On Sunday, July 8, 2018, F.C.C. invited the Rev. Margie Price to be our Guest Pastor while Pastor Art is on Sabbatical.

Good morning. I’m so glad to be here with you all this morning.

I love getting my annual summer preaching invitation here with my extended church family. I have had a fairly busy year since I was last time I was here.

As Art said, I have been formally accepted as a Member in Discernment with the Metro Association and I have also been licensed in the Garden City Community Church.

And, maybe the biggest event, as many of you may know, I got preach a sermon in front of Rev. John Dorhauer, the general minister and president of the UCC. It was completely unexpected and rather intimidating, but, hey, I’m always up for a challenge and he was very encouraging so it all worked out in the end.

So, if you read the Pastor’s Perspective that Pastor Art wrote in the May Forecaster, you will notice the similarities in the sermon titles of that sermon and today’s.

I figure, since you heard the reaction to the sermon back in May, I’d share the actual sermon with you today.

In that light, would you please take a moment to pray with me?

Ever-present God,

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you. Oh god my strength and my redeemer.

As I have said before, I like to preach off the lectionary.

Rather than come up with a topic of my own to preach on, I like to read the scripture and let it present me with the topic.

I don’t know if maybe I’m just being lazy in not having to come up with my own topics, but I figure it’s a descent trade off because over the course of 3 years, using the lectionary, you hit most of the scripture in the Bible, and do it during the relevant seasons.

So whether I’m being lazy or not, it still works. This is what I started to do when preparing this sermon.

And then I read through the scripture set I was presented with and the topic that jumped out at me was the topic of sin and I thought to myself, “Nope, not being lazy.”

I’m kind of happy about this, though, because it’s not something I really talk about often. I mean, I frequently hear, Jesus died for our sins, everybody likes to remind us of that, but that doesn’t really tell us a whole lot about sin.

I have friends and classmates that can recite chapter and verse of all the different kinds of sin and what the consequences may be to committing those sins. And people will do it frequently. To the point where I start to become afraid to do anything for fear that I might commit one of the myriad sins they enumerate.

And then there is the UCC, where we don’t tend to talk about sin a whole lot, at least not what makes it up. We talk more about what we should do, than what we should not: as we read in Micah, do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God, things like that. If we focus on what we SHOULD do, how we SHOULD act, that would keep us from doing the things we should NOT do. Right?

So in light of the scripture set of the lectionary, I decided to take a bit of a closer look at sin and what these scriptures are saying about how Jesus relates to it.

You know, one of those nice light topics for a summer Sunday morning.

So I couple of issues right off the back when talking about sin:

First, I have to admit I don’t really deal well with concept of Original Sin: this concept being that I carry the shame of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, after God specifically told them not to.

I don’t see how the God we always talk about, the loving God that welcomes and embraces us, the one who freed God’s own people from Egypt, this God we are the children of, as we are reminded in our scripture this morning in 1 John, that this God could be so harsh as to punish us for something we couldn’t have hoped to have had a hand in.

How many of you here have children, nieces, nephews or other grandkids or other kids you have been around, even just babysitting? Now who here would hold something their parents did long before they were even born against them? Who would punish a child just because their grandparent made a mistake and disobeyed his or her parent? I don’t expect anyone would. So why do we think God would do the same with us?

My other issue with sin, as I always understood it, is that there is not a single thing I can do that God won’t forgive me for if I just ask for that forgiveness.

When Jesus walked the earth he taught long and hard about forgiving each other, when asked he said we should forgive 70 times 7. And it was not that the end number was the important part of that teaching, it was that we were to keep doing it.

So if we, in theory, have the ability to do this, why wouldn’t God be able to? And God would be so much better at it than we will ever be, after all the practice with the millions of people who came before us and all the petitions God must have received well before I came along.

So in thinking about this concept of sin and applying it to the fact that Jesus came to save us from sin, it just didn’t match up for me.

So, what did I do for the longest time?

Find out – Continue reading for a fresh perspective on ‘Sin’.

Featured Image Credit: Sunrise on the Beach in Florida. Courtesy of Paul Brennan, PD Pics.