I have a college student who
works part time for me and last week he came into the office sounding like he
swallowed a frog and with his nose dripping like a public restroom faucet. He
told me that some sort of cold bug had swept his dorm floor and they were all
sick. In that living situation there’s nothing do be done. Close quarters mean
shared germs no matter what. They couldn’t have avoided each other if they had
wanted to. Many Christians, though, act as if this is the proper way to avoid
sin, to avoid people who “have” it. But sin isn’t a bug to catch.
So many Christians live in
cultural quarantine, shutting themselves off from what they see as sinful
influences. They avoid “bad” people and even places. They talk about those
people and places like they are disease carriers – “We can’t have them around” or “We couldn’t go there.” They act like someone can sneeze
sin onto them, that they will catch the bad decisions and guilt of another
through physical proximity. What does his shunning communicate to those we have
labeled “unclean”? Exactly that, Christians think they are unclean. Not the ideal
way to draw people to Jesus. But sin is not an infectious disease.
We don’t “catch” sin. It’s in us
from birth. We are sin carriers. It’s
only by the grace of God that we can become immune to the virus that lives in
us, that we can live a life without its symptoms oozing and coughing and
exhaling out of us onto others, not to infect them but to influence them. Because of the work of Christ we are able to
choose whether or not to sin. It is a decision, one that we often have a very
hard time making, but a decision nonetheless. Sin is a theology too. It is a
belief, or lack thereof, in the goodness and work of Jesus. It is this
theology, this belief that informs our decision and drives us.
So, when we are around obvious
sin, those people and places, we can’t catch their sin. We can choose their sin, but that is a matter of decision, of belief,
of theology. If we hold fast to Jesus there is no risk of that sin invisibly
taking hold of us like a flu bug might. How freeing! We no longer have to keep
our distance or live in cultural quarantine. We can engage those people with
grace and freedom without fear. Because we are near Jesus we can be near to
anyone without fear that they will make us more like them than like Him.
