The ashes of wasted love.
Burning up something that is precious and priceless.
The wreckage of the love of which we are capable.
Wasting the gift of being alive.
Sin.
Today it is quite literally rubbed in our faces.
The ashes are brand new, I just burned up the palm fronds from last years Palm Sunday, when we welcomed Jesus in as Our King, and then we crucify him five days later.
We burn up those fickle palm branches. Palm leaves stink when they burn.
Sin.
We tend to obsess on Sin or to not take it seriously enough.
The Christian understanding of Sin is much more mature than the usual way we hear that word. Usually what we hear about sin is the theological equivalent of cheap drivel.
We usually hear of sin in terms of upper handed moralism, or of petty self elevation at the failures of others.
Sin is usually spoken of by those who gloat at others, those who are addicted to casting judgment and aspersion, the habitually indignant.
We frequently hear of sin being used in a scornful way that rejects human frailty.
Sin is also used as a form of self abuse by the those of tender conscience or wounded psyche.
All of these are immature understandings of Sin.
Both the occasion of sin and the power of sin, in our lives and in the lives of others, for a Christian these become an invitation to celebrate more deeply God’s Gratuitous Generosity in Jesus Christ.
The true problem with Sin is that it is quickly and ultimately boring and repetitive, the same old thing over and over again, the same old story over and over again. The same mistakes and waste.
It is usually packaged as something exciting or as an occasion to be indignant, but the truth is that that it is old, boring, monotonous news, not really worth much attention.
Being stuck, in habitual, and addictive abuses that wither our God breathed humanity into a cheap caricature, that is what Sin ultimately does, it turns us into shallow stereo types, we become blandly the same, no longer uniquely reflecting God’s glory.
But God’s Gratuitous Generosity is something new, something worth attention.
The mature Christian understanding of Sin is not so much that God rejects or judges sin as God rescues us from the power of Sin that drags us down.
God takes on our death in the death on the cross, and we take on God’s life in the resurrected life of Jesus.
So The Christian take on Lent is not that we wallow in our own sinfulness, rather we bath in God’s graciousness.
To take sin seriously we have to take God’s grace even more seriously still.
It is not that we reject something that is killing us and those around us, rather we are turning toward someone who is wonderful.
Sin to a Christian is the invitation to be gracious.
Scott Cairns says it best in his poem titled “Metanoia”. Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance.
“The heart’s metanoia,
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward,
as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so bad
as it is a waste of time.”