“It’s just a Little Lie”

a sermon by Rev. Kimi Riegel
Delivered November 6, 2005 at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church

Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in sin. Well that’s not quite true but nearly so. Certainly sin is not something you would regularly find as a sermon topic in a Unitarian Universalist church. In fact many of us coming out of more mainline traditions have turned away from the concept of sin as it was personally destructive. And yet here I am on sermon number three in a whole series on sin. I realized in reviewing the others I had not taken any time to talk about why this interests me or even a bit on the Unitarian Universalist doctrine of no original sin.

The doctrine of original sin is prevalent in many Christian churches, including the churches from which both the Unitarians and the Universalists emerged. Original sin presents humans as innately sinful. The Calvinism of our New England forebears taught that, with the exception of a very small group known as the Elect, everyone is damned to eternal torment, eternal separation from God. According to other variations of this philosophy, one could be saved but only through the intervention of a savior. This is not a message of personal empowerment: “We are too depraved to save ourselves, too depraved to choose the good.”

The forebears of Unitarian Universalism turned away from this view of human nature and rejected original sin. One of my colleagues writes: “At the heart of Unitarian Universalism is the realization that there is nothing we can do individually or collectively to sever ourselves from the Divine or the Ground of Being or the Mystery.” In other words we are all, at all times, a part of a greater whole whether we are in touch with it or not, whether we define that as nature, or God or Goddess. This is very different from the sense that there is a punitive God just looking for us to mess up so he can punish us by separation from love.

This year is actually the 200th anniversary of the Hosea Ballou’s Treatise of Atonement. With that document he essentially created Universalism. At the time, 1805, most Americans believed that sin was a given human state of existence, depravity was our lot, and the punishment was a separation from God. Rev. Ballou stated that the sin in fact was the separation and we needed, through our own actions, to get back to our loving god. The need to be angry, feel prideful, lie, experience envy, hoard, feel fearful, be in control, and so many other negative, sinful ways and feelings, are due, he believed, to our separation from the ground of our being. If we just reconnect with the all forgiving force in the universe we will not sin. It is from this Universalist point of view that we find there is no need, no basic human need, for sin, because if we can stay connected to the love which is all around us there will be no more sin. This was a radical idea for the 1800s and led to some pretty heated debates as you might imagine.

And it continues to be a radical idea. When I was in seminary I often visited the Lutheran seminary for interfaith events. The students there asked my how without a “good book” or a “fear of God” we taught our children to be good. From their perspective without these tools there would be no reason to be good because we are all at our core sinners. But that is not what we UUs believe. Instead we believe, thanks to the Universalists, that humanity would like to be decent; that we are in fact inherently honorable.

That’s the good news. The bad news is sin still happens. When we threw out the term sin we threw out our understanding of what can go wrong. Even if we are not born in sin, we still hurt one another, and there is still suffering in the world. Accepting the inherent worth and dignity of each other still leaves us causing and feeling pain on a pretty regular basis. Hosea Ballou suggested we need to get back to the love at the center of all existence, and that is certainly curative, but still what does it mean to sin?

A friend and colleague of mine who tends toward a Christian theology gave me a helpful definition. He says the definition of sin is to miss the mark. In fact that is one of the words for sin in the Jewish tradition; sin literally means ‘to miss the mark.’ I have learned it is an archery term; you missed what you were intending to hit. I intend to be truthful and honest, but sometimes I lie. I find it easier to understand that we all miss the mark rather than we are all sinful.

We all miss the mark and most of the time in pretty predictable ways. For me the Enneagram, a personal and spiritual tool, has been a further source of understanding. I have learned that I miss the mark in foreseeable ways. There are habits of the mind and emotion that I have learned and they are not helpful. But the Enneagram is not alone there are at least seven deadly sins identified by great thinkers through out history. These are clearly places that humans tend to fall down or miss the mark. Some of us have a habit of anger; it’s our way of missing the mark, our sin. For others its deceit or pride that is the typical way we fail.

Twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich wrote about sin as separation: Separation from your truest, deepest self, separation from others and community, and separation from God, or meaning, or mystery.

At our deepest, Universalists believe, we want to do right. We want to be connected to others and our communities. The word religion means to tie back; religion then is about reconnecting. The religious task is to help each other over-come that separation; that need to sin. With the help of our communities and their teachings we find our negative patterns of behavior and do our best to get back on track. Put in more traditional language to be religious is to sin less. We might say to be religious is to hit the mark more often; to create less suffering. And to do that we must be able to recognize the patterns of separation within ourselves and within each other. These would include behaviors like: Prejudice / Shame / Keeping secrets / Denial / Telling lies / Resorting to sarcasm / Meanness. Thus my sermon series on sin comes out of a desire to look at our selves and our patterns of missing the mark to see how we might become better people.

Deceit is not one of the seven deadly sins. But it is one of the areas of missing the mark, one common habit of the mind, defined by the Enneagram. There are lots of words that we use for lying; Fib, deception, untruth, falsehood, tale, story, pretend, fake, dishonest, fraud, cheat, trick, fiction, fabrication, deceit, perjury, duplicity, deceive, sedition, and treason to name just a few. Certainly it is one sin that has been in the news a great deal over the last few years. Atlantic monthly has a web site where you can vote for the president you think is the most deceitful. They only give you a choice of the last four. Our current president is in the lead.

One of my favorite comedians, Eddie Izzard, has a wonderful piece on the lies of Bill Clinton. He says we, the U.S., have been lying since before we were country. It might be said to have started with the lies we told to the Natives when we arrived. What makes us think that President Clinton would do anything but lie about sex? In fact Mr. Izzard suggests that lies about sex are less serious than lies about stealing land and intent to do away with an entire group of people.

Lies do come in all shapes and sizes. There are functional lies. Even God told a functional lie. When an angel promised the elderly patriarch Abraham and his aged wife Sarah a child, Isaac, Sarah laughed and said to herself, “After I have withered shall I again have delicate skin? And my husband is old!” When God repeated Sarah’s comment to Abraham, He changed her words, leaving out the hurtful exclamation about Abraham’s age and implying that, in Sarah’s mind, it was only her age that was at issue. Thus God said to Abraham, “Why is it that Sarah laughed, saying: "Shall I in truth bear a child, though I have aged?’" (Genesis 18:12-13). In this distortion, the purpose was to maintain peace between husband and wife. In this case one wonders about the notion of the end justifying the means. For instance is it OK to lie if you believe it will bring about world peace?

Some lies stretch the truth. Some lies exaggerate. Some lies are pure fabrication. All of them serve a purpose. That exterior purpose changes with the lie. Sometimes we lie because we believe it to be true. Sometimes we lie because we are frightened of the truth. Sometimes we lie to accomplish a task. In our task orientated society we feel that the lie is justified if it accomplishes the goal.

But on the inside, to lie we must understand ourselves as separate and on our own. If we were connected to our communities, our colleagues at work, our loved ones we would not need to lie. If someone asks me if I like their dress and I don’t, it is only my disconnection from them, my fear of hurting them and becoming more disconnected that causes me to say yes when I mean no. On the other hand my good friend, who has been my friend for years, will not end of our relationship if I say to her that the new dress is not flattering. Honest communication requires a risk but the more connected we are the less the risk and the less likely we are to lie.

One classic example is Unitarian Universalists tend to dodge questions around religion. We lie about what we believe. We may even not say we go to church, a lie of omission. We do this because we feel disconnected from the mainstream. We know we don’t fit in and we don’t want to fit in even less. We believe, to some extent, that our truth is not real and valuable so it is OK to lie. We don’t feel we are worthy so we lie.

This happens with religion. But you can see it everywhere. Because we feel disconnected and unacceptable we pretend to be what we are not, take credit for what we didn’t do, say our children are doing better than they are, and spend more money than we have to fit in. We lie to some extent because we believe that the universe turns on our own creation. We believe we are only going to make it on our own, and we know we are not sufficient, so we lie. When we understand that we are a part of a much larger whole, a whole with many parts of which we are only one we feel less need to be the one with all the answers, the one on top, less need to be in with this or that group because its all one. Thus less need to present falsehoods.

Lying has become a way of life in our culture perhaps because of the individualistic goal orientated nature of America. We lie because we believe it is up to us alone. We lie to the point that we may not even realize we are doing it. Look at advertising campaigns, look at political campaigns. Look at ourselves. When was the last time you told a lie?

As Unitarians and especially as Universalists we understand that being connected to the greater good is what we all strive for. When we lie we are feeling cut off from something; ourselves, our family or from that whole to which we ultimately strive to connect. To stop lying is impossible. We can all justify the times we have told less than the truth. When it becomes dangerous is when it becomes a way of life.

We will all miss the mark. The key is to recognize when we lie, then to understand that behind that is a desire to feel connected. Then ultimately our task is to fill that connection need. It is my hope that this religion, this community, will help us all tie back to love.

Namaste.