When sparrows fly
Because they are plenty, sparrows fly about beneath my awareness save the occasional notice.
But when a hawk swoops down and captures his prey with an unexpected suddenness it is a rare event and I take notice. Sin, I believe, follows a similar pattern. Like the sparrow, my small sins fly beneath my awareness, and like the hawk, large sins descend into consciousness.
Distinct in my awareness, swooping down around the age of ten, as my friend and I rode in the back seat of his mother’s car, a conversation took place regarding Hell’s population. My friend believed Hell indeed was populated with sinners. I, believing God was all-loving, stated my thought God forgave each, and everyone eventually ended up in Heaven. His mother never commented on this back-seat theology, but I’m sure she managed a smile.
I can’t tell you who was right. We spoke as 10-yearolds from two sides of the same coin. God is all-loving. Hell is populated. Of course, there is a right, living apart from us, absolute and unchangeable, emanating not from a back seat or from some innocent childhood construction.
Sin hinges on time, the whole crux of the human problem. Thinking there is enough and believing our final time is out there in our future, we spin conversations around philosophical (and actual) lines in the sand. If we knew when our given end would come, being right would offer little value and consequence. As long as our ideas satisfy us, death seems a far off place. When hell and death are banished from thought, little sins become not sin but choice, a benign means to separate us from full communion with God.
No matter the sin unnoticed or the sin well-known or the belief perpetuated, to be right clings to us as a hawk clutches prey or as John Wesley noted, we are “not so easily prevailed upon to part with a favorite opinion.”
Christians are called to live as if time does not exist. By its very definition, eternity knows not time, only place. As long as right is the goal, lines weary us and deter us from living there. Isn’t it possible when we draw lines or hold dear to our opinion, we end up in the wrong place? Aren’t lines time?
When man fell from the garden, he was cast into ignorance, but God did not send him forth without provision. Within him, he retained free will and conscience, an often ignored and sometimes misinformed sense. C.S. Lewis said, “All through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it (conscience). None of them ever quite succeeded.”
But from that conscience, emanating imperfectly from it, is a sense there is a truth apart from us showing us our little sins, chastising our wish to be right when we know we’re wrong or ignorant and each revelation asks us to commune with our Lord.
“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15, NKJV).