Orignial Sin or Original Blessing

I am so excited these days as my book "God is Plural: Sermons for an Emerging Church" arrived in my hands two days ago. The experience of holding my book in my hands for the first time, was as thrilling as holding my first child in my hands seventeen years ago. I had promised to myself that I will not write a book, until I had something unique to say, because I refused to add to the destruction of trees. Those who listened to my sermons urged me to put them in writing and after having have done that,I feel really good.

Today was my first outing with the book in hand to attend a palliative care seminar at Broward General Medical Center. I sat next to a registered nurse by the name of "Donna". I had a book in my folder which was transparent. She saw the cover - God is Plural - and was curious."I have never heard that expression before," she said. I urged her to peruse the book and in minutes, she wanted to buy a copy. I was thrilled.

Donna told me that she was especially touched by one line inside the book that said: "No child is born a sinner." She thought that was a "liberating message." All through her life, she had heard from preachers and teachers that we are born in sin.

How could any one look at an innocent baby and call him or her sinner? Original sin is a Christian dogma concocted by St.Augustine based on the fact that children are the products of sexual acts which he considered 'dirty and sinful.' Augustine who led a life of sexual promiscuity and fathered an illegitimate child prior to his conversion,must have been expressing his guilt in formulating the theory of original sin. I don't think that we have to be bound by Augustine's thought as a paradigm to determine our lives today. I belive that, we come into this world, with an original blessing. The fact that he enters a sinful world, does not make the child a sinner.

Attaching the sinner label to an innocent child on the day of her entrance into the world is an insult and injustice to that child. Let us say that we come into this world as a blessing and the purpose and goal of our life is to be a blessing for others.