ranking sin

I've been disturbed lately by the dominating practice of ranking sin in the church. Sin is talked of as if there were levels to its significance or corrupting effect in one's life. Especially disturbing is the tendency of ranking bigger the ones further of way from the rankers own problems.

Speaking of a Pentecostal context in Finland, sin is most commonly spoken of in public in terms of alcoholism, sexual immorality, and if there's a need to use a big caliber rhetorics, something like homosexuality is used.

All of these are expressions of sin and the corrupted state of man, but the reason why they are used to give name to sin, is that they provoke emotions. Unfortunately, they also make it easy to handle issue of sin looking at the life of someone else than own. It appears that although these issues are present in the lives of Pentecostal Christians too, it also appears that to the majority of the people these are not the toughest issues in the life. That's fortunate of course, and perhaps due to the fortunate fact that many people have grown emotionally healthy and have had stable life. This is to be grateful of, but unfortunately with current sin rhetorics it leads many away from the realization of sin and the need of grace.

Forgiveness can only be received when there's sense of guilt. The one who's never guilty never experiences forgiveness, and that separates the person from the most genuine realization of human being (being guilty before God, that is), and the most valuable experience (God’s forgives).

Missing that then leads to another problem of losing the true meaning of Gospel. This very experience is what the Gospel is all about. This is what a Christian is to witness for, and losing it's reality from own life, looses the person from the core message and cuts the edge from the testimony.

So, in my opinion preaching of sin and guilt, should confront the hearer with his/her issues in order that it might bring that hearer to receive the grace of God. In church context we might use some time to speak of hardheartedness, gossiping, materialism, inactivity of faith and selfish relation to serving God, to name a few that are actually well alive interdenominationally in western Christianity. Ranking list of sin should perhaps have these in top5, if that ranking is done in respect to paralyzing effect on the church’s accomplishment of its mission.

To end with, I don't think sin can be ranked. All of it is demonstration of the same core problem of the broken relationship with God, that shows itself in varying ways accoding to the life and person of an individual. All of it also in the reach of the same unlimited grace, but to experience that grace one much come to see the need for it.