How do we preach about “sin”? (A guest Post)
Melinda Quivik is an ordained ELCA pastor who has served churches in three states, including a UCC/Presbyterian congregation in Michigan. A former professor of liturgy and preaching and past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, she is now the Editor-in-Chief of Liturgy, a mentor with Backstory Preaching, and a liturgical and homiletical scholar whose books include Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays (2023), Leading Worship Matters (2017), Serving the Word: Preaching in Worship (2009), and other publications.
Some congregations do not include the renunciation of sin in the baptismal rite.
The classic baptismal rite asks, “Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?”
Devil? A guy with horns and a tail? This language reminds everyone that the church has ancient words that are uncomfortable.
Today’s conventions find such an image naïve or childish, outdated, unsophisticated. Who believes in that these days?
The next two questions in the rite ask the one being baptized (along with the entire assembly) two questions that define what is meant by “the devil”:
1) “Do you renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God?”
2) “Do you renounce the ways of sin that draw you from God?”
The first question acknowledges systemic evil; the second, that some things in this world seduce us away from the orientation of wholeness and healing that God desires for us as individuals and as communities.
We can be drawn away from God on our own, in our personal lives, or together as a community. To renounce “the ways of sin” is personal. It is to plant oneself on a path of living that notices and overtly works against what is not life-giving.
Can anyone among us argue that there are no ungodly powers in our world? Have some of us failed to notice that people are unjustly imprisoned by demagogues, starved to death, sexually abused, tortured, left to scrape by where water and air and soil are polluted by human actions, and more?
In our world today, one recent event involved both an individual and an industry. It has galvanized the public. One person murdered a health care insurance executive on a New York City street, and it has exploded into a society-wide discussion of how health care is delivered or denied in our nation.
Neither murder nor lack of compassion affirms life. Sin is real. The devil is at work..
If we ignore sin, is it absent?
So we may ask ourselves as pastors, preachers, worship leaders:
What is missing when the renunciation of sin is absent?
A friend who is part of a Russian Orthodox congregation tells about a woman who was to be baptized at the Vigil of Easter. My friend asked how she was preparing for her baptism. The woman said, “I’m working up a big wad of spit.”
At the beginning of her baptism, the rite has the one being baptized stand facing the world outside the church with her back against the outside of the closed church door. When she is asked to renounce sin, she spits at the world.
The sign of spit does not mean to denigrate God’s good creation but to acknowledge the forces in this world that work against what God desires for creation. The presence of sin, the devil, evil intentions, and damaged persons and communities is real.
Sin does not disappear if we take it out of our baptismal rite.
Instead, failing to acknowledge sin—with or without the wad of spit—diminishes the power of baptismal incorporation into the body of Christ.
If Evil is a Fiction, is God?
Why believe in God if we think evil is merely a fiction?
Why would we need God’s promises spoken over baptismal water that cleanses and forgives us, infuses us with the Holy Spirit, and welcomes us into the community of faith?
Perhaps by avoiding renunciation of sin, we treat ourselves as beings too fragile to face the truth about this world and our own desires. Perhaps the fragility we have acquired is, in part, a result of silence about sin.
When we are silent about “the devil and all the forces that defy God,” we may try to content ourselves with something less than the full truth about our lives which is that sin is real and so is God’s presence.
In baptism, we are brought into a community of faith gathered by God’s word because we need each other to stand together against the forces that defy God.
They aren’t going away just because we don’t like the names they have been given.
Preaching the Human Condition—and the Good News
Preachers know that naming the human condition is imperative because without our failings, we cannot understand what God is doing in our midst to turn us around.
Repentance is often described as a 180º move away from what destroys toward what redeems.
Preachers know that to focus only on what destroys without naming God’s undergirding power comes across as giving the listeners the job of fixing problems.
The gospel (good news) is that we are not left on our own to figure out how to work toward wholeness and healing.
Instead, God plants within us the compassion we need to move toward the light because the forces that defy that light will never quit.