Bible Study on the Web
| Home | Studies | Books/Audios | Comments | About this Work |
The Sin You See
By Fred Pruitt
This may sound a little funny, after all the talking about seeing “One,” but
in Christ we have this wonderful new sight, which is, in a sense, seeing
“two,” but not in the same sense in which we speak of a divided
consciousness.
What I mean is simply this: we see both temporally AND eternally. Both are
completely real. One, however, is transitory, fleeting moments speeding by,
and the other is the Permanently Real.
Now, this may really confuse things, but in a divided consciousness, it
appears as if we just see “one”: we see only the temporal, where everything
in appearance is disjointed and separate. It is the Eternal sight, joined
with the temporal sight, that gives the WHOLE. And the Whole is ONE. In
other words, we see the temporal through the eyes of the Eternal. That is
the key.
So when I say “the sin you see is in you,” I am talking about seeing only
one side of things.
So let me offer a little
explanation, lest some would miss our meaning, and think I'm just promoting
some head-in-the-sand Pollyanna approach to life, that has nothing to do
with reality. As if people could be all around us, chopping off heads,
raping and killing, lying and cheating, while we smile gaily and say, like
Sergeant Shultz on Hogan's Heroes, “I see nussing!”
In the Eternal realm, where we are joined with God, one spirit with Him,
there is only God. There is only His Love. There is only His purpose, His
will, His Life, being expressed. This is our Home. It is our rest. This is
our peace.
In the temporal, we are confronted with strife and division. It is part and
parcel of this world. When we did not know the Lord, outside the kingdom of
God in spirit and consciousness, that strife and division, along with all
its ramifications, was all we could see or know. And the solution to the
contrariety of this temporal world, when that is all we know, is likewise
something taken from one side or another of the strife and division. That is
what it means to live from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
However, seeing things from the topside down, so to speak, changes
everything. One takes things at face value as they appear, we do see the
plain sight of what is before us, be it evil, strife, disagreement, but at
the same time we can see the whole forest, instead of just the one tree. We
see both, the individual trees and the whole forest.
I've been amused of late [written in 2002] by the hullabaloo our Christian
Attorney General has caused in Washington, by his draping of the partially
topless Statue of Justice, so that her one bare breast is covered. Now, I
don't know Mr. Ashcroft, so I would be hard-pressed to have any true idea as
to why he ordered the offending naked breast of a statue covered up. Of
course the press has eaten it up, as well as right-wingers and left-wingers
battling it out over the attendant issues.
The situation does provide, however, a timely example of what I am talking
about. And the issue here is, “Where is the sin?”
Is the statue sinning by being partially naked? Well, of course that's
silly, and we all know it. Statues can't sin. Well then, what about the
sculptor, was he or she sinning in creating this partially nude statue? Or,
as the saying goes, is “beauty” (or sin) purely in the eyes of the beholder?
I've told part of this story many times before, but I think I've left the
following particular part out. In 1972 Janis and I, who were card-carrying
hippies, took a hitchhiking trip from Georgia to Colorado to participate in
the first Rainbow Gathering, held on Arapaho Mountain on the western side of
the Rockies. We got there and there were 10,000 people or so milling around
in a huge meadow on top of the mountain. We had been there a night and part
of a day, checking things out, when we heard that part of the site, over
a-ways from the rest of everything, had been designated the “nude area.” So,
out of curiosity we decided to go check it out. Like I said, the festival
site was in this huge mountaintop meadow, but all around the meadow were
forested areas where most people were camping. The nude section was in one
of the forested areas, away from the main sites. So we trekked on over
there.
Now, Janis and I are both shy folk, when it comes to bodily-exposure. I've
never liked that locker-room “everybody look at me naked” thing, and
likewise the same for Janis. So we didn't go there to take off our clothes,
but just to see what it was all about.
And it was true, as we found out once we got there, that everybody (except
us) was naked as a jaybird, though some had on shoes or headbands. Hundreds
and hundreds of naked people, all walking around and talking and acting
nonchalant, as if all is “normal.” There were all sizes, shapes and races,
naked as they could be. You could see all the female breasts you could ever
imagine, as well as male and female genitals, and butts. If seeing people
naked is your thing, you would have been in heaven. Naked hippie heaven.
But for us, after about five minutes, it really got quite boring.
Truthfully, it was really no big deal.
Look, everybody's naked. So what? Look, there's 400 penises. Big deal! Look over there – a thousand breasts! Ho-hum ... Look at all those butts! Fat ones, skinny ones, concave ones, convex ones, cellulite ones! After a while it was truly a case of “if you seen one, you've seen 'em all.” Other than the fact that it confirmed by sight what I already knew, which was that we've all got the same equipment though with slightly different packaging, it really was hardly worth the walk over to the place to see it. My life was neither enhanced nor damaged by the sight of hundreds of naked people walking around.
My feeling at the time was
that I really didn't see the point. It seemed quite impractical, for one
thing. I mean, who wants to sit on dirt or on a rock (or worse, a tree
branch) with their naked bottom? It made me appreciate the value of
clothing, not only as a covering for our bodies so no one else could see
what we look like, but as protection from the hard earth and stones and
wood. As well as the sun and other natural elements. It was, contrary to
what some might think, NOT sexy!
And that's not my only exposure to that sort of nudity. When I first lived
with Janis, when we lived in a big hippies house in Atlanta, we lived with
her girlfriends, the two Judy's. And the two Judy's, when in their own home,
liked to walk around in nothing but their bikini panties. And since they
were both nice-looking young women, you didn't hear me complain, though I
never remember lusting after them, nor were they trying to entice me in any
way. It was, for them, “normal.” (Though I have to admit, it was always a
little “special” to me.)
Now, with those experiences under my belt, I'm not too jacked up over a
statue in Washington with exposed female mammalia. But then I don't suppose
Mr. Ashcroft ever was a hippie and I doubt he was at the 1972 Rainbow
Gathering, so to him, maybe such a sight is a bit much for him. I really
don't know.
Now, what's the point of my stories?
Well, just this. I don't see “sin” when I look at the breast-exposed Statue
of Justice. Some others, perhaps, do. Where is the sin? I would say it is in
the people who see it.
Ok, you say, that's all well and good for statues and inanimate objects, but
what about when I see people (or myself) caught up in what really is sin,
things like hating, lying, cheating, violence, etc. What about that, where
is the sin, then? Are you saying there is no sin there?
No, I'm not saying that. What I AM saying is that when you see from the
Eternal point of view, you begin to see people as Who they really are,
rather than what they temporarily by appearance seem to be at this
particular moment in time. You begin to see that all people, regardless of
race, creed, or color, are forms of the Eternal God, that His Life is in
them, that the eyes they look out of are His eyes, that the face you see
looking back at you is HIS face, even though for a moment possibly distorted
in Time. Even if they are temporarily held in the devil's prison, still His
face is behind their faces. That's why Jesus could come and be among us. He
could penetrate past the Satanic veneer which had coated us all through the
Fall, through to the Seed that had also been planted there at the moment of
their casting out from the Garden.
Jesus said to the Apostles after the Resurrection:
“Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever
sins ye retain, they are retained.” (Jn 20:23).
What that means is that we begin to see with a heavenly vision, seeing all
One in Christ, which is the true Eternal Reality. It means that in our
faith, we see people as they truly are, as God sees them, for He sees ALL
through the Life of His Son, since indeed, ALL IS His Son. The veil of the
temple, separating all of humanity from the Holy of Holies, has been torn in
two. The separation no longer exists. It has been done away in the Cross.
Therefore, instead of incessantly pointing out shortcomings and failures,
which is not news to any of us, we are free to declare the heavenly reality
as the truth here in the temporal. We can choose to see past the sins of
others, to in a sense not “see them,” and in our faith see and declare the
real Eternal truth. It is in that sense we “remit” sins. They (the sins) are
not the point. They have been completely taken care of. What IS the point is
the rising up of Christ in them, revealing Himself inwardly in each, and
ourselves as agents to call forth that which is True. As Jesus pointed out,
Moses (the law) has those to preach him on every street corner. The law’s
purpose is to expose sin and it is accompanied by condemnation. It is
necessary that it does its job.
But the Messiah comes along, in apparent disregard for the law (though not really), and declares to everyone He sees, except those who believe in their own self-earned righteousness, “Man, (or Woman), thy sins are forgiven thee.”
And all the self-righteous
ones were scandalized and angered to the point of murder. They still are
today.
Everybody knows if you beat a dog, you probably make it mean. Same thing
with people. Browbeating people, including ourselves, continuously holding
over their heads their transitory failures of love which they cannot help, more likely serves to
only fix people in them, rather than providing a means of escape. When
someone who is under the devil’s spell of fear and self-loathing (which is
all humanity at one time or another) hears something contrary to that which
they've heard and believed all their lives about themselves and others, that
somehow they are accepted as who they are at the present moment, that
somehow they are precious, that somehow they are loved just as they are,
that gives rise to faith. It's like pouring water on a seed in the ground,
which causes it to germinate. It, the water, which is Truth to the seed,
brings forth the Life of the Seed.
Christ is the Seed within every human being on the face of the earth – the
Light that lights every man who comes into the earth. Perhaps that Seed is
covered by some pretty hard earth, by stones, by other plants growing wild
-- the devil's wild overgrowth.
But no matter. For Christ is the Strongest Seed in the Universe, and that Seed
lies there, dormant for a time in every man, until someone comes along and
pours Water on it. And then it grows up of Itself, and breaks out of that
overgrowth of the devil, finally pulling up that false plant by the root,
and Christ is formed!
The Water you pour on it is the Truth spoken in love and faith. That's what
Paul meant by returning good for evil, and in so doing we heap coals of fire
on their heads. People EXPECT evil in return for evil. They are totally
discombobulated when Love comes back at them instead. It upsets the
applecart.
Even if we die in the process, like Stephen, who prayed as he was dying,
“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” (“Do not retain this sin.”) At
least one there in the crowd, a young man named Saul, caught it. (Acts
8:57-60)
Sometimes, yes, we are called to “retain” sins. Sometimes the wrath of God
is to remain. Things need to be burned up, and only the consuming fire of
God will do it. The Spirit lets you know.
Let me finish this with a passage from Thomas Merton's “The New Man”:
“The force that holds this together is charity, and that is why
everything that Christ tells us about union with God and the knowledge of
the Father is centered upon charity. His own union with the Father depends
on the love of the Father for Him. Our union with Him depends on His love
for us, which is simply the extension of the Father's love, through Him, to
ourselves. And the charity of Christ, which springs from the Father as from
its hidden and infinite source, goes out through us to those who have not
yet known Him, and unites them, through Christ in us, to the Father. By our
love for other men, we enable them to discover Christ in themselves and to
pass through Christ to the Source, the Beginning of all life, the Father,
present and hidden in the depths of their own being. Finding Him, they who
have long been torn and divided by the disintegrating force of their own
illusions are able to discover and integrate themselves in one.”
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of
these is charity*.” (1 Cor 13:13)
Amen.
*"Charity" is King James language for "love."
Back to Miscellaneous Articles on Union
E-Mail Fred at fhpjrrom@gmail.com