1 John 1:1—2:2
May 4, 2003
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When I was in Pennsylvania last week, I was reminded of the annual chore of “spring cleaning.” In California you can physically clean your house anytime during the year. But in places on the East Coast when the harsh weather keeps you hibernating indoors during a long, hard winter, spring is the time you begin to go outdoors again. The first time you open up your windows to let the fresh air come in is an event with almost spiritual meaning.
I noticed that the residue of salt and sand used to help motorists drive in icy and snowy road conditions was still in need to be swept up by street cleaners. Broken branches from the weight of snow scattered across the front of lawns still needed to be picked up. The annual task of taking out your rugs, hanging them on the clothesline and beating them to get out all the dust was just about to start. The rite of spring includes “spring cleaning.” But whether you are living in Pennsylvania or in California, no one likes “spring cleaning.”
Roomba
Last year, an artificial intelligence lab at MIT created an answer to our “spring cleaning” problems. After twelve years and 30 generations of prototypes, they have come up with “Roomba.” Roomba is a practical and affordable robotic appliance to vacuum and sweep your floors. Priced at $199, this small but powerful vacuum cleaner sweeps as it moves around your kitchen or living room while you are reading a book and sipping coffee.
Listen to what the Hammacher Schlemmer website said about Roomba,
This self-propelled, self-navigating sweeper-vac is compact but powerful,
with suction that collects surface dirt and pet hair from your carpet, tile, and
hardwood floors. A sophisticated set of sensors helps it navigate along walls
and around table legs, stairs and other obstacles, methodically covering the
entire room. An internal “cliff detector” ensures the sweeper will turn
around when it encounters a stair or other drop-off. It’s thorough cleaning
ability makes it ideal for taking over the chore of daily maintenance
between regular deep cleanings. Its rotating brushes sweep the entire room
thoroughly and automatically, even under the coffee tables, pianos, and beds.
A wide, spinning side brush cleans right up to the base of the walls. An
included “virtual wall” unit emits an infrared barrier the sweeper-vac will
not cross, confining the sweeper to one room. When it has finished its timed
rounds, turns itself off.
Weighing only 5 pounds and10 ounces and measuring 13.5 inches wide, Roomba looks like a heavy Frisbee on wheels.
Now I know what I want for my birthday this year! I want a Roomba! She operates absolutely alone and never steals the silver.
Roomba was not an easy invention to create. Scientists who designed this robot did their homework. They studied dust and dirt. The team had to invent and develop an efficient vacuum that functioned on a mere trickle of electrical power. In short, the inventors of Roomba had to study the problem and come up with a new way of dealing with an old problem.
Problem of Sin
After two weeks since we celebrated the resurrection of Christ, we still seem to have an old problem. Human beings started out morally clean, but we quickly muddied ourselves up. “Spring cleaning” is not limited to under our beds where dust bunnies live or behind the piano where spiders have webbed their homes. “Spring cleaning” is also about how dirty our lives are. The Bible uses the images of being dirty to describe the human condition we call “sin.”
In Isaiah 1:18, sin appears like a stain that needs to be removed,
“Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be like snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.
In Psalm 51, sin is a blot that needs to be washed away:
“Blot out my transgression. Wash away all my iniquity and
cleanse me from my sin…Cleanse me…and I will be clean; wash me
and I will be whiter than snow.”
Jesus in Matthew 15:19-20 taught that what defiles a person or what causes someone to sin comes out of the heart. These evil thoughts of murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, and slander are the things that make one unclean.
And then we have in today’s Scriptures, another cleaning imagery. “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”(1:9)
What we see in our lesson for today is that God sent Jesus to do some soul-cleaning. Jesus is our spiritual “Roomba,” a soul-vacuum cleaner who cleans the stains, the blots, the defilement, and sins from our lives that no Fantastic Spot Remover can!
Not Too Dirty
Some of us think that our lives are not that dirty at all. We might say on the surface, you can take a white glove and wipe over our lives and it’s clean. It’s clean enough. We might say that we use a HEPA filter that vacuums up even the finest dust mites and dust bunnies under our beds.
From our lesson for this morning, we see in this young Christian community that some of the members believed that they had not sinned at all. So the writer of 1 John said to them,
“If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”
John said that to deny the human condition of sin is to say that everything that Jesus taught us and did for us was not important or true at all.
We try to sanitize the problem of sin by calling it by another name. We might say, “Mistakes were made.” It was only a misjudgment. Or in the case of the collapse of Enron and World.Com, the CEOs said our creative accounting was still with good intentions except that it went haywire.
Because sin appears to be so common to the human condition, we are tempted to minimize its danger. If we all have this human condition of sin then its not really anymore of a problem for me than the next guy. “My sin and your sin cancel each other out so we have no sin,” we might want to say. We think we are all good people. We just have some annoying bad behaviors.
It’s not bad to be a sinner, we say, no more than it is bad to have pet hair covering your white carpet. It may look kind of bad. But you just have to clean it up with your Hoover with Wind Tunnel suction and try to keep the dog out. We say that dirt on the floor is a natural order in this world. And sin on our souls—is a natural order in this life. We just have to clean it up and try to keep it that way. We think.
Sin is like a three-letter dirty word. It’s a dirty word because it speaks about what we don’t want to hear. Sin speaks about who we are and our treatment of each other and God. We can be like this young Christian community that 1 John talked about and believed that we have not sinned at all. But when we see how all the suffering caused by humans to each other, we know we have sinned. I think about the suicide bombers in the Middle East and wonder when will we lay down our arms as brothers and sisters to live in peace with each other. We pray that the renewed peace initiative this spring will offer hope of a lasting peace agreement.
When we are mesmerized by the media telling us of heart-wrenching stories of missing persons and kidnapped kids and domestic disputes, we can see the human condition of sin is alive and well in our world.
Sin isn’t just the big stuff, sin is the small stuff too. When we find ourselves creating barriers that keep us apart from having true Christian fellowship, we are in sin because our hardened feelings and animosity will keep us from God’s love. Sin is anything that separates us from God, hides us from God’s light, and puts us away from God’s love.
I know that for all of us we want to see ourselves as essentially good and law-abiding responsible people. And there’s some truth to that too. We don’t find our names on the police briefs pages of the newspapers. We live clean lives, we think.
Live Beyond Sin
God takes a more serious view about sin. While sin is common to the human condition, to be fully human is to not live in sin at all, but to live beyond sin. Adam and Eve before their disobedience were humans—fully human the way God designed them to be. To be fully human does not mean that we sin but rather to be without sin. And until Christ returns, our challenge is to strive to become Christ-like and to live as much as possible with God’s design for human beings to live beyond sin.
Our goal and norm is to have a clean moral carpet. It’s not the exception. Unfortunately, staying morally clean seems like a big job. It’s like trying to keep the house clean, but it gets dirty anyway. We can take off our shoes before entering, but there’s nothing we can do about the dust that falls from our clothes, our bodies, and gathers under our beds. There’s nothing we can do about the hair that falls out of our heads. As clean as we try to live, as we try as hard as we like, sin keeps on piling up—and we still need a spiritual Roomba vacuum cleaner!
Most of us can’t stand being dirtied. We don’t like our homes to be dirty. And we don’t like our souls muddied with sin either. During this spring season of Eastertide—a period of time in our church year when we focus on the meaning of Easter in our lives, it’s time for “spring cleaning.” Here are four kinds of soul-cleaning tasks that work:
1. Come to Worship.
When we participate with each other in worship, we receive a collective sense of renewal that helps our souls stay clean. In the presence of God Almighty with the witness and support of one another, we praise God and seek his cleansing spirit to fall afresh on us.
2. Engage in Prayer.
Both in disciplined and in informal prayer times, invite God into our lives daily. By doing this, we are reminded of the real reason we live in the first place. We live for God’s plan for our lives in this world rather than for our self-interests. We are able to clear away all of the clutter that just gathers dust.
3. Read the Scriptures.
If we read the Bible as consistently as we read the sports page of our daily newspapers, we will know God’s will. You can follow the daily devotional books or join a weekday Bible study group; by studying the Word of God particularly made known to us in Jesus Christ, we get to know God.
4. Search your Soul.
Perhaps about all we do together as we begin our Sunday morning worship is to take a few moments for silence. But it is an example for us to search our soul before we enter into the holiness of God’s house. When we ask ourselves, “What am I to do with Easter?” we are searching to be spiritually clean and fresh. Soul-searching is a way for us to enter into confession in order to keep us clean and renewed.
Especially Designed for You
The MIT inventors after studying the problem of dust and dirt especially designed Roomba to vacuum and sweep a floor clean.
God did the same. God saw how we have muddied ourselves with our disobedience and sin. So God designed a special spiritual vacuum cleaner in the name of Jesus Christ to solve our problem of sin.
Nailed on the cross, Christ died for our sins. And on Easter morning, God resurrected Christ from the dead, cleaned up the tomb, and Christ has been vacuuming up the dust and dirt in the lives of people ever since.
But staying spiritually clean is nothing like the hard work of cleaning our houses even with a Roomba! All it takes to get clean with Christ is confession, and then the acceptance of God’s forgiveness. Then you walk away. Your soul space is cleaned. It’s as easy as that.
Let us pray.
Gracious Lord God, we ask that you wash away the sins from our lives for we are sorry for what we have done to separate ourselves from you. Forgive us and help us to accept your mercy and generosity. Lead us to become as human as possible living beyond sin as you have designed us to be. In the name of Jesus Christ who died for the forgiveness of our sins, we pray. Amen.