aggravating melting glaciers, which in turn, leads to landslides, wiping out entire villages in Tibet and Nepal.

Maybe I just wanted to fix my sentence fragments, maybe you do too, but together, our actions make an impact that harms the land and the communities of creatures who live there—even though that was not our intent.

Worse yet, this infrastructure is neither politically nor economically neutral. It is moving billions of dollars of wealth into the wealthiest people’s pockets. Ironically, when that is questioned, it is justified to us as necessary technological progress that might one day help us to solve the problem of climate change.

This is ideology. This is an example of social sin. I clicked undo, but the damage was already done.

Now, this is just one example of social sin, and how social sin works. We could also have looked at the residential school system, systemic racism and discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation, we could have looked at factory farming, flying, cell phone manufacturing and critical mineral mining, or just driving my car to church this morning. We are all implicated in systems that harm us and our world, we all participate in social sin not through personal moral failure but by virtue of participating in society. That is how social sin works.

Now in our Gospel reading this morning Jesus offers us a kind of ethic on how we are to respond to sin within the church community. It involves going to the person who sinned against you and confronting them directly with the problematic behaviour. If that behaviour is not corrected, the number of people involved in the confrontation is to be escalated until the behaviour changes, or the person needs to be removed from the community.

This approach seems to focus pretty exclusively on sin as a personal moral failure rather than on social sin. Nevertheless, I want to suggest two principles I think we can generalize from this text that might help us in negotiating our own interactions with social sin.

The first principle is the principle of truthfulness.

As the theologian Stanley Hauerwas has argued, commenting on this passage, what keeps the church a non-violent community, is the commitment of its members to tell the truth, to tell the truth to one another, and to tell the truth to power. Truthfulness is our response to power. And in seeking and in speaking truth, we reveal and dismantle the stories, the ideologies that power uses to justify itself. As Vaclav Havel describes, truthfulness is the power of the powerless.

The second principle is the principle of paying attention to and protecting the vulnerable.

As theologian Anna Case-Winters rightly claims, this passage is not about mitigating petty conflict, it is about protecting vulnerable community members from being harmed by other community members. It assumes that the church will not always be a safe space for all people, and that a part of our responsibility as disciples of Jesus, is to be prepared to confront our own community’s sins in order to make it a safe place. We must be watchful, in other words, to make sure our community’s life truly reflects abundant life, to make sure our community’s life is life giving for all—especially the vulnerable.

The same, I would suggest, is true for navigating our lives in the world God loves:

Who are the vulnerable persons and creatures in our world today?
What truths do we need to tell to help liberate ourselves and our communities from the narratives of power that direct our actions and harm the vulnerable?

Today, we begin our celebration of the season of creation: a liturgical time recognized in common with our siblings in Christ within other traditions including the United Church, the Orthodox, and the Roman Catholic Churches. It is a time when we are called to reflect on our relationship with the rest of creation, and to nourish and celebrate our own sense of creatureliness.

In a time of climate change and climate related disasters, it is also a time for us to lament, to lament our broken relationships with the land, the waters, our neighbours, and our creaturely kin. It is a time for us to speak truth to the powerful stories that are consuming our world. And it is a time for us to stand with the vulnerable.

"...you know what time it is,” St. Paul writes, “how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.” (Romans 13:11-12)