SIN IS GOOD, IF…

Martin Luther once opined that if we are going to sin, we might as well sin boldly. After all, a sin is a sin is a sin. Difference in degree makes no difference, as I have maintained for a very long time. For instance, stealing a dime and stealing a million dollars is still stealing. No matter how much we steal, large or small amount, stealing is a sin. So if we are going to sin by stealing, on a theological level, steal big.

On a practical level, I remember an old prof in seminary who said the same thing. He said, if you are going to steal, don’t stop with $10,000. Steal millions because you’ll still get the same jail time. He was wrong, however. A former employee in a parish I served embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars. He got three-to-six years in jail. At the same time a high-ranking sport person had embezzled several million dollars and received a sentence of one year. The parish employee obviously did not steal enough to hire a good lawyer while the other guy did.

There’s a moral there somewhere when it comes to the practical. On the theological level there is one there also. It is good to sin if we know that what we are doing is both deliberate and wrong. We don’t sin by accident. All sin is deliberate. Both gentlemen knew that what they were doing was wrong and that if they were caught, they would have to pay a civil penalty. They were and they did. They had no one else to blame but themselves even if they tried to justify what they did, and they did try.

The reason why Luther and even my seminary prof concluded that a big sin/crime was better than a small one is that we humans tend to not sweat the small stuff. “My sin was not so bad,” we say to ourselves. It could have been worse. Our sins only seem to get our attention when they are whoppers and we can neither deny nor justify what we have done. We have to face up to our sin.

That’s where the rubber hits the road. It seems that it takes something that we can neither avoid nor excuse that finally gets our attention: Luther’s point. Until our sinfulness gets our attention, we keep on keeping on. On the other hand, what if we never really sin boldly, do something that gets us arrested or hurts another so much that the other is scarred for life?

That’s the dilemma we face, isn’t it? Since we are not great sinners, personal sin never gets much of our attention. And because it does not, sinning doesn’t seem to do us much good because we believe our sins haven’t done much bad. We convince ourselves that we are good, and we are, and that we are not perfect, which we are not, and that God understands, which God does.

But none of that is an excuse to not get serious about our deliberate failings and shortcomings, as minor as they maybe. If we do not, they only get worse.