As we continue using Eucharistic Prayer 1 from Enriching Our Worship 1, I thought I’d continue reflecting on pieces of that Eucharistic Prayer. Every Eucharistic Prayer is a “thanksgiving” that re-tells the story of salvation. After blessing God for creation, the prayer takes us into the spiritual betrayal of the Garden of Eden:

But we failed to honor your image
in one another and in ourselves;
we would not see your goodness in the world around us;
and so we violated your creation,
abused one another,
and rejected your love.

This is as good a definition as any other of “sin.” God created us human beings in God’s own image, as bearers of the divine characteristics of compassion, creativity, and love. But we have, in oh so many ways, failed to honor that image, in ourselves and in one another. This is what “sin” is. Sin is not, as the grocery-store checkout magazines would have you believe, a matter of pleasure; there’s no such thing as a “sinfully-good chocolate cake.” Nor is sin a matter of moral rules and regulations, of things A, B, and C that you must do, and things X, Y, and Z that you must not do. “Sin” is an unfortunate reality of the human condition, an affliction and a distortion in which we do not treat ourselves, or one another, or creation, or even God the way they ought to be treated. I love Billy Joel as much as the next guy, but “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints” just makes no sense, at least from a Protestant point of view: every one of us is, as Martin Luther used to say, simul iustus et peccator; simultaneously righteous and a sinner. Especially in a world in which our future is threatened by climate change and our clothes are made in sweatshops, all of us are inextricably caught up in systems of human invention that violate God’s creation and abuse one another… and that’s not to mention our dozens of daily, petty sins, our gossip and resentment, our rudeness and self-centeredness and all the rest. (You can’t tell me that these aren’t real; I drive around Boston, too.)

And yet God continues, always, to love us and guide us. As the prayer continues:

Yet you never ceased to care for us,
and prepared the way of salvation for all people.

In it all and through it all, God continues to care for us, to love us, and to lead us toward a different reality. God plants the seeds of a kingdom among us that’s different from the kingdoms of the world, and waits for it to grow. God gives us the good news that there is another way, and invites us to follow it. God forgives us all our sins, small and large, and draws us into wholeness of life.

The story of the prayer doesn’t end here, with this frank admission of our failings. The Christian story should never end here, with judgment or condemnation. And the way we talk to and talk about one another should never end there either. We are not simple creatures. We are always mixed. We are, each one of us, both laughing sinners and crying saints; full of good intentions and inevitable failings, and always, always loved by God.