Hi, I’m Brianna, yet another guest blogger. My website is called Wonderblossom. Today I want to talk about sin.
Last week I was camping on the Sunshine Coast with my in-laws and one of the many things we discussed was sin. We talked about the fact that my husband feels his parents didn’t really talk about or emphasize sin while they were raising him. It’s not really hard for us to mention the word “sin”, to discuss it, or to openly – not to mention verbally – recognize it in our lives and try to correct it. His parents were raised in a way that over-emphasized sin and used it in a manipulative, unbiblical way, so they were reacting to that. My husband’s mom and dad realized that one thing they do is that they often say that something “doesn’t feel right” instead of saying something is a sin. One of the results of this is that my husband doesn’t know how to talk about sin. I was raised in a non-Christian family, so I never learned how to talk abot sin, either. That’s an area we struggle with in our marriage and in our personal relationships with Christ.
Today at church we realized that sin is almost never discussed from the pulpit, either. We confess our sins in the liturgy every Sunday, but that’s about it. We also rarely hear other people talk about sin in a personal way. We started to wonder whether it’s a generational thing. Were your parents sin-shy? Are you sin-shy? How do you deal with sin in your life? In your marriage? Do you talk about it? Do you use the word “sin” or do you use a euphemism? Are you willing to tell other people who are close to you that they are sinning? How do you do that? When you say the word “sin” with regards to yourself, what emotions do you feel? Are you comfortable speaking about sin? Do you use sin as a tool for manipulation? Do other people around you talk about sin? If so, how?
I’d really (really, really) love to hear what others have to say on this topic. Discuss away!
Lutherans confess each week that they(we) are “poor, miserable sinners.” I think that, growing up Lutheran, I heard plenty about sin, but I heard about it in a healthy way. I don’t think that it’s necessarily important to know and name every sin, but to know that we do sin in “thought, word, and deed–by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” The reason for this is that the fact that we sin and the fact that we sin even when we don’t want to–the fact that much sin is NOT deliberate but accidental–is what defines our relationship with God.
I’ve heard other, terrible ways of talking about sin, such as when my parents must have sinned by “not praying enough,” according to one group of Pentecostals–the answer to “Why is our child mentally retarded?” I think, to some extent, I did grow up with kind of a specific sin-neurosis when it came to sexual sins. And that’s not healthy (and it was separate from what I learned in church).
When I talk about sin, I tend to keep it in terms of humanity as sinful, rather than individuals as sinful. We’re sinful as a body and we’re redeemed as a body. Christianity, in my opinion, has never really been about me or you or Joe there in the corner. It is about all of us at once.
I would like to add also that I think that it’s useful to talk about sin when confessing to each other. I don’t know that it’s necessary to always say “I’ve sinned against you by…” but just acknowledging that there are things we do that we shouldn’t do because they hurt people unnecessarily. So in that way, it’s useful on an individual level. But when we talk about God, I think that sin has to be acknowledged as a communal thing within the Body.