I have a lot of baggage about sin

Alt title: Ash Wednesday was a tough one for me

Me rewriting the Ash Wednesday song for the 50th time, captured by Meg.

I grew up in a faith tradition centered around personal salvation. I heard many threats of God’s anger and eternal damnation. Sin was baked into my bones, and my mistakes and wrongdoings left me groveling at the cross. Jesus sacrificed himself for my sins to pacify a vengeful and angry God. I believed God loved me despite who I was and what I had done. 

I’m certainly not the first Christian to dismantle this idea and go searching for a faith that doesn’t see God that way. I think God loves me because of the person God created me to be. God wants our closeness, but God does not become less of God if God doesn’t get it. God loves us and created us for goodness. To fully accept that love is not to become someone else but to peel away the layers that keep us from being integrated to that goodness again. 

Peeling away those layers of blindness, we see the rift between us and God. We see how God bears our rejections and never walks away - even through death. God offers us forgiveness and reconciliation, and it moves us to change how we see ourselves and how we move in the world. When we are integrated to God’s goodness in ourselves, we see things as they really are - our suffering, our joy, our pain, our desires - and we know God is with us. God has given us this life so we can live it together. 

Photo by Timothy Pakron

My children have taught me this lesson most clearly. If I walk it back to how I was raised to feel about God’s love for me, it’s not how I would describe my love for my children. My love for them just is. Their belovedness can’t be bought or earned. I can’t imagine being so angry with them that I would withhold love. As they became toddlers, they began to show me the full range of their emotions, and I had to take stock of how I wanted to respond. Do I want their compliance or do I want connection? I want to give them love, safety and security, not fear and shame. Of course, there are moments where I don't get this right, and in my gut, I never feel farther away from my kids in those moments.

So, what do I think sin is? I’m no theologian, but I think it’s the distance we put between ourselves and God, or the distance we put between ourselves and other people. When we see those barriers and try to remove them, we feel freer, less self-conscious and more integrated with each other. Maybe a world full of free people is what the Kingdom of God will look like? 

Photo by Timothy Pakron

So, it turns out my journey through the church year might be darker than I imagined. It’s hard for me to look this season in the face and write songs about sin. I think about some of the worship songs I sang - arms raised, eyes closed - in the church gymnasiums of my youth. Those ideas floating underneath the surface did a lot of harm. 

But, I trust that God has always been with me in this wilderness. Like I said before, this project is my attempt to remake a space within myself for devotion, presence, and prayer. I've found it therapeutic to put things back together with the help of these ancient prayers and traditions. The God I've found there seems sturdy enough for my big questions and my soft heart. 

Listen to my song for Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent, "Begin Again." Read the lyrics and credits here.  

Did something change your mind about sin? Or did you not change your mind in the end? I'm curious to know how other people feel. We can talk in the comments :)