“The Gospel in Peanuts: “The Whole Trouble”: Original Sin” Romans 7:15-25 Mark 7: 1-8,14-15, 21-23

07/08/18 “The Gospel in Peanuts: “The Whole Trouble”: Original Sin”

The Church of the Resurrection, the largest United Methodist Church in the United States, has a compelling purpose - to build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians. At first it seems like a purpose that we should all have as the Church, right? To reach out to non-religious and people who are seeking to know about Jesus but just aren’t sure yet. But I have to wonder how many of us do this well? How many of us put ourselves in a position to be used by God in a way that deeply connects with people who may not yet speak the Christian language or know much, if anything, about Jesus? How many of us would rather default to making people come to us and speak like us before we share the Good News?

We are now the second week of our sermon series focused on using things in the world around us as a connecting point to share the message of Jesus. In other words how we use things of this world to proclaim the power and glory of God. This year, our sermon series is focusing on the comic strip Peanuts, which ran for over 50 years. Perhaps what makes Peanuts so relatable is that it talked simply and honestly about life. How many of us could connect with at least one character from the comic strip - whether it was Charlie Brown, Linus, or Lucy?

What the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz realized was that art could reflect deep truths about life that we aren’t able to always grasp or put words around. Jesus understood this too - its why he told parables. Parables were stories that used common things that people would understand to talk about difficult things. While parables didn’t give easy answers, and in fact often led to more questions, it led people to think deeply about spiritual truths. How many people could look at a mustard seed after Jesus’s teaching and not hear his words about faith echoing through their minds? 

This week we are talking about a word that we hear a lot, but perhaps one that hasn’t sunk in for us yet - sin. There are a lot of definitions of sin, but the one that I keep returning to is missing the mark. In Genesis 3, we find sin entering the human story, as Adam and Eve chose to defy God and eat from the one tree they were forbidden from - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As they ate, their eyes were opened and they ran and hid from God. The result of this choice are long lasting, effecting all of human history.

This teaching about sin is often called original sin - or the belief that Adam and Eve’s choice led to their fall, which has effected all of human history since. In other words, as children of Adam and Eve, we have a bent towards sinning. It seems to be in our human disposition to choose to miss the mark, to choose to stay and hide from God. In our doctrine as United Methodists we put it this way: is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually. A lot of words, that if we summed it up would means that part of being human is having our will bent towards sinning. 

We understand that part about sin, at least in our minds. But often we stop there. We talk about sin as an abstract concept instead of something that deeply effects each of us today. The Apostle Paul puts it this way:  I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead, I do the thing that I hate. That even though the desire to do good is inside of me - I don’t do it. Sin lives in me. 

Paul is considered one of the greatest teachers of the Christian faith. He planted church after church. He traveled countless miles by foot and by sea for the Lord. He was jailed and beaten for the sake of the Gospel. And even Paul, looks into his own heart and sees a bent towards sinning. For Paul sin isn’t about just committing immoral acts, its about something deep inside of us - the origin of who we are and what we are predisposed to do. Lucy explains this to Linus by saying that the human heart has both hate and love in it that are constantly at war with one another.

No one is exempt from this bent toward sinning. Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is speaking to religious officials, folks who made their lives about the business of God. But somewhere along the way, sin took over even that, as rituals replaced ethics. Before we start wagging our fingers at the Pharisees I think we need to look at our own hearts and actions - why do we do what we do as the Church? What have we misinterpreted as being very important to God, when really it is our human preference? We, too, get trapped by how our faith looks from the outside instead of looking at how our faith asks us to change on the inside. 

Which is of course what Jesus is trying to point out. Faith isn’t just about looking from the outside like we don’t struggle with sin - its trusting God to change us from the inside out. A word that is used in scripture and can sometimes be used today is hypocrites.  Some of the words used to describe hypocrites include liar, pretender, and deceiver. But I don’t think its as sinister as that. Hyporcracy is when we pretend to have it together on the outside, without checking how we are on the inside - which leads to a disconnect. 

For Paul that type of disconnect comes from putting our hope and trust in something other than Christ. For so many during that time it was the law - thinking that one could become righteous simply by following the rules, but the problem is that rules don’t change lives. 

Which is why we need a Savior. Sin is this active power in our lives trying to distance us from God. We are all sinners. We have all fallen short. And it is Christ alone that can restore us. That, friends, should be our hope and what we put our faith in - yet all too often we try to earn grace and forgiveness on our own. Or we talk about how Adam and Eve led us to be this way, without taking time to examine how sin still troubles each of our human hearts.

There is a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy telling Charlie  Brown“you know what the trouble is with you Charlie Brown?” He walks away “That you won’t listen to what the trouble with you is”. Because of sin, we too, don’t listen, brothers and sisters. Our hard hearts become a barrier to accepting Christ. And sometimes we try every conceivable way but Christ to find freedom from sin. We try looking like we have it altogether - but that is just a surface change. We try to earn our way through good deeds - but we can’t rescue ourselves from sin. We try to bring order to our lives as a form of security - but that doesn’t change our being. Only Christ can break the bonds of sin in our lives. 

For Paul, sin wasn’t about breaking rules, even though that is far too often how we talk about it. For Paul, sin was about distorting our relationship with a Holy God. We can sin, not just by what we do (sins of commission), but also by leaving things undone (sins of omission). We are fighting a losing battle against sin, my friends. Which is why we need a Savior. 

Original sin tells us why we do what we do, but the cross tells us that the victory has been won. Original sin is the frustrating part at the center of our being that tries to pull us away from God, but Christ, through his death and resurrection says that it doesn’t need to be this way. Do we have the humility today to accept the gift that Christ has offered and come and confess that we, too, are a sinner in need of grace?