3 Epiphany - Mark 1:14-20

The new day begins at midnight.

The new year begins in winter.

The new life begins in the womb.

The good news begins in darkness.

The gospel is bad news before it is good news, Frederick Buechner writes.

It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word (and also the old patriarchal

language; sorry, ladies, this includes you too), that he is evil in the imagination of his

heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather that what he is sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob.

What Buechner does not say here, probably because he was shaped in the same church culture I was, is that sin is not only an individual shortcoming but also a collective condition.

Society is a sinner.

Church is a sinner.

My family and congregation and country and species is a sinner.

We are so steeped in the doctrines of individualism that this needs to be said.

I am a racist, not because of feelings I have or choices I make in a vacuum, but because I grew up in a household that feared difference in a society that reinforces white privilege.

I am a thief, not because I personally shake down other people and take their stuff, but because I remain silent in the face of extortion and robbery which are usually so subtle, systemic, widespread, and veiled from public view that I fail to notice, and I benefit from evil inequities in ways I don't want to realize, much less admit.

I am an idolator, not because I bow down to little statues, but because I put too much trust in finite people and processes and perspectives while trying to navigate a world that worships money, power, fame, sex, security, violence, convenience...to name a few.

I am a sinner because I am a sweaty body swimming in a dirty pool, and circular arguments

about individual versus social responsibility become an endless whirlpool of avoidance,

dodging the unpleasant, unpopular truth that we all share in blame enough to go around.

Isaiah got it right: Woe is me!

I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips who lives among a people of unclean lips...

The truth teller John was arrested by a wicked king clinging to power in a fickle, wicked world, as trapped upstairs in his palace as the doomed prophet downstairs in the dungeon.

Sin is a virus raging both within us and around us, and we all catch it.

The strains and symptoms are different but the disease is the same.