Fighting with Sin in Captain America: Civil War

We’re told early on: This is a story about grief.

More accurately, it’s a story about the refusal to grieve. And the isolation and destruction that follow.

Early in Captain America: Civil War, Tony Stark presents a new technology to a crowd of MIT students and faculty. He shares an imagined memory of his last moments with his parents. After the program ends, he says, “That’s what I wish happened. It overrides my hippocampus, but doesn’t do anything about my unprocessed grief.”

It was a truth half-wrapped in a sad joke. But it stuck with me the entire film. It provided a kind of frame for everything that followed. What if this whole drama we’re watching is the result of unprocessed grief?

The characters themselves give us their interpretations of the battle-of-wills (and then just plain battle) between Tony Stark / Iron Man and Steve Rogers / Captain America.

For most of the narrative, as the conflict is building, various characters read the core issue as ego, arrogance, stubbornness.

A moment that sticks out in my memory is when Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow confronts Stark: “You are incapable of letting go of your ego for one goddamned second.”

In a Christian vocabulary we have a name for this sort of motivation: pride. We consider it among the deadliest sins. Some people even consider it the root of all sin.

But pride is just a facade, a symptom of the real issue.

The deeper issues show up in the final fight scene.

Captain America: Civil War is a notable break from the explosive, unfollowable choreographed fight that we’ve come to expect from the Avengers films. What we see here is far from a climactic blow-out.

Ultimately, it’s just Stark and Rogers, exhausted, exchanging punches. It’s a piteous and heartbreaking squabble between two men whose strength is only physical, men whose emotional life is too weak to engage the complexities of their crossed desires. Men who would rather kill one another — even be killed in the process — than engage their grief.

The scene can hardly even be called a climactic moment. It’s an anti-climax. A nadir. A canyon.

At that (anti)climactic moment, T’Challa / Black Panther names another layer to the conflict, the motivation that is underneath their pride.

According to T’Challa, pride isn’t the root of their behavior. Vengeance is deeper.

T’Challa says to Zemo, “Vengeance has consumed you. It’s consuming them.”

Which is important for us, a largely USAmerican audience to hear.

Vengeance certainly does consume us, is consuming us, as a whole culture. To take just one easy example: 9/11 is still used to support our presence overseas when we’ve killed far more civilians (like, by multiples) than died in the attacks.

And yet…

This is a story about grief.

About unprocessed grief.

Star’s line early on must contribute to the plot. The writers were too intentional. There are any numbers of technology Stark could have shown, but it was the one about memory. Any number of memories he could have chosen, but it was the one about unprocessed grief regarding his parents’ death. Half the conflict centers around Stark’s unprocessed grief over his parents’ death, and Zeno’s calculated exposure of it.

And his “unprocessed grief” is inextricably linked to that plot.

The other half centers around Rogers’s grief and Zeno’s prodding at that. His grief over the loss of Margaret Carter, yes. But it’s much more profound than that: most people he knew were dead. The culture he knew is gone. Rogers holds the grief of losing an entire world — family, friends, social codes, culture, food, moralities.

Stark wants to kill Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier because Barnes killed his mother; Rogers shouts that it won’t change anything. A rationale that doesn’t get anywhere close to landing because, for Stark, this isn’t about the past — his refusal to grieve means that her death is still present with him.

And for Rogers, who goes to great lengths to protect Barnes — the one person with whom he has a shared past. The one person who can remember his childhood with him. The one person who understands what it is to be removed from your time. It is, in part, his own refusal to grieve for all he’s lost — all the people he knew who are now dead — that pushes him to risk so much to hold on to what he has left.

Stark and Rogers are both unable to make good decisions, to hear what the other is saying, to discuss their options reasonably.

Their refusal to grieve does what sin always does: it isolates and divides.

Sin pits broken people against one another, when the very thing they need could be found by more deeply understanding the soul within the body they’re pummeling.

So Stark and Rogers are tearing each other apart. Because it’s easier to destroy something — even yourself — than to surrender yourself to grief.

Which is, perhaps, the real sin that pride is always masking: the refusal to engage grief.

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In the comments…

Where do you see a vengeance-mentality in your self, community, culture, country?

Where do you see refusal to grieve in your self, community, culture, country?

June 24, 2016June 23, 2016

What is Sin: Unalterable State or Chosen Behavior?

What is sin: a preconditioned state of being or a behavior that we choose to do? And how does it help us love? - read on KateRaeDavis.com

We’d much rather talk about love than about sin. Eyes on the prize, right? But we can’t get to the prize if we immediately trip every time we stand up.

So we need to talk about sin, about the things that are making us trip. Only by recognizing them will we find ways to move past them — and then begin to move towards love.

Sin is hard to talk about.

Part of this is because it’s so abstract — it’s not a thing we can point to, something with substance and being of its own right.

Even in the realm of characteristics, sin is abstract. We can come up with images for kindness or anger — we even have emoji for them. And we can more or less agree on what emoji mean. But sin … well, I’d love to see someone try to use emoji to represent sin.

Part of this is because sin is beyond a characteristic.

Sin is a preconditioned state of the human community.

This is not to say that humans are bad at their core. Sin is not ontologically defining. It is not something that must be expelled or repressed.

Recognizing sin as our preconditioned state is is simply an honest recognition of the way things are. An honest narration of human development. An honest naming of the fact that we all fail at living fully alive into our flourishing, God-gifted, human identity.

Sin preconditions all behavior, because it is part of the system before any behavior can be chosen.

The “my child is innocent” defense doesn’t work with this kind of sin. Did you eat chocolate while pregnant with your child? Then your child has likely metabolized the product of forced child labor and is now part of a system that is infused with sin. That’s not to condemn you — it just highlights the complexity of the world in which we live and the prevalence of sin that goes beyond any individual behavior. We are born sinners because we are born into sinful systems. No one gets to opt out.

Which can help us grow in compassion towards others. Like you, they were born into a system of sin. And perhaps one with more evil present than there is in your own.

At the same time, sin refers to the behaviors — the chosen actions — that are the natural result of our precondition.

If sin were simply a precondition, we would be freed from responsibility for our actions. It’s just the way we are, we could justify any wrongdoing. We have no real control in the matter.

But scripture repeatedly confronts this notion. The narratives are full of people making difficult decisions. Wisdom literature speaks about choosing between two ways. In the gospels, what makes Jesus compelling is that he consistently chooses a way that is not sin. Even in our sinful state, we have agency in whether or not we will choose sinful behavior.

Recognizing sin as behavior confronts the way we engage our own agency. Recognizing that sin is a behavior confronts us with the question: have the choices we’ve made been for our own desires and comforts, or for the realization of the kingdom of God?

Recognizing sin as behavior draws attention to the fact that we may act in ways that are destructive to others and to ourselves despite our best intentions. Sin is like a hot stove: the stove does not care what your intentions were for touching it; it will still burn you. We know sin by its destructive consequences. And those consequences follow regardless of intentions. Not because God is punishing you — not any more so than God burns you because you touch a hot stove– but because that’s just what sin does.

(As an aside: Redemption is also like a hot stove in that it doesn’t care about your intentions. Jonah, for example, did a famously bad job at calling Nineveh to repentance because of his hatred for them. His half-hearted “Forty more days!” is hardly persuasive. It was lazy, because he wanted them to be destroyed. Yet, despite his bad intentions, the people responded — hyperbolically so — and the city was saved.)

The way we’ve treated sin has been sinful.

In trying to expel sin, correct sin, or repress sin, we’ve done damage to others and to ourselves.

Grace Jantzen, reflecting on Julian of Norwich, wrote that sinful behaviors “are only symptoms of a wound for which God does not assign blame.” Julian went so far as to say that, in the end, sin itself will be rewarded.

Our church foremothers and forefathers did not develop an understanding of sin so that we could do more sin. The vocabulary of sin is meant to give us sight for the ways we are blocked from participation in love. Understanding the ways we don’t receive God’s gifts can help us find ways to outstretch our arms for those gifts. Understanding sin enables broken people to be made whole in God’s love.

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In the comments…

What are ways you or your faith community has tried to expel, correct, or repress sin? What was the outcome?

Do you tend to see sin as more of a preconditioned state (and beyond your control) or a behavior (and chosen)? What needs to shift for you to see it as both?

June 16, 2016June 13, 2016

The Way We (Don’t) Talk About Sin Is Hurting Us

The ways we talk about sin (and the ways we avoid talking about sin) are hurting ourselves and each other - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

The previous posts in this series may have seemed pessimistic. Starting a conversation on the human condition with sin and failure to receive God’s gifts seems like cynicisms. Humans are capable of great acts of reconciliation, compassion, and love. Christians have a long history of working to extend love to others just as God extended it to us. Why focus on the dark side when light exists?

Sin may seem irrelevant to who we are called to be. But sin remains a vital category not only in Christian theology but in human development. It’s happy to focus on salvation and redemption and grace. But salvation stories are meaningless without knowing what it is we’re being given grace in response to, or what we’re being saved or redeemed from.

Sin is anything that keeps us from being fully alive in our humanity.

Sin is anything that keeps us from loving others in their full humanity. So sin is always part of the Christian conversation. It’s the backdrop that makes noticing light possible.

Whenever salvation or grace is preached, what is implicit is the notion of salvation from a state of being, or grace with regards to a tendency. The word ‘sin’ may not be used, but its presence is assumed when we use the words like salvation, redemption, and grace.

It’s really easy to forget that salvation was extended to us in the midst of sinfulness. I know that I forget about what my life used to be like. And that forgetfulness is a great risk to ourselves. When we forget the ways we harm others and ourselves, we tend to return to those ways.

So sin is a diagnosis, a vocabulary, a name, a narrative for the ways in which we fail to live into our salvation, the ways we fail to live in grace, the ways we fail to be fully human. Without a solid understanding of sin, our attempts to move toward health, wholeness, and holiness do more harm than good.

Sinful behavior is contrasted with interpretations of Christlikeness.

When people are urged to be more Christlike, the qualities that define “Christlikeness” are interpreted from scripture.

Let me repeat: they’re interpreted from scripture. They’re not just from scripture. The stories are interpreted, and then they’re applied to our lives and world today — which is also an act of interpretation. If those interpretations are limited, the grace and salvation preached will be similarly limited.

And let’s be honest, interpretations are always going to be limited. Each human — whoever is doing the interpreting — has a very particular worldview. Each human is only able to see the world from their own stance. If they’re really good at listening, maybe they can imagine a few different perspectives.

There is no entirely objective “view from nowhere.” There can be no fully sensitive, diverse, informed “view from everywhere.” Unless you’re God.

And here’s the issue: to whatever degree an interpretation is limited, it holds the potential to be destructive.

So it’s a problem that only men have been allowed to participate in theological conversations in recent, erm, millennia. Women’s experience has been largely silenced.

This silencing is especially noticeable in conversations about sin.

Many of the “deadly sins” are from places of privilege.

Gluttony assumes you have access to food, greed assumes you have access to resources, pride implies you have a sense of self and agency.

But these sins just don’t really apply when you aren’t in a position of power. I’ll focus on pride, since it’s the one that the Western world largely speaks of it as if it’s the root of all sin. Pride assumes you have access to conversations and are allowed to “take up space” — and so you should be quieter, humbler, relationally “smaller” to make room for others and to submit to others. Great, if you’re a man with markers of privilege and status.

Less great if you’re a woman who has limited access and is already so relationally “small” as to be nonexistent. For generations, women have heard from preachers and pastors to be humble and to submit to others. If she’s having a fight with a friend, be humble and sumbit to your friend. If she’s being abused at home, be humble and submit to your husband. Sex against your will? Be humble and submit.

This isn’t working.

Or rather, it’s working in the sense that it functions to uphold the current power structures. It’s working, right now, for straight white men.

The problem is diagnosed as pride and the solution only perpetuates the pain, and the church insists that the problem is still pride. That’s crazy. That’d be like your doctor insisting that you need to be leeched because you have a blood disease — when your issue is that you’re bleeding out. It’s time to re-evaluate the problem and get a new diagnosis.

Maybe the thing that is supposed to save us — humility and submission — actually is itself the sin. And maybe recognizing that is really good news because it opens up the possibility of salvation.

That’s been true in my life. And I found that my liberating experience is shared by others who had internalized our culture’s value of humility and submission (or in other circles, “self-giving” or “self-sacrifice”). Those others are mostly women and people of sex and gender diversity, which is telling — we’re the people that didn’t have voices in theological conversations about sin and pride.

We need to start by recognizing that sinful behaviors do not vanish upon baptism or speaking the Jesus prayer.

Even in dramatic conversion experiences, people aren’t entirely freed from sin. I’m certainly not.

Sinful behaviors persist because sin is not only a behavior, but also a state that preconditions all behaviors.

It is not enough to be converted to a new way of life once. We must be converted freshly every day – at times it feels we must be converted every hour – and continuously re-oriented toward the goal. The goal, by the way, is love of God and neighbor.

We must know the character that we hope to develop or else we labor in vain. Roberta Bondi says “we must not simply aim at love in general; we must have a little knowledge of the qualities that lead to the love we want…In the same way, we must also know what we are to avoid.”

We can best move toward the goal of love if we can anticipate the blockages we will face. We need to develop language and sight for areas to which we have been blind.

We name sins, we confess the truth of our reality, not to make us more lovable or more acceptable in God’s sight. We confess our particular sins as a step forward in our freedom to love.

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In the comments:

Have you ever been told to “be humble / submit / self-give / self-sacrifice” and felt something inside yourself — hope, agency, safety — wither? What did it do to your relationship with God? with the Church?

June 9, 2016June 8, 2016

How to Understand Relationship With God

What relationship do you mean to evoke when you say “God”?

I don’t think any of us mean the bearded old guy on a cloud. At last not on purpose.

We’ve moved away from rulership metaphors, for the most part. Which makes sense. “King” and “Lord” don’t carry a lot of metaphorical weight with people who elect their political leadership.

Many Christians are moving away from the parental imagery of Father (and of Mother, for that matter). Blame it on Freud, but we’re in an age of psychological awareness. As large groups of people work on to articulate the ways in which their parents fall far short of divine behavior, it will continue to get more problematic to evoke parental imagery for God.

So we’re left wondering: how do we understand this divine, invisible, felt force that moves through the cosmos? What metaphor or analogy can we use for something beyond all understanding? What language can we put to something so profoundly experiential?

The Good Gift Giver

I’ve settled on one image that feels right and true: God is the giver of good gifts.

Throughout scripture we read that God gives strength, wisdom, and all that is good. For just a short list, see Psalm 29:11; Psalm 85:12; Proverbs 2:6; Matthew 7:11; James 1:5; James 1:17. That list could be really long. The act of giving is an essential characteristic of God and is made incarnational in Jesus.

Kathryn Tanner writes about God as the giver of good gifts. She recognizes that the God-made-flesh moment is what unites humanity and God. Tanner says that in this uniting work, “God gives everything necessary. … God contributes all the elements. … God gives completely to us.”

Sacrifice is no longer required of humanity. There is nothing to sacrifice. In a great reversal of expectations, God has provided and offered all the elements of sacrifice as a gift to humanity. You could even go so far as to say that it is impossible for us to truly sacrifice to God, for “God needs nothing but wants to give all.” The Christian God is “a God of gift-giving abundance.”

Receiving Gifts

I struggle with this conception of God as the giver of everything.

If God provides every aspect of the sacrifice needed for my atonement, what is left for me to give? It’s not that attending church services or spending time in daily devotions is insufficient, it’s that it’s unnecessary to the atoning project. How do we participate in a relationship if God has done all that needs doing?

I think the first step for us is to recognize the goodness of the gifts.

And then to respond with gracious receptivity and surrender. To offer, as Tanner says, “the return to God of prior gifts on God’s part to us … as an appropriate act of thanksgiving.”

Our response to God’s gifts is to return those gifts for the purpose of God. As Ignatius phrased it in prayer:

“Take and receive, Lord, my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding… All that I am and have you have given to me, and I give it all back to you to be disposed of according to your good pleasure.”

Gifts are received and returned to God when we use the gifts to the pleasure of God. I think this takes the form of using the gifts to the service and benefit of humanity (but that’s a topic of its own lengthy post).

There are a thousand examples of gifts being given back in ways to please God. A gift of innovation that is used to restore creation; a gift for joy and laughter that is shared to bring joy to others; a gift for organizing resources used to care for those in need.

Not Receiving Gifts

And then there are ways in which we don’t accept and return God’s gifts.

We refuse rather than receive. We misuse rather than return. That is, we sin.

Sin is shorthand for what keeps us from relationship with God. In this image, sin is shorthand for the ways in which we fail to receive or use God’s good gifts.

Refusing Gifts

We refuse gifts because of blockages.

Perhaps we’re unable to receive because our hands are full of what has been handed from elsewhere.

Perhaps our hands are forcefully closed or our arms will not risk outstretching to receive.

Or we have been handed stones in the past and we won’t risk asking for bread again.

Or we have been socially conditioned to view ourselves as unworthy of good gifts.

We refuse gifts because of blindness.

Perhaps we don’t notice what is offered.

Or perhaps we don’t recognize that the gift is good.

Or we don’t believe it’s freely offered, suspecting hidden strings attached.

Or perhaps we’re distracted.

And in all of this, God remains the giver. Tanner is adamant: the “gift is still being offered even as we turn away from it in sin.”

Misusing Gifts

When we successfully receive a gift, our participation is not done. Sometimes we misuse the gifts that have been given to us.

A gift can be used for purposes other than for what was designed or intended. Like a kid who asks for a water gun that is then used to torment the neighbor girl, sometimes gifts aren’t used as they were intended. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything…

A gift can be used in its right function (the gun shoots water), but for ill purposes (torment instead of fun, surprise instead of consenting play). In a spiritual sense, a gift might be used for ill ends such as personal glory, self-promotion, or financial prosperity rather than for the good of others.

Or, more subtle but perhaps equally sinister is the person who claims that their gifts originate within their own self. The person who refuses to acknowledge that there was any gifting involved.

Or, a gift can be misused through its destruction in inappropriate sacrifice.

Justin Martyr writes: “We have been taught that the only honor that is worthy of [God] is not to consume by fire what he has brought into being for our sustenance, but to use it for ourselves and those who need.”

Martyr’s words remind me of a story of an African man who heard of Jesus’s sacrifice and that no other sacrifices were necessary. So he stopped sacrificing his animals, and was better able to feed his community. He laughed, “Jesus saves…the chickens and the goats!”

The sacrificial misuse of spiritual gifts often occurs through misunderstanding the purpose of gifts. Women, I think, are socially conditioned to destroy what is given. Women with gifts of leadership or prophecy or any number of things are told to “sacrifice” for the sake of being a good wife/mother/Christian. She is being lied to about the essential nature of her sex and about the appropriate use of her gifts.

Systems of Sin

When gifts are refused or misused, we tend to focus on individual choice. Or perhaps we’re generous — we speak in terms of predisposition, family patterns, and circumstances.

But at least as important as the individual is the reality of the wider system.

We all live and move within layers of systems. Often unknowingly, or unquestioningly. Family systems, yes, but also cultural norms, socializations (what is “polite” or “proper”), societal roles. And these systems are influenced by religious teachings, traditions, doctrines, and ways of interpreting scripture. All of these influence how and whether we respond to the gifts of God.

In a systemic sense, we are all complicit in the sins of the individual, because we have created a context in which sin may be a reasonable or beneficial option.

That might sound far-fetched, or like too much guilt. But consider, for instance, the sin of murder: we’ve created a context in which weapons of many sorts are readily available. In the US, we’ve even come up with legal terms we view as sacred: Self Defense. As though the text reads, “Thou shalt not kill, unless in the circumstances that murder is a countermeasure in order to defend the health and well-being of oneself or another.”

We’ve created a context in which murder is reasonable.

And even if we question that norm, we are complicit. At least, I am, every moment that I’m not trying to change the system.

If that feels extreme, consider the sin of theft. We’ve participated in circumstances in which people starve and won’t be fed. This is true even if our participation is through a lack of action to change anything — I haven’t welcomed to my dinner table any young adults who have aged out of the foster system or mentally ill persons with no home to return to. So I’m complicit.

Grace

Madeleine L’Engle:

“It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy is hale (as in hale and hearty). If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy. The marvelous thing is that this holiness is nothing we can earn. …It is nothing we can do in this do-it-yourself world. It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received.”

We are each gifted with a seed life that carries the potential to flourish. It is the very fullness of our humanity that is “waiting to be recognized and received.”

Grace is the offering of the seed.

Grace, then, is not an add-on to our human condition. Grace is essential to human nature.

Kathryn Tanner says “humans are created to operate with the gift of God’s grace.” God’s choices are not bound by time, so they’re not sequential. God didn’t create humans and then have to come up with the solution of grace to address the problem of sin.

Instead, God’s choices are wholly formed from the outset. God willed and created humanity to be, at once, sinful and graced. Grace was always part of the design.

Receiving Grace

We receive our identities as “selves-in-relation.” We receive identity from being in relationship with God and neighbor.

For a fully human life, we each must recognize relationship, our own agency to act in the world, and the fact that our agency is tied to relationship. We must recognize that that our abilities are rooted outside our own self-understanding and capacities.

A Christian understanding of identity recognizes that any person’s identity can only be known in part by anyone other than God. This includes recognizing that we each only know our own self in part.

I am more than I can know I am.

We will always be more than we are capable of understanding. Anglican Father Williams explains that faith is the opposite to sin:

“[Faith] consists in the awareness that I am more than I know. …Such faith cannot be contrived. If it were contrivable, if it were something I could create in myself…then it would not be faith. It would be works—my organizing the self I know. That faith can only be the gift of God emphasizes the scandal of our human condition—the scandal of our absolute dependence upon [God]. … This will enable me to assimilate aspects of my being which hitherto I have kept at arm’s length. My awareness of what I am will grow, and the more it grows the less shall I be the slave of sin.“

Faith and grace are deeply related gifts of God. Faith and grace are necessary gifts to receive in order to flourish in our identities.

Roberta Bondi says the early Christians understood grace as “simply God’s help in seeing and knowing the world, ourselves, God, and other people in such a way that love is made possible.”

Fully human selves-in-relation rest in faith and grace. Without faith and grace, a human is less than fully alive — is in sin.

Biblical theologian Mark Biddle writes about this. He says that although “human beings exist only in relationship” and cannot act without risking damage to the relationship, we must also individually develop in order to grow into full personhood. This process of development “is unfortunately rife with opportunities to be stunted by perversion and suppression: sin.”

I had a professor who said it this way: “It is not enough to be a self that is only a self-in-relation.”

In contrast to a graced life of wholeness and holiness is sin. Sin is being less than fully human — being a self that eschews relationship or being a self that is only in relation. Sin blocks human wholeness and holiness through disrupting the cultivation of self. Sin stops human wholeness and holiness through obstructing the cultivation of relationship. Sin disrupts human wholeness and holiness through blocking grace.

This, I believe, is a foundation stone of an understanding of the human condition.

Share in the comments:

What metaphor best describes your relationship to God?

What is your response to understanding God as a gift-giver? How do you think you receive?

To follow the rest of this series, make sure to sign up for once-a-week notifications, right to your inbox. The whole series is available here.

*Kathryn Tanner quotes from Christ the Key, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

*Justin Martyr, “The First Apology,” trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 166.

*Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, (Wheaton, IL: H. Shaw, 1980), 60-61.

*Harry Abbott Williams, “Theology and Self-Awareness,” in Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, edited by Alexander Roper Vidler, (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1962), 90.

*Mark E. Biddle, “Sin: Failure to Embrace Authentic Freeodm” in Missing the Mark: Sin and Its Consequences in Biblical Theology, (Nashville, TN: Abindgon, 2005), 66.

*Roberta Bondi, To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church, (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987), 37.

June 2, 2016June 8, 2019

The Liberating Good News of My Sin

I’d always been taught that pride is bad. The worst bad. The root of all bad. The core human sin.

In school, the summation of many stories came down to: “Pride cometh before the fall.” In church, the response to gossip was the same. There was nothing worse one could be than to be prideful.

Which meant, of course, that there was nothing better that one could aspire to be than humble.

“It was pride that changed angels into devils,” wrote Saint Augustine. “It is humility that makes men as angels.”

So it was inevitable that when I placed my needs before the desires of others, I would feel guilty. The teachings and practices of my church and wider culture encouraged me to be selfless, self-less, without a self.

My dad couldn’t understand why it took me years to leave an abusive relationship. Now I’m able to narrate: of course it did. Some unarticulated part of my character had been formed to believe that, in wanting safety for myself, I wasn’t loving him enough, I was being selfish, I wasn’t giving enough of my self.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned of a concept that, in the 1950s, was first named “feminine sin.” I immediately recognized it as offering me a particular grace. “Feminine sin” is the opposite of pride. It is, as Valerie Saiving Goldstein put it, is “diffuseness, triviality, and lack of a sense of self.”[1]

And that was good news.

I recognize that for many people, the topic of sin doesn’t generally fall under the category of good news. But this, for me, was liberating; a sparrow released from my ribcage.

To name self-less-ness as sin freed me from these destructive ways of life that I had been told were necessary, even holy. Understanding my silence as sin freed me from the shame of having my own opinions. Understanding passivity as sin freed me from the guilt of leaving abusive relationships, the guilt of failing to “self-sacrifice” more.

The moment these behaviors were named as sin, I was freed from masochism that had been parading as virtue.

I had been living sinfully, but my sin was not pride. Truthfully, the diagnosis of pride only encouraged my sinful behavior, pushing me deeper into abnegating my agency and underdeveloping my self. This was the great betrayal of the theologies I had been given: that what I had been told would save me is what led me further into sin.

I realized that for many of my (male) peers, even ones in seminary with me, the naming of sin was not experienced as good news, and I struggled to articulate why it was for me.

I began to explore feminist theologies of sin. In doing that research, I became increasingly aware of the tendency to split humanity into a spectrum of identities based on sex (male/female biology) or gender (masculine/feminine cultural constructs).[2]

In some feminist theologies, masculine sin (pride) and “feminine sin” are entirely isolated from one another, as though two mutually exclusive categories, or else were put in opposition to one another.

In other feminist theologies, there are arguments for an androgynous understanding of the human condition. These were often formed as a defense against essentialism, the belief that gender traits are inherent to the sex with which we associate them. In other words, that men are inherently, in their essence, strong, violent, and aggressive, whereas women are inherently weak, meek, and submissive.

These theologies argued for androgyny as though the bodies in which we live (sex) and the ways in which our society structures the ways in which we understand our identities (gender) do not carry any weight in the conversation or in our lives.

I longed for an understanding of sin that made sense of my liberation. I longed for an understanding of sin that acknowledged my body and my life. I longed for a way to understand sin that spoke to the way my culture encouraged me to sin on the basis of my sex. I longed for a theology that asked what the human condition is, in all its sexed and gendered complexity, even as it asked what masculine and feminine components might be.[3]

There are masculine and feminine poles within interpersonal relationships, most easily seen in heterosexual romantic relationships. Similarly, these gendered poles exist in our own selves — we each hold elements of the masculine and the feminine in our own selves. And, these poles exist in society at large.

Naming the human condition in its similarities and differences, I believed, would help foster integration of these differences into deeper connections.

Religious texts failed me in this desire.

At least, religious texts as we traditionally understand them failed me.

I discovered that fairy tales offered me a way forward. Perhaps because fairy tales have been a way for women to pass on their wisdom. And during times when women were excluded from positions of authority and theological conversations, they were probably the ones thinking about integrating their masculine and feminine natures.

In fairy tales, the masculine and feminine are often represented by prince/king and princess/queen. They may be in conflict throughout a story, but they almost always find a way to re/unite and love one another at the end (which explains all those wedding endings).

Perhaps our cultural love for fairy tales and their (re-)(re-)re-tellings is because we experience that same truth inside our own selves: our masculine and feminine are in conflict, but we hope for them to love each other.

Fairy tales, then, were able to satisfy my longing for a connective theology of sin. Fairy tales cultivate an understanding of sin as something more than a barrier, but as an essential part of the journey toward grace. Fairy tales show that sin is part of a process toward reconciliation — reconciliation of the differences within our own selves and differences between ourselves and others.

In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing more of my work and reflections on this process of discovering the ways that sin is good news. I hope you’ll join me. Make sure you don’t miss one by signing up — I’ll deliver once-a-week updates with what’s happening on the blog, right to your inbox.

[1] Paraphrased from Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ, (New York, NY; HarperCollins, 1979), 35.

[2] Feminine and masculine are words pertaining to gender, which refers to culturally identified traits and programming; male and female are words that relate to physical, biological sex. An individual’s primary gender may or may not correspond with their embodied sex. Each individual carries masculine and feminine gendered poles within his or her self, regardless of physical sex. For more, see Lois Tyson, “Feminist Criticism,” in Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 83-131, 2^nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).

[3] In Genesis 1:27-29 (NRSV) we read that God creates humankind in God’s image. While there’s much debate over what exactly “the image of God” is, the text seems to imply that it has something to do with the fact that “male and female God created them.” We best reflect God through being two distinct beings that create one humanity; our human plural corresponds to the divine singular. Thus, I believe the responsible development of theologies must include diversity that is united into a singular humanity.

Share in the comments:

What have you believed is the worst sin? How has that belief shaped your life choices?

Has naming something as sin ever felt liberating? Tell us about it.

October 13, 2015January 12, 2016

Integrative Project Presentation

To Play with a Child Named Sorrow - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

This Spring, I handed in my final master’s work, called an Integrative Project, titled “To Play with a Child Named Sorrow: Engaging Sin, Grief, and the Self-in-Relation through Myth and Fairy Tale.” I spent 15 months to write and then whittle down to 70 pages, and then whittled further until I had a 10minute presentation. The abstract is below; click through here to see the presentation.

Western theology’s understanding of sin on pride has focused on pride, which has furthered the oppression of women. In the last 50 years, feminist theology has made great strides in explaining how pride (“masculine sin” developed by male theologians) oppresses and has named “feminine sin” (which I term echoism) as diffuseness, a lack of a sense of self, a defining of one’s self by relationship. However, theology has failed to discuss the ways in which these sins interact with one another and how we interpersonally move from sin to grace. In “The Myth of Echo & Narcissus,” we see the ways in which pride harmfully emphasizes the self and how echoism harmfully emphasizes relationship. In “The Tale of the Handless Maiden,” we come to see the transforming process of grief, which frees us to love. This is not simply a balance between pride and echoism; this process is a transformation of human character that comes through an active process of receiving God in the midst of grief. The burden is not on humanity to find a way to manage or balance our sins. Rather, as the tale shows us, characterological change frees us from the constraints of sin (with emphasis on either self or relation) and frees us to love as selves-in-relation.

See the 10-minute presentation here: https://vimeo.com/138362284

"Echo and Narcissus" by John William Waterhouse — “Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse

July 13, 2015January 9, 2016

Confessions

This sermon was written for Evergreen Mennonite Church in Kirkland, Washington. The primary text was Psalm 51; referenced texts are 2 Samuel 11-12 and Philippians 2:5-11.

Before he was King of Israel, David was a shepherd boy. He was the youngest of eight sons; when he wasn’t doing the very unroyal work of tending sheep, I imagine he was picked on by his older brothers. And then, one day, an old man shows up and names him King. He was just an ordinary guy, more or less content with his position in life — then suddenly holds the responsibility of a Kingdom. David rises to the challenge in relationship, in military strength, in religious commitment — he is not only a good leader, he’s a good person, described as “a man after God’s own heart.”

Until one afternoon when David saw her bathing on the roof and her beauty overthrew him. Now, David knew how to keep his head about him. When confronted with the well-shielded, well-armed giant Goliath, he remained cool enough to lethally aim a pebble. We wouldn’t expect this man to commit a sin of fiery passion — yet he does.

Afterwards, in his guilt, he tries to cover his sin by sending Bathsheba’s husband to the front line of battle. All his life, David had worked consistently to bring about the Kingdom of God — conquering Jerusalem, naming it his capital, vowing to build a temple there. He’s the last person we would expect to order the slaying of one of his own men, the last person we would expect to commit a sin of cold calculation — yet he does.

We have, in our cultural collective, a certain types. We say things like “He’s the type of person who would give you the shirt off his back” or “She’s the type of person who would sell her own mother to make a buck.” We have similar types of people for the kind of person who commits adultery, or the kind of person who commits murder. David, we might say, doesn’t fit the type — yet he sins.

Which is why I sometimes hear this description of David: “He was one of Israel’s greatest Kings, except for that Bathsheba business.” But I take some comfort in “that Bathsheba business,” find solace in the fact that David fell into such terrible and — let’s just say it — such obvious sin.

I take comfort because David seems, on the surface, to be the exemplary person who has his life together. Scripture tells us that he’s handsome. He’s an intelligent strategist. A strong warrior. He’s King of the Chosen People of God. He has absolutely everything by which we would mark success — the title, the house, the body, the wealth, the respect. The strong prayer life, commitment to God. And yet his sins here reveal that he doesn’t have it all together — they show that he’s as human as I am.

David is a person committed to God. David exploits his power in order to fulfill desire; David exploits his power in order to conspire a murder. In all of this, David shares our humanity.

The King and I seem to have little in common. We’re certainly separated by three thousand years of time and half a globe of distance. We’re separated by culture, social status, power, authority, privilege, and gender. And yet, to fail to read David’s humanity as intimately linked to mine denies the ways in which, on my best days, I am just like him — beautifully and brokenly human. Caught up in sins of passion, conspiring in sins of calculation. Exploiting the power and privilege I do hold.

For although I am not royalty, but I do have power and agency in my own small domains, as we all do in our jobs, our friendships, and our family systems. I have the power to treat others with dignity and respect. Power to exploit or manipulate others for my own ends. Power to ignore others as though they don’t carry the image of God.

* * *

It’s an oft-spoken saying that preachers should have a bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, and it was in reading the news these last few weeks that I began to see the gift offered us in David’s psalm. For what makes David a great leader isn’t the military strategy or the political savvy, it’s this moment, this psalm. What makes David a great person is the ability to see his actions as wrong, to admit to that wrongdoing, that sin, and to move toward reconciliation. What makes David a great leader is that he confesses his sin as publicly as the sin was made, that he sees his personal actions as intricately tied to the national systems.

I mentioned that I only began to recognize this modeling as a gift when I put my bible in one hand and my newspaper in the other. As I read about the act of terrorism at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston; as I read about the following acts of terrorism in burning black churches throughout the US South; as I read the countless tweets, facebook updates, blog posts, and journal pieces of African American people begging our nation to collectively realize we have a race problem — David’s psalm became such a gift.

In the same way David doesn’t seem to fit the type, we don’t seem to fit the type either for this sin of racism. Most people don’t identify as racist — even White Pride groups say they aren’t racist, they just love their heritage. And if even they don’t admit racism — what are the chances that the average American will? What are the chances that a people concerned with matters of social justice will recognize their own racist tendencies?

And when I look at the people gathered here — well, I doubt any of you are donning white sheets and setting fire to the lawns and churches of your black neighbors. There are no confederate flags among us, on our cars or our clothing. We just don’t fit the type of person who is racist.

So David’s story gives me pause. David doesn’t fit the type of person who would be an adulterer or a murderer. Before Nathan came to him, I don’t believe David thought of himself as an adulterer and murderer. But when confronted, he responds: “Have mercy on me, O God…blot out on my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, my sin is ever before me.”

This confession is part of our holy scripture; it was public in the kingdom in which David reigned. Because he held public office, as it were, his sins were publicly known — people talk. And in his psalm, he models for us what repentance looks like by showing the way in which true confession is AS public as the sin. For him, the people likely all knew or had heard whisperings; his confession had to be public.

For us it is likely smaller. I recently read a piece about race in Seattle. The reporter, in researching, wrote that she had approached a young African American man and told him, “I’d love to interview you; you’re so eloquent,” and then immediately hears herself sound, in her words, “like one of those people who said candidate Obama was so well-behaved, well-groomed, polite — for a black man.”

She could have just gone on with the interview. She could have caught herself in her head, confessed to God (privately), and said nothing to the man. He would have answered her interview questions, probably eloquently; she would have gotten her quotes for the story; no real harm done. Just her lingering feeling of self-consciousness after using a word with a history and his lingering feeling of needing to perform for white people to notice to him.

Instead, the reporter quickly confesses to the man: “I can’t believe I just called you eloquent.” He gives her a knowing look, and then begins to laugh, a bubbling outpour of grace, and she is freed to join in his laughter — the reconciliation complete in laughter’s grace. And they carry on with an interview that, I imagine, was somehow more comfortable and authentic than it would have been had she refused to confess her sin as publicly as it had been made.

So, a confession of my own: I have, this week even, chosen a different route to walk because I saw a black man ahead of me; I am a racist.

Another confession: I am a white person talking about race, and I am very uncomfortable. This discomfort and unwillingness to talk about race is part of what makes me racist. And part of what makes me privileged; white people get to choose whether or not we discuss race.

Another confession: I’m only able to speak in this room, at this time, because education systems have privileged me — at least in part — because of my race.

I confess these sins; the reporter confesses her sin; David confesses his sin because the recognition of sin as sin and the appropriate confession of it are not only the first steps toward reconciliation, they are the direct cause of reconciliation.

I’m encouraged to confess my sins and to name my iniquities, because David does the same for sins that are, if we were to use a measuring stick (which we aren’t supposed to do, but if we were to), David’s sins would be “worse.” Adultery. Murder. And yet David is restored to God; it seems that nothing is beyond God’s capacity and willingness to forgive, even when justice cannot be served. David is restored to the community and reconciled to God even though Bathsheba’s marriage and Uriah’s life cannot be restored. God’s forgiveness of David is so complete that God blesses the union of David and Bathsheba in the form of their son Solomon — the wisest of all Israel’s kings. In a sense, we could say that wisdom is the result of confession.

That David is reconciled even though justice cannot be done — this lends me tremendous hope for the possibility of racial reconciliation. It will not be easy. It will require recognizing personal acts as sinful. It will require looking at national systems as sinful. It will require true confession and repentance. It will require a breaking open and cutting away of the callouses around our hearts, will require, as David says, brokenheartedness. David says “A broken heart, O God, you will not despise.” Today we might say, “A soft heart, O God, you will not despise.” It was modeled for us in Christ, who emptied himself, who refused to exploit his power so that he could be with us in our humanity and our suffering.

When it comes to racism in America, justice cannot be served this side of the coming of God’s Kingdom. We cannot undo slavery. We cannot reclaim the four million or more lives that were lost in crossing the Atlantic in cargo holds. We cannot bring back Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown, or Eric Garner. We cannot bring back the nine victims of Mother Emanuel Church– Sharonda, Clementa, Cynthia, Tywanza, Myra, Ethel, Daniel, Depayne, Susie.

Have mercy on us, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out our transgressions.

Wash us thoroughly from our iniquities,

and cleanse us from our sin.

For we are learning to know our transgressions,

and our sin is ever before us.

Indeed, we were born guilty,

sinners when our mothers conceived us.

Let us hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that have been crushed rejoice.

Create in us clean hearts, O God,

and put a new and right spirit within us.

Sustain in us a willing spirit.

Then we will teach transgressors your ways,

and sinners will return to you.

Deliver us from bloodshed, O God,

O God of our salvation,

and our tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

You have no delight in sacrifice;

if we were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Credit to Sarah Green, SarahGreenIllustration.com