By Wendy Morical
My church home has always been a UCC congregation, from infant baptism to the current day. Over the years, I’ve occasionally had discussions with people who have turned away from church, actively put off or damaged by practices in a church. When I’ve described why I find church-going a positive act of self-care, I’ve found myself asserting that “we don’t talk about sin” in the UCC. This is likely the position I have taken when speaking to those who were made to confess their sinfulness regularly and feel bad about themselves constantly, ultimately deciding they had no place for organized religion in their lives.
I have always known that God loves all of us, as we are, and didn’t understand why some felt they needed to earn back God’s favor, or that they must work to earn a positive judgment at their life’s end. God does love, God IS love!
Therefore, this past Sunday, I braced myself when sin, evil, repentance and even Satan were topics of the sermon. Pastor Laura opened by acknowledging that these are problematical and even abused aspects of Christianity, but in keeping with our search for the constant of God’s love in all places, she tackled the experience of temptations in the desert.
One of the most helpful touchstones in her sermon was a concrete way to reframe sin as, “that which separates us from the love and grace of God.” She spoke about resisting the “evils” that separate us from God. That was something that I could wrap my head around – and something that deepened my understanding of the experience of Lent.
To repent, we were told, is to change your way of thinking in order to cast off that which is evil. Jesus, though tempted mightily, resisted those things that would get in the way of His relationship with God. Pastor Laura called on us this week to be “resisters of evil.” Can we have the courage to resist the small evils that drive a wedge between us and our relationship with a loving God? Might we recommit during this Lenten season to check our impulses toward pettiness, cynicism, judgment, self-service, and other small but sinful habits that separate us from the love God offers us so freely?
Let us praise God not only with our lips but with our living; let us use this season of Lent to reassess what that might mean.