Are We Really "Sick With Sin”?

Imagine that you wake up one morning in your bed, and you are sick. You have a headache, and you are lightheaded. You have a scorching fever, your stomach is violently upset, and you feel like you might vomit. You are so weak and in so much pain that all you can manage is to roll off the bed and crawl toward the bathroom. You realize that even accomplishing the most basic of tasks today will be beyond your capabilities.

The next day, imagine that your illness is gone, but now you wake up physically bound in multiple ways. Your hands, your wrists, your elbows, your knees, your ankles, and your feet are all tied together - not in a painful way, but it almost completely prevents you from moving. All you can manage is to wiggle yourself off the bed and along the floor. Just like the previous day, you realize that accomplishing even the most basic of tasks will be impossible.

Two days. Two different ways of being incapacitated. Two different ways of being rendered less than a fully functioning human being. Sickness, or boundedness. Which one of these is the better way to think about the human predicament?

The Christian faith, like virtually every belief system, is built on the notion of the human predicament. It assumes that there is some problem, some deficiency, something about our lives and our world that is not what it should be.

Christians explain this problem through the story of Adam and Eve. What was originally an idyllic, innocent existence is spoiled when the first humans ignore God's command and eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Since then, humans have faced the predicament of being born into this "sinful" condition, and we have struggled mightily to know how we might be delivered from it.

Which brings us back to those two days I asked you to imagine. By and large, Christians have viewed this predicament like the first day. We are born into a world where we and everyone around us are sick with sin. We have inherited the disease that first entered the world with Adam and Eve, and we continue the problem through our own disobedience.

Many of our classic hymns reflect this notion of sin as sickness, such as "There Is A Balm in Gilead" - where the saving work of Christ is repeatedly referred to as a healing ointment for the sin-sick soul. This perspective assumes that there is not only a predicament to the human situation, but that there is dysfunction - that we are doing something wrong and must be cured of our waywardness.

When we see our problem as sickness to be healed, it causes us to look for where the sickness resides - which leads us into negative attitudes of judgment and condemnation. Both with ourselves and toward others, we frame individual behaviors in terms of healthy and unhealthy, right and wrong, or even good and evil. And we see larger systems and the world as a whole in term of brokenness.

But let's look at our human predicament like that second day - when we didn't wake up sick, but rather bound up and tied together. What if, instead of being born with a congenital disease called "sin," we are born with chains that limit us - that do not need healing, but that need to be untied and unbound? How does this shift change the way we look at ourselves, at one another, and at this human predicament that we share? Does it lessen our negative tendencies toward judgment and condemnation, and instead increase our positive tendencies toward growth and freedom? In a world full of people destroying one another over notions of right and wrong and good and evil, is an orientation toward freedom instead of healing the more peaceful and compassionate path?