The eCrozier

Our sins are stronger than we are – Psalm 65:3 (Book of Common Prayer)

For much of Church history, the Psalmist’s conclusion wasn’t questioned. It was simply true: “Our sins are stronger than we are.” We used to believe that left to our own devices, and sin being what sin is, we’d often drag ourselves, and those around us, “down to the pit,” as the Psalmist elsewhere puts it. But we’ve nearly lost the capacity to speak in these terms and thus we’ve no way of conceptualizing the ways that our sins drive our neighbors “down to the pit.” I believe there’s a connecting thread between our lost capacity for the vocabulary of sin and the growing poverty rate in our country.

Many people today are drowning in poverty. There are 46.2 million of us living below the poverty line, the highest number in the 52 years. Poverty has also engulfed 16.4 million children. That’s 22 percent of all children in the U.S., the highest numbers since 1962, and the highest percentage since 1993. The number of us in deep poverty (defined as less than half of the poverty line, or about $11,000) now stands at 20.5 million, or about 6.7 percent of the population, up from 4.5 percent in 2000.

Our Christian faith gives us the language to talk truthfully about this, but, as I wrote above, we’ve nearly lost the capacity to do so. That doesn’t mean that sin has totally left the Church’s vocabulary. It merely means that part of our sin is that we have blind spots about our sin. Those who still use the language of sin and believe it’s a powerful force in human life (a “high” doctrine of sin) tend to view sin as limited to one’s personal violations of God’s will. And those who are uncomfortable both with the notion of sin and its vocabulary (a “low” doctrine of sin), they’re left with feeble language when it comes to addressing the devastating reality of poverty. So, they use terms like “unfairness,” “inequality,” or “injustice” Those terms imply that with a tweak here and a vote there we can fix poverty, but those concepts lack a motivational robustness because they don’t necessarily point us toward being out of right relationship with God.

The number of us suffering poverty is increasing because we haven’t been able to call poverty what it truly is: a profound sin against God and our neighbor. If we recapture a “high” doctrine of sin (which I believe the Bible bears out), then we’d recognize our guilt in what we’ve done and be motivated to amend our lives collectively. We’d demand far more governmental intervention into the economic marketplace in terms of job creation, affordable housing, and food support. Sinners that we are, something needs to slow down our greed and avarice, which leads to a disregard for our neighbor’s plight. We’d also demand more from our religious and civic organizations; that they’d also be engines of affordable housing and hunger alleviation. But if we don’t believe that our sin is real and a prime cause of poverty, if we continue to confine sin to a narrow slice of human behavior or disregard its profound reality altogether, then nothing will change. It’s time to admit “our sins are stronger than we are” and then put in place serious structures that will mitigate how our sin devastates poor people. We’re allowing poverty because we have a poverty of language about sin.

+Scott