In 2015, Brock Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault. Two international students from Sweden caught him in the act of assaulting an intoxicated woman. When he realized he was caught, he fled, but the international students chased him down until he could be apprehended by the police. While the charges of which he was eventually convicted carry a potential sentence of 14 years in prison, he received a mere six-month sentence and served only three months. You may remember this case because it was often noted in the media that Turner was a Stanford swimmer. You may remember this case because the judge who issued his sentence was also a Stanford graduate, and an athlete. You may remember this case because of the outrage that surrounded it. And there are a lot of things about that case that we could mention, particularly when we are thinking about who we are, honestly. Who are we as a society to allow this? We think of: the systems of sin that allow for some to be so easily forgiven by our justice system while others are incarcerated for a lifetime; the way our culture will blame victims and excuse perpetrators; or the way entitlement and privilege seem to go hand in hand with permissiveness.
There is one particular moment in this case that struck a chord with me, though, because I think it speaks to a tendency that often arises in each of us. This case illustrates it starkly, but it is a more universal tendency.
As happens in situations like this, interested parties were invited to submit letters to the judge regarding Turner’s sentencing. His mother did so, as any mother given the opportunity would, pleading for leniency. But what was noteworthy to me about the letter she sent is that she did not speak to what he had learned or how he had changed or to any sense of remorse on his behalf. Instead, she told the court that the purpose of the letter was to explain who the real Brock Turner is. As if he was someone other than the criminal about to be sentenced. As if it were not, in fact, her son who had committed the acts with which he was convicted and that two witnesses watched him perpetrate. As if there were some other Brock Turner than the person convicted. As if there were another person behind those acts who was not really the person who did them. As if she could say, “He’s not really a rapist.” Which is, of course, what she wanted to say. And what she wanted to believe. Because who wants to believe such a thing of their own child?
But the truth is, if you rape someone, you are a rapist. Even if you wish you hadn’t. You are still the person who has done it.
You are what you do
I point out her letter not because I think it is such an unusual way of thinking, but because I think it is a highly common way of thinking. I think that if we are being honest, you and I very often think of ourselves the way this mother thought about her son: that somehow, we are other than our acts. We think that behind what we do, there is some good person inside that doesn’t really mean it, that didn’t really intend it. We think that really, we are good people, if you don’t count the things that we have done.
Sure, we may have lied to our spouse or our parents or our children or our co-workers about a few things, but we’re not really the kind of people you would call liars.
Except we are. If we lie, we are liars.
Sure, we may have engaged in some tearing down of another’s reputation, but we generally don’t go in for that sort of thing, and we feel bad about it when we do it, so we’re not really gossips.
Except we are. If we spread gossip, we are gossips.
And, sure, we may have found a way to get around the rules to our own advantage on a test, in our business, on our taxes — some people would call it cheating. But we’re not really cheaters, per se.
Except we are. If we cheat, we are cheaters.
Psalm 51 speaks to this condition. The psalmist writes: “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”
I suppose sometimes we feel discouraged, hopeless, weighed down by our own wrongdoing. But more often than not, we are apt to excuse our own behavior as belonging to some part of ourselves that is somehow other than our real selves. We tell ourselves the lie that behind our actions is our real self, a person who would not really do these things. However, there is no other person. We are nothing other than what we do. These acts that oppose God, that cause fractures in our relationships with God and with others, we have named sin in the Christian tradition.
And if we sin, we are sinners.
The same principle applies for the things that we do not do. Sometimes we think positively of ourselves when we have done nothing to deserve it. For instance, we think that giving is a good idea, and so we like to think of ourselves as the kind of people who would give to charitable causes. We think of ourselves as generous people because we like the idea of generosity. But we don’t actually give.
Or we think of ourselves as the kind of people who are interested in feeding the hungry or housing the homeless or supporting the refugee. We think about that as a lovely idea, and we think to ourselves that that is just the kind of people that we are. We are the kind of people who like that sort of thing, but we don’t do anything about it.
Or, we think of ourselves as friendly people, because we like people. And we like to think that we would be friendly to people. But we are not, in fact, friendly people if we do not do anything about it.
If we do not actually give of our resources, we are not generous people.
If we do not actually do anything to feed the hungry, house the homeless or support the refugee, we are not actually serving those people.
If we do not welcome strangers among us, we are not friendly people.
We cannot simply think these things of ourselves, and think they are true of ourselves. They are only true of ourselves if we are doing them.
The psalmist writes: “You desire truth in the inward being.”
Systemic sin
If we really want to be honest with ourselves about who we are, the truth is even more complex. To this point we have been speaking of sin primarily in terms of discrete acts. And yet, we also know that sin is systemic. We are involved in complex systems of sin in more ways than we can untangle – systems that support racism and patriarchy and privilege – and systems that we are unaware of and unable to name.
This year’s Presbyterian Women Horizons Bible Study, “Love Carved in Stone” by Eugenia Anne Gamble, offers a perspective on the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words, that opens up and expands their meaning in many ways similar to John Calvin’s positive use of the commandments. Calvin expands the meaning of the commandment in his “Institutes on the Christian Religion.” Regarding the commandment not to murder, Calvin indicates that this commandment includes not only the directive not to kill our neighbor, but also “the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can.” Gamble goes further by including a systemic perspective. Her commentary on the Sixth Word makes this point: “To refuse to resist structures, patterns, and processes that systematically diminish the life of individuals or groups is, therefore, a violation of this Word. In our Reformed tradition, to allow the hungry to hunger, the worker to be exploited, the child to remain in danger is a violation of this Word. … Even if we are not guilty of causing ills per se, if we do not address society’s ills, we are complicit and responsible.” We are all culpable.
The psalmist writes: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.”
Actor-observer bias
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that the doctrine of original sin is “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” In other words, it is the only Christian teaching that we can look around and see for ourselves is true. In one respect, he is right. We see sin all around us. We see violence and greed and immorality. We see webs of unjust and inequitable systems that involve each of us, sometimes as victims and sometimes as perpetrators, and sometimes as both at the same time — and the systems of sin in which we are bound seem inextricable.
We also must admit that just like the scholastic theologians of old, we all have our categories for sin. We often have some sense in our minds of which sins are worse and which sins are not so bad. We know which are easily explained away by circumstance and which are not to be tolerated under any circumstance. For many of us, the ones we have decided God probably does not mind so much line up dangerously closely with the things that we are most likely to be involved in.
Even more, we make distinctions between ourselves and others when we are talking about the same activity. The field of sociology has recognized this phenomenon and has a name for it: actor-observer bias. The same negative action is judged entirely differently when we do it or when we are the actor, compared to when someone else does it or when we observe someone else doing it.
Take, for instance, grumpiness. Let’s say we are grumpy in an interaction with a stranger. We are likely to judge ourselves based on all the external factors that made us grumpy: our spouse snapped at us this morning, our children were difficult, we have way too much going on at work, our lives are very stressful. Those are the things that made us grumpy. The blame is to be placed on outside factors. But if someone else is grumpy with us, our tendency is not to consider what factors might have led to this happening but to blame their character: this store clerk or co-worker or church member must have a character flaw, and instead ought to be friendly. We do not make the same kind of excuses for others that we make for ourselves. Now, I am not suggesting that grumpiness falls into the category of sin, but we fall into this trap with all kinds of behaviors, excusing ourselves but judging others.
So, while I think Niebuhr is partially right, he is also wrong. Because while we might be able to look around and see a sinful world, knowing about the sin out there is not the same thing as knowing our own sin. It is quite easy to identify sinful behaviors in others, or even to name systems as sinful. It is another thing altogether to recognize ourselves as sinful and to recognize our participation in those systems.
The psalmist writes: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
A left pocket reflection
To this point, this article has probably been pretty much dreadful and depressing to read. Why drag humanity’s name through the mud? What is the point? There is a well-known teaching attributed to Polish Rabbi Simcha Bunim: “Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that he can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need. When feeling lowly or depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there find the words: ‘For my sake was the world created.’ But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’”
This is a left pocket reflection, appropriate for Lent, appropriate for when we are confusing ourselves with the Creator of the world. Naming who we are, honestly, is part of what is means to be Reformed — it is an essential part of our worship as we confess our sinfulness before God and one another. Naming who we are, honestly, is setting ourselves right before God –
acknowledging who we are and who God is – and making sure we do not confuse the two.
This is not the sum of our identity, however. We are not only left pocket people. While it is important to me to remember that there is no “other self” behind our self that is somehow not culpable for the acts that we participate in, my temperament is such that I tend to dwell in this sort of critical self-examination for far too long. At times, I may have trouble finding my way out of the left pocket. Hence, I have been challenged by a colleague to think more about how I articulate this idea of describing ourselves. “What about Jesus?” he asks. Our identity cannot simply be the sum of our acts, good or bad. He is, of course, right. While I stick by the idea that there is no “self” behind our acting self, this does not account for the Christ who is both behind us and goes before us. The Christ who surrounds us. So, while we in ourselves may not be defined by anything beyond what we do, in Christ our acts do not define who we are.
Who are we, honestly? It is God’s act in Jesus Christ that ultimately tells us who we are: children of God, forgiven and free, healed and redeemed, loved beyond measure. That is our identity, honestly. That is the honest truth about ourselves.
The psalmist writes: “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.”
Erin Kesterson Bowers is associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church in High Point, North Carolina. She lives in High Point with her two daughters and her husband, who is a United Methodist pastor. She enjoys traveling, all kinds of theater and performing arts, and reading.
