SAYING “NO” TO BAD THINGS: ON NAMING SIN RIGHTLY

“O God of Earth and Altar” was, on my first listen, a downer hymn. It begins with a loud minor chord, and my taste in church music is decidedly more major-key. Furthermore, the words did not strike me as particularly uplifting. Already in the first verse, we have “Our people drift and die,” and then we get to the second and we have terror and lies. As the initial social media campaign for this magazine spread across my feeds, I started to wonder just what the editors were up to with a publication named after this piece of music.

In the intervening months, “O God of Earth and Altar” has not become one of my favorite hymns, though it has grown on me. I’ve come to appreciate the clear way that it names sinful things – death, lies, greed, division – and identifies God’s saving work in response to sin. This hymn is an illustration of the importance of naming sin rightly.

I am unabashedly for the doctrine of sin. Part of this is aesthetic: I love the way its official title, hamartiology, rolls around in my mouth, how it escapes from my lips in six distinct syllables. Part of this is also academic: as a historian and theologian, I study hell and how Christians long ago thought about God’s justice and love in relationship to it. Almost every day, I follow threads in old writings that help me to understand how Christians used to think about sin. But the vast majority of the reasons that I advocate a robust doctrine of sin have to do with the way it allows me to speak honestly about the world and the condition in which I live.

Sin is about naming correctly what is right and what is wrong with the world. Because of this, it is essential for Christian faith. To call something sinful is to say two things at once: first, that something is not part of God’s ideal and desire for the world, and second, that we need God’s help in overcoming it.

Take, for example, the second verse of “O God of Earth and Altar:”

From all that terror teaches
From lies of tongue and pen
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men
From sale and profanation
Of honor and the sword
From sleep and from damnation
Deliver us, good Lord.

Here, many things are named as wrong. We should not let fear be our guide and teacher. Lying is bad, as is comfort of the powerful. Death (“sleep” in the hymn) is our enemy. Yet these things surround us. Being able to identify these things as wrong is a quietly powerful act. To call lying sinful is to admit that it’s not what God wants for us. God does not want us to be led by fear, to experience death, to comfort the cruel at the expense of their victims. Naming sin is a way to identify that this world is not as it should be.

In relief, the doctrine of sin helps to name what God wants for us. These are often things we know from Scripture: God is truth (John 14:6), and is opposed to lying because lies are contrary to who God is. God is perfect love, and God’s perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:8). When we follow fear, we are not following God. Naming sin helps to point us in this direction – away from what God does not want for us, and towards what God does desire for us.

Yet, we are not on our own to overcome sin. At times, discussions of sin in Christian circles can feel a little like self-help; for example,: lying is bad, so you have to be extra careful not to lie. You can live into what God wants for you simply by trying extra hard – setting goals, making good habits, praying the right amount, going to church, etc. But this never lasts. Instead, we need God to help us, to deliver us from sin. Calling something sinful means that we cannot tackle it ourselves. It means that we need God, with us, to save us from it.

There is great hope in this. A half-way doctrine of sin, one that sees sin as only naming bad things, leaves us stuck in a mess where we’re constantly failing to eradicate sin. We’re never doing enough. We’re surrounded by all of the terrible things “O God of Earth and Altar” names, and we never gain any ground. But add this second movement of the doctrine of sin, and we notice something true about God: God is also opposed to these things, and working to deliver us. There’s no clearer illustration of this than the incarnation, which we just celebrated at Christmas. God comes to be with us, to fight sin in our midst, and to save us from the evil that surrounds us.

In the face of lies, Jesus tells the truth. Against the cruel, Jesus shows compassion for the downtrodden of society – the poor, the sick, the widowed, and the orphaned. He shows us what it means to honor the Lord. In his life, death, and resurrection, he worked to defeat death and damnation. God is with us, working against sin. Jesus’s behavior is both a model and a promise: a model for how we too can oppose sin through telling the truth, works of justice, and through letting God, not fear, lead us. But his behavior is also promise that God is already with us, alongside us, and working to deliver us from sin. The call to be delivered from sin, as the hymn ends each verse, is a call for God to bring the work that God is already doing to completion. Sin is never something that we have to face on our own. It is never just our problem to solve. God is actively working against it and opposing it now.

For many years, my friend Bailey had a profile picture that still comes to mind when I think of sin. It showed a black piece of tagboard affixed to the end of a yardstick, a protest sign. On that big black rectangle, the words “NO TO BAD THINGS” were painted in big white block letters. In naming things as sin, we say no to them, but it’s not just us. God says no to them, too. And God joins us in a protest against them, because God says “yes” to us. God’s work against sin is God’s acknowledgement that the world is not as it should be, and God’s commitment to us and all of creation, that things will be made new. Lord, deliver us indeed.