Sin, Hell and the Devil

Transcribed from the sermon preached February 26, 2012

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Genesis 1:1-5, Genesis 3: 1-24, Romans 5:17-21

Sin, Hell and the Devil are not subjects that progressive ministers tend to address directly. This is difficult stuff, fraught with pitfalls and dark history, and we are tempted to pretend it they are not part of our tradition, or at least that they can be left behind for a more benevolent and gracious theology. In our inquiry over the next several weeks, there will certainly be angles and perspective from which we want to distance ourselves, or even declare opposition toward. But the irrefutable existence of sin and evil, the ever-present preoccupation with demonic forces in popular culture and the consistency of major religious myths confronting sin and evil ought to give us reason enough to deal directly with the reality and subject. For even Buddhism and Hinduism, which speak of release from duality of good and evil have elaborate visions of hell and intricate ethical systems which seek to help people avoid the pit of evil. It may be that Dante, from whom much of our popular imagery of hell and the devil come, barrowed from the much older mythical images of Buddhist and Hindu Hell.

There are many angles to approach the subject, and I shall try to touch on several. We may take a Christian theological approach, a biblical approach, a historical approach, a cultural and a cross-cultural approach, a psychological approach, and a sociopolitical approach. I don’t pretend to have a coherent or systematic presentation, but seek to present different snap shots or perspectives which together may help illuminate the truth of life and give us knowledge to live as disciples of Christ with power confidence and Joy.

Today, I begin with a theological approach to sin, and a heavy one at that. Of all the plays one might choose to begin the Spiritual Super Bowl, this coach opts for the conservative; give the ball to your back who is built like a brick outhouse, and run it straight up the middle.

So I start with Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume III, section 3 under the doctrine of Creation. Barth, a prolific and brilliant Swiss theologian is big on two things throughout his ominous15 volume systematic theology: The sovereignty of God and the absolute importance and centrality of Jesus Christ. It has been a difficult task to slim his thought down into a sermon so bear with me and forgive me if I lose him or you.

As we listen to Barth, we hear quite orthodox language, language that has been largely appropriated by Christians who tend to sound simple minded, make exclusive and literal claims about scripture and align themselves with nationalism. But I ask you to release preconceptions, for to call Barth intelligent is like calling Sophia Loren kind of pretty. He was the sole author of the Barmen Declaration, which in 1933 was signed by the representatives of the Confessing Church in Germany against the German Churches idolatry of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Barth comes out strong against demythologizers like Bultman or we may imagine the more contemporary biblical scholars Marcus Borg or John Shelby Spong. Barth saw no value in bending the Gospel to fit modern sensibilities. “We have every reason to make use of the “mythical” language in certain connections,” says Barth, “and there is no need for us to have a guilty conscious about it.”

C.S Lewis, not quite the brain of Barth but certainly a Christian genius wrote: “What myth communicates is not “truth” in the formal sense, but reality. Truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is.” (Dorrien, Gary. The Postmodern Barth: The Word of God as True Myth. Christian Century. April 2, 1997. P. 338)

Barth doesn’t want to give much room for sin or the devil in God’s world: in answering the question of suffering he will not give in on either the omnipotence of God nor on the love and grace of God so perfectly demonstrated in Christ Jesus.

Barth begins his discussion by telling us what sin is not. As was hinted in the prayer of confession, it is easy to both overestimate and underestimate the power of sin and the devil. We may imagine that the devil and his demons are so ever-present and powerful that they demand a vigilance so constant that they take up more of our time and focus than the power, graciousness and love of God. The devil would like us to think that he is so powerful that we must devote more time to fighting him than to living and loving like Christ, the easy victor. Many churches are preoccupied with sin, the devil and hell, and Creation and the world from their point of view appears such a dark and horrible place that we would be better off just dying right now to be done with it. The only reason to stick around it seems, is to preach the Gospel so that a few more people won’t end up burning with fire and brimstone of Hell for all eternity.

On the other hand, we may strip the world of spiritual force, and imagine sin as a natural inconvenience, which merely slows our progress toward psychological and social enlightenment. The very word sin may be seen as a remnant from an outdated, cynical, guilt ridden worldview, and our best and fastest route to happiness is to discard the judgmental God and superstitious belief in devils and sin. Yet even if we seek to acknowledge the dangers and pitfalls of past theology, which lends itself so well to demonizing the other and creating fear and guilt within us, the reality of sin must be taken seriously. The idea that world peace and harmony will break out as soon as we all think positively or set things straight ourselves is simply naïve. The power of positive thinking is indeed great, and most of us could benefit from doing more of it. Yet the reality of sin and evil and our feeble attempt to deal with it is irrefutable, and we are in desperate need of a power and grace that is larger than ourselves, larger than our positive thoughts.

Now if we acknowledge that sin is a part of our lives and the world, and we know that God is against sin, then we might be led to think that God is against us. We also see in popular culture that obedience to God is the opposite of freedom, and that living within the will of God is boring and bland. In Bram Stroker’s Dracula, the gothic romance, God is the bad guy for condemning the passionate Dracula and his love to eternal damnation. Meanwhile, the good guy, played Keanu Reeves, is bland and boring and we are led to wonder why anyone would ever love the guy. All we can do is feel sorry for him because he is such a small boring part of the story. And as they travel from Transylvania by ship back to London, the land of his love, we are led to believe that the Devil and Dracula command the passionate and stormy sea. Passionate Creation, it would appear, is under the control of the Devil.

Barth calls sin “nothingness,” to indicate that it does not hold the substance of God’s Good Creation. Barth points out that the biblical take on creation includes light and shadow, negative and positive. There is, as Matthew Fox points out, a via negativa that is included in God’s design. “This negative side is not to be identified with nothingness…The fact that we have limits and boundaries to our existence, that we as creatures are both worthy of the Creator and dependent on Him, that is not nothingness but something…The creature is good, even very good, in so far as it does not oppose but corresponds to the intention of God as (for example) revealed in the person of Jesus Christ…For in him God has made Himself the Subject of both aspects of creaturely existence.

To make it plain, it is not a part of sin or because of sin that there is a yes and a no, that there are sunny bright days and stormy nights, high mountain tops and low valleys, not only beauty but also ashes, that we grow up and grow old, that we bloom and decompose, that we eat and defecate, that we join in the union of sexual intercourse and yet are individuals, that we feel both great sensory pleasure and pain and sorrow, that we are curious yet less than all knowing, that we both work at day and sleep at night, that there is not only a beginning but an end. The Yin and Yang are both included in God’s good Creation quite apart from sin. The affirmation of the goodness of Creation is seen through the Gospel message, where God become human with all and within all the limits of creation, yet freely lives a divine love and grace affirming life.

Barth makes his point in a long footnote, using Mozart as an example of someone who understands the providence of God even of the shadow side of life. “This was the time when God was under attack for the Lisbon earthquake, and theologians were hard put to defend him. In this two year time period,” Mozart also lost two children and his father.  In face of the problem of theodicy, Mozart had the peace of God, which far transcends all the critical or speculative reason that praises and reproves. This problem lay behind him. Why then concern himself with it? He had heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time- the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow. The sweetness is also bitter and cannot therefore cloy. Life does not fear death but knows it well…Mozart saw this light no more than we do, but he heard the whole world of creation enveloped by this light. Hence it was fundamentally in order that he should not hear a middle or neutral note, but the positive far more strongly than the negative. He heard the negative only in and with the positive. Yet in their inequality he heard them both together, as for example in the Symphony in G- minor of 1788. He never heard only the one in abstraction…Hearing creation unresentfully and impartially, he did not produce merely his own music but that of creation, its twofold and yet harmonious praise of God... He was remarkably free from the mania for self-expression…He made use of instruments… with the human voice somewhere among them, having no special claim to distinction yet distinguished for this very reason. He drew music from them all, expressing even human emotions in the service of this music, and not vice versa... He died in misery like an “unknown soldier,” and in company with Calvin, and Moses in the Bible, he has no known grave. But what does this matter? What does a grave matter when a life is permitted simply and unpretentiously, and therefore serenely, authentically and impressively, to express the good creation of God, which also includes the limitation and end of man.

…In the music of Mozart…we have clear and convincing proof that it is a slander on creation to charge it with a share in chaos because it includes a Yes and a No, as though orientated to God on the one side and nothingness on the other. Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality, creation praises its Master and is therefore perfect.” (p.299)

Sin has no basis in creation or in us that small part of Creation. It has no perpetuity. God is, says Barth, “The basis, essence and sum of all being. And for all its finiteness and mutability even His creature has perpetuity- the perpetuity which He wills to grant it in fellowship with Himself.” Barth relates sin with the Chaos before Creation in Genesis, the null and void, “which has been rejected, negated, passed over and abandoned even before He utters His first creative Word. (p.352) Nothingness has no perpetuity. It is from the very first that which is past. It was abandoned at once by God in creation. He did not even give it time, let alone any other essence than that of non-essence. How can it be anything but empty when it is only by God’s non-willing that it is what it is?”

“God’s response to the coming in to the world of this nothingness of sin is his jealousy, wrath and judgment. And “this judgment does not confer substance and fullness on nothingness but prevents it from assuming them. It gives it only the truth of falsehood, the power of impotence, the sense of non-sense. It establishes it only as that which has no basis.”

In Genesis 3, says Barth, in desiring more than its perfection as God’s creation, humans brought in the Chaos separated by God and it becomes a factor, which secures and exercises a power against God’s Creature. “The failure of the creature consisted in the fact that, succumbing to the insinuations of nothingness, it desired to be like God, judging between good and evil, itself effecting that separation, unwilling to live by the grace of God and on the basis of the judgment already accomplished by Him, or to persist in the covenant with God which is its only safeguard against nothingness. It did evil by desiring to do in its own strength the good which cannot be done save by God alone and by the creature only in covenant with Him. The creature sinned by thinking, speaking and acting in a way alien and adverse to grace and therefore without it…When man sinned he performed the impossible, not acting as a free agent but as a prisoner.” (p.356)

Freedom is to live into the natural goodness of our being, while sin separates us from our created good and free selves. Lost and alienated from ourselves and God, the essence of all being, we need help. “The suffering of sin,” says Barth, “is no punishment due but the reality to which we have fallen and cannot get out.” (p.360) In sin we lose our power and freedom. Enslaved, blind and lost, unable to see which way is up and out, God who has sworn fidelity to us, whose very being can do no other than love us eternally, reaches out through the person of Jesus Christ. Barth again, “He would rather be unblest with His creature than be the blessed God of an unblest creature. He would rather let Himself be injured and humiliated in making the assault and repulse of nothingness His own concern than leave His creature alone in this affliction. He deploys all His majesty in the work of His deepest condescension.”

In Jesus Christ, God “actually becomes a creature, and thus makes the cause of the creature His own in the most concrete reality and not just in appearance, really taking its place.” (p.359) Jesus is the perfect symphony of a life, reflecting the beautiful, eternal, divine grace, which is the Creators cosmic song.

In recognizing his beauty and truth, and choosing to be in covenant with the gracious God, we join the orchestra. It becomes our desire to submit to the boundaries of our part and instrument, so that we may sore free in and become one with the perfect music of the Creator.