Pray for all sinners

What is sin?

At the very least, sin is anything that breaks or mars the goodness of God’s world. Let us take a very simple plant: tobacco. It is good and God made it good. There is no sin in it and there must be hundreds of uses of the stuff that would cause no harm. If nothing else, it is green and beautiful to the eye. 

God created tobacco, but men decided to overindulge* in pipeweed in a way that is harmful. God created desires, but it was men who learned to hook other men on a desire so they could make money. God created by using a Word, but it was men who took good words and used them to persuade other men to do things that would produce an addiction. God lives in a perfect Triune community that reinforces love, but men use community to harm each other so deeply, at an institutional level, that we misuse weeds to mask our pain.

Whatever the many vices of men that led to one soul getting hooked in a harmful way on tobacco, surely the vice, the sin, is not the final cigarette smoked by the person “hooked.” This person would quit if he could, but he now cannot. The vice, if he had one, was long ago, but now misuse of the weed is a nearly unbreakable habit. At this point, he may need prayer for healing and not so much repentance for sin long ago confessed. The wages of that long ago self-indulgence, long ago confessed, come due when the harm has been done.

This is not the end of the sinfulness of sins: sins done to us, sins we commit whose consequences we do not understand, and the wages are often paid by those least guilty. When it comes to overuse of pipeweed, what of the guilt of the advertisers? What of the companies giving out free samples to the kids to get them hooked? It is a crooked world.

Nobody is “excused” of their choice, or the harms they do. We all must pray for forgiveness of sins, known and unknown. The unknown sins are often the simple act of living in a broken culture where we cannot avoid participating in harmful structures. A bad action is still a bad action even if the harm was unintended.

There is none righteous, no not one.

And yet there is another sense where some actions are not sins. Jesus was without sin, but He paid taxes and commanded His followers to do so. These taxes supported a great Empire which did good, but also harm.  You could not live in that Empire without being entangled in institutional evils, indirectly, but Jesus died sinless.

He did not have to repent for being a provincial in the Empire. Paying a tax was not His sin, even if the coin drawn from the fish’s mouth He used to pay His tax went through many hands only to be used to pay Judas for the Betrayal.

You cannot live without breathing the air of Empire or a fallen Republic. We can sorrow with the Son of Man for that foulness, but breathe we must, if only to preach a sermon like that He gave on the Mount showing a better way.

What of this? Repentance of sin is needful and constant in the life of a Christian, but it should be for sins we commit. We cannot repent of the sins of others or of biological weaknesses that chain us to a bad habit. We are not justified in over-indulgence, but the cause for every overindulgence is not a bad will, choice, or intention. Sometimes it is an addiction or a biologically based problem.

Not every person is sad because they did something wrong or even because something wrong was (directly) done to them. They are sad because in a broken world the sin that broke the world has worked itself out in a brain gone awry.

Medicine might help there more than prayer. But still prayer is needed, always needed!

Why?

It is the brokenness of Creation at the deep level that makes what “is” different than what “ought” to be. We sigh and groan with Creation at this brokenness and we long for the age to come. Yet we must not place on ourselves or our fellows the direct culpability for all the brokenness around us. We are neither that important or that powerful.

We inherit some fallenness, pain, and sorrow.  Some is given to us. Other pain is from devils. We must not repent for being oppressed, but seek liberty. 

So we pray: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. We must, because we sin. But we also can pray: Maranatha, come quickly, Lord Jesus!  because we are also sinned against and so ensnared in sorrow and in pain that has no full healing this side of Paradise.

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I am not arguing that any use of tobacco is sinful, but that overindulgence in anything (food, drink, water) is a vice. Parsimony and underuse of life’s simple pleasures can also grow to be vice, but is less common in me at least, so I do not write so much about it.