While travelling in Ireland last summer, we attended a variety of worship services. One was at a combined Presbyterian/Methodist church in Limerick.
        It was like entering a time warp. We sang hymns that I haven't encountered in 40 years. We heard a sermon that could have come straight out of 1960.
        Tom Harpur made a similar observation in Florida. “We deliberately attended a different Christian church each Sunday for several weeks,” he wrote in The Emerging Christian Way (CopperHouse, 2006). He listed six denominations, and continued: “What was extraordinary was the similarity of the sermons. They all came from one mould. If you closed your eyes, it could be the same preacher… Each homily, apart from the odd illustration, could have been preached 75 to 150 years ago.”
        There's a central theme to these sermons, I think. Their language takes for granted that we are all sinners.
        But I no longer think of myself as a sinner. Flawed, yes. Human, yes. But the term “sinner” no longer moves me.

Flawed definitions
        I've seen sin defined as “Missing the mark.” That is, in target shooting, darts, or basketball, one aims at a specific target. But one rarely hits it – more often, the shot goes astray.
        That's a fairly good analogy for sin. One starts with good intentions; they go astray.
        But missing the mark occasionally (even regularly) doesn't make me a sinner. Bouncing a basketball off the rim is a lot closer to being right than bashing the referee. Or sulking on the bench, refusing to play at all.
        To think of myself as a sinner because I miss the mark is to penalize me for making the effort to hit the mark.
        And not even the saints hit the mark all the time.
        So I prefer to think of myself as an imperfect saint.
        Which means that much of the old-time rhetoric about being a sinner in need of salvation goes right past me. Or over my head.
        That's a watershed thought.

Obsessed with sin
        Look at some of the traditional hymns. Luther's “A Mighty Fortress” focuses more on the power of the Devil, the “ancient foe,” the “prince of darkness,” than on God's grace.
        The United Church of Canada's 1940 “Statement of Faith” reasons that Jesus was necessary simply because sin was so pervasive and so powerful. Jesus could not be just another prophet or good example. He had to be more than human, because no human could conquer sin.
        As I wrote in my book SIN: A New Understanding of Virtue and Vice, “The whole carefully constructed structure that starts with God, moves on through Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity, turns out to have as its fulcrum, its raison d'être, not God but sin… Without that overwhelming reality of sin, Jesus would be unnecessary.”
        Obsessed by sin, we become captives of it.
        I'd rather be obsessed by, say, empathy. By at least aiming for the basket, instead of feeling guilty about missing it.