It’s the Little Sins

23 May 2024   Mark 9:41-50

“Keep salt in yourselves and you will have peace with one another.”  

Mark 9:50

In the 1990s many U.S. cities adopted a new model of policing based on what was called the “Broken Windows Theory.” According to that theory, inattention to visible signs of disorder, like broken windows, has the effect of causing more crime. When people start getting the idea that small crimes like vandalism, jaywalking, loitering, and fare evasion don’t matter, they start looking around for other laws that don’t matter, and crime escalates. If, on the other hand, police are vigilant about these small signs of disorder, people get the impression that the small things do matter, and they don’t escalate their behavior to more serious crimes. Police departments deploying the “Broken Windows” theory of policing saw significant reductions in all kinds of crime through the 1990s.

Many people have accustomed themselves to many, often a great many, small forms of sin – habits of speech, habits of thought, habits of ordinary interaction that are not gross departures from the example of Jesus, but are departures all the same and drive us, if only a little bit at a time, from the righteous path. The Prodigal Son didn’t start by demanding his inheritance and heading for a far country and riotous living. It was a lot of little things over time that drove him to that, little sins that were unrepented, and therefore unseen. Those sins congealed into habits, and it was the habits that drove the Prodigal to a far country, and ultimately to being a swineherd, yearning for the food the pigs ate. Sometimes these habits have been with us so long that we are scarcely aware of them, and trying to break those habits makes us stumble awkwardly. We catch ourselves, sometimes before, sometimes just after we say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, back up apologetically and start over – “Sorry, what I meant to say was….” We feel clumsy, sometimes ridiculous as we try to internalize a new rule.

The clumsiness, however, is only what repentance feels like at first. It isn’t fun; it is the occasion of frustration and embarrassment, unlearning and relearning. But it is also the beginning of order that results finally in holiness, and holiness is simply order directed toward God. This is what Jesus was referring to when he talked about the “salt” in our lives. Salt by itself is not especially tasty. However, when it is used in the right proportions in food, it brings out the best in the food’s flavor. Used in slightly different proportions it also preserves food from rot. Similarly, order directed toward God – aka holiness – brings out the best in us, and the best in the people around us. It also preserves us from moral decay and intellectual rot.

Visible signs of disorder unattended accumulate and cause the habits that make Prodigal Sons and Daughters. Like invasive kudzu, disorder attaches itself to any signs of life and tries to smother it. It can only be defeated by repentance, which stumbles and stutters at first, until it finds its feet and speaks the words of life that order our lives toward God.

Holiness is repentance that keeps going. It is conjugating verbs, and diagramming sentences, erasing and rewriting, until suddenly, out of nowhere, one line of a poem forms. And then the diagramming and conjugating and erasing don’t seem to be burdens so much. We start to have a hunch that language is the handmaid of beauty, and then page after page of yearning and struggle with pen in hand is nothing if only we can glimpse the next line.

Holiness is stuttering toward fluency and stumbling toward dancing. It is the aching to hear the poem that is fighting its way out of our heads and onto the page. It is babbling tuned and trained and focused until it becomes a psalm. It is the fight that creates the order that shows the glory of God.