Tonight, I’m speaking at Otter Creek’s Vespers gathering on forgiveness and reconciliation. I’m going to say something like this (based upon stuff I’ve written in The Feast).

The corporate and individual power of sin consume much of contemplative life.

Bishop Desmond Tutu offers one way to engage the subject of sin in healthy and life-affirming fashion.¹ Bishop Tutu is most known for his appointment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, by South African icon and leader extraordinaire, Nelson Mandela. An ordained priest, Tutu was able to accomplish in South Africa, in the immediate wake of apartheid’s death and destruction, what some Christian scholars are calling one of the most important Christian contributions of the twentieth century.

Apartheid, simply understood as the legal separation of people based on race and skin color, flourished in South Africa for much of the twentieth century. It was a brutal system employed by a powerful white minority to control a disempowered black majority. “You know you’ve created God in your own image,” writes Anne Lamott, “when God hates all the same people as you.” Tutu’s landmark recollection of the Apartheid Era in South Africa, No Future Without Forgiveness, is loaded with stories that illustrate the injustice and sins committed by humanity against humanity. Stories which feel, look, and sound eerily similar to the racism/classism/sexism (and all other “isms” that plagues us in the United States even to this day).

When God accosted Adam and remonstrated with him about contravening the order God had given about not        eating a certain fruit, Adam had been less than forthcoming in accepting responsibility and disobedience. No, he shifted the blame to Eve, and when God turned to Eve, she too had taken a leaf from her husband’s book (not the leaf with which she tried ineffectually to hide her nakedness) and tried to pass the buck. We are not told how the serpent responded to the blame pushed on it. So we should thus not have been surprised at how reluctant most people were to acknowledge their responsibility for the atrocities done under apartheid. They were just being descendants of their forebears and behaving true to form in being in the denial mode or blaming everyone and everything except themselves. Yes, it was all in our genes. “They” were to blame. There we go again, showing ourselves as true descendants of our first parents.

We are all guilty. We are all sick. We have all broken relationship with fellow humans and with God. Our sins desperately need naming. We desperately need forgiving.

Humans all too easily become the very thing we claim to be against. Our fear and anger in relation to the monster often acts as a catalyst in causing us to become monsters ourselves. As Bishop Peter Storey, another survivor of South African apartheid, reminds us, “One of the tragedies of life, sir, is it is possible to become like that which we hate most . . . .”

I believe the only hope for me, the church, and humanity, is the language of sin and the power of forgiveness.

This is what I believe.