Transcript

One area of my understanding that the Catholic Church has helped me with so much is in the area of sin.

Uh, having been in many different Protestant denominations, I always embraced the doctrine of the church that I was in, or at least I tried to.

So it sort of ran the gamut from, um, once saved, always saved, you just accept Jesus as your savior and you're- you're in, to total depravity where, you know, the, you can't do anything right and even the very best thing you do is still very evil and bad.

So that when God looks at you, he can't stand to look at you and so he has to put Jesus in front of you in order to tolerate you.

So I always felt lost somewhere between those two extremes.

And in the Catholic Church, it's different and it's beautiful.

And it's- and it's helpful because we begin to understand that God really loves us just the way we are because even though we w- have to deal with sin, we're still at least 51% good.

The day I heard a priest say that, just the light went on inside of me that this was the God that I love, that's the way He would feel about me.

He would never give up on me.

There would always be that 1% tipping point in my favor.

And so that has been a profound understanding that- that I just can't wait to tell all my Protestant friends about if they'll give me the chance.

As a Catholic, while we know that we have a fallen state, we know that that wasn't always so.

The Catholic faith teaches us that God created us good and perfect.

Adam and Eve existed in the garden before they fell, and that nature was- was completely good.

And so we're not the snow-covered dung hills that Martin Luther proposed us to be.

What's beautiful about our Catholic faith is that it recognizes that we all struggle with concupiscence, that we have this disordered tendency towards sin.

But the church also gives us really wonderful remedies for that, things like the rosary and the sacraments of course.

In my own life what's been very helpful is looking at the lives of the saints.

The saints are proof positive that even though we struggle with sin, that we each have our own vices that we have to contend with, that those vices can be overcome with God's grace.

That we can live a holy life.

That we can become the men and women that God has created us to be.

When we look at the saints, we- we see, or at least we get a glimpse, of what human nature is supposed to be and the great heights to which we can rise with God's grace.

I think from my, uh, Methodist tradition, and even in the time of year I lived and served in the church, I think what we're dealing with is- is people would rather not use the word sin, would rather not draw attention to the areas in which, you know, humanity fails, uh, or where- where we personally, um, fall short.

Uh, so I- I brought that with me, um, into the church.

And- and what I think is so beautiful about the faith is- is it helps us remember that it's really only through Christ that we are brought into, uh, union with the Holy Spirit, I mean with the Trinity.

It's the only reason, uh, it's through Christ that we're united with the Father and- and- and are part of, uh, the Holy Trinity.

It's because of- of God's grace and God's mercy.

So I- I've never connected, I mean not- not having been a cradle Catholic, I don't connect with the idea of Catholic guilt.

What I think is such a beautiful thing is that I entrust myself to the mercy of God.

I knew the story from Genesis of the fall of man, of what happened with Adam and Eve from the time I was a child.

Knew it well.

But when I became Catholic, all kinds of aspects of that story and the reality, the beginning of the history of our human race, uh, became alive for me in whole new ways.

And one of the important ways was in- in thinking about what it means to- to have sin.

I came from a tradition that talked about our sin nature as if it were natural to us to- to be sin.

And- and that went along with the- the popular idea to sin is human, it's only human.

And I remember someone asking one time, Well, if Jesus was fully human, then he didn't sin.

How could he be fully human?

'Cause it really is human to sin.

I remember one time my father, um, told me he was annoyed he would go to Catholic funerals and he was very annoyed that they didn't talk a lot about the person and what the person had done and- and where the person was now.

A- and I understood it later as an adult that really that's- that's an illustration of a different theology.

You know, there are many, um, parts of grieving and mourning and many You know, like the wake.

At a Catholic wake, certainly you would go on and on and talk about, uh- uh, good times and bad times that you had with that person.

But by the time you get to the mass or Christian burial, it's about Christ and what Christ has done for each of us.

And the fact that we throw ourselves upon the mercy of God, there isn't anything that we could do to measure up.

No one.

There's nothing we could do.

And we don't know where we are.

We entrust ourselves to the mercy of God.

And, uh, you know, we- we pass into eternity and we don't know, but we know that God loves and is abounding in steadfast love.

So that's something that I understood much later.

There was a reason you didn't go to a Catholic funeral and hear someone go on and on about how wonderful the person was and- and we know where they are.

Even today when we say in the mass, you know, Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, it- it reminds us that- that we're fallen, that nobody measures up.

And what I came to understand is that know when we- we look at the creation of man, we were created to be something perfect and beautiful and whole.

It is not our nature to be sinful.

It's a deficit in our nature.

It's a- it's a fault.

It's a loss.

It's the loss of the original righteousness, that original justice that we had.

And that in a- in a very deep, genuinely mysterious way, but- but real way, Jesus is the man who is fully human, more human than we are.

Because we're still less than fully human because of our sin, but he's called us to that perfection.

He's called us to that holiness.

He's called us to be fully human.

And because of that, we can overcome the fall.