10 November 2005

Stephen G. Ray, Jr. writes about social sin and Christian responsibility in "Do No Harm."

I begin this book about sin-talk by bringing attention to the eye because sin, and our discourse about it, has everything to do with how we see the world and one another. What we name as sin, how we respond to it, and the culpability that we ascribe to the sinner correlates strongly with the interpretive framework through which we see those persons and their actions. If we otherwise think well of certain sinners, their sin likely gets a different sort of scrutiny that does the sin of persons to whom we are less well disposed.
...the behaviors of societies, peoples, and churches are conditioned by the types of assessments they make of sinners in their midst. There are very real systematic and material consequences to the way that sin and sinners are named.

I read this page in the introduction and decided I needed to press on into the rest of the book. Investigating something like sin-talk is very different than writing about sin. It appears as thought sin-talk may become destructive to the lives of people within a community and therefore, this sin-talk becomes that which breaks apart community and relationships. How we see someone and how that seeing agrees or disagrees with how we view sin can have a great impact on how we live in community...or with whom we choose to live...or worship...or commune. We have a group of 39 people going to see the newest Harry Potter movie in a few weeks. I know that there are some people in churches that think this is awful...as though we are handing ourselves over to the powers of evil. Harry and his friends are primarily seen as wizards and witches. That instantly puts them in a category of people that are to be outside of our contact. Even if the characters are fictional, we cannot associate with them...even though they are only in books...or a movie. Some good religious folks can view some things and people as so deeply a part of their definition of sin that they cannot see anything else but what their eyes have been trained to see. A more horrible example would be the people who live around us whose skin is a different color or they live in a different part of town or go to those schools. They are viewed differently than our "own." Therefore, we cannot see and will not see who they are....just what they are....and that vision quickly turns into sin-talk.

Connection: It is good to ask another person what they see. It may often help us to see things in a new light. Then, ask someone who is quite different from yourself what they see....it may be quite different and we can then begin to talk about the wider picture of how we see the day.

Lord you give us a way to view others. That is not always simply by seeing with our eyes. We also see with our heart and emotions. In all the ways of our seeing, help us to be gracious and able to see your children in a new light...the light of your Blessed Reign. Amen.