Missing the Mark? or I’m Getting Better All the Time . . .

Most people are familiar from their early years, even from church or Sunday-school, with a concept called “sin.” But it’s a concept most people would just as soon avoid. It smacks of negativity, guilt, or condemnation. Who needs those things? So why bring it up?

Whatever negative, emotional overtones people may have learned to attach to the word, sin, it has a very simple definition: missing the mark.[1] Think about a target, a bow, and an arrow. You aim, fire, and then evaluate. Did I hit the bullseye? Did I miss, and by how much? Did I miss entirely? Targets aren’t bad, they give us a way to evaluate.

The issue regarding sin is: Who defines the target? Who defines “sin”? I recently heard a sermon where the pastor seemed to suggest, possibly jokingly, that forgetting an item on one’s shopping list was “sinful.” OMG, really? Sin isn’t dancing, playing cards, consuming alcohol, or homosexuality as many churches make it out to be. What “missing the mark” indicates runs far deeper than that.

A lawyer approached Jesus and, essentially, asked Him to boil down the entire Jewish religious, social law into its essence. He simply responded: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.” That, my friends, is the “mark,” the bullseye; that is the target -- not, forgetting an item on your shopping list!

Why are Creator and missing the mark (sin) linked? After all, can’t each person figure things out for themselves and live according to their own lights? Well in Jesus’ statement above, He said otherwise. He said there is a target, a bullseye, and it is the Creator. So if we are “on target” with our lives and not “missing the mark,” the real question is how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Or another way of asking this is: “How close am I getting to God?”

My wife, Sally, and I use shamanism as part of our healing practices. One of the ideas that shamanism promotes is that everything in the creation is alive and connected to Spirit, in fact has a spirit (a spirit created by the Creator!). Sally and I, in our soon-to-be-published book, Jesus, the Ultimate Shaman, show that the Bible supports this idea -- millions of spirits attached to the creation and available to help us. It’s easy in shamanism, however, to focus entirely on our helping spirits/allies and pay no attention to the Creator. The unintended consequence is to remove the bullseye. Without a bullseye, anything goes. You can do and say and believe anything you want, though it may be completely contrary to Creator’s essence.

When we seek to shoot the arrow of our lives toward God, we are aligning our lives and essence as best we can with our Creator. We seek to resonate with Creator’s essence, His/Her presence, what is called the Tao, Source, Essence-Being, etc. We call to Creator through our worship and Spirit/spirit experiences and ask that Creator’s Spirit bring our being and purpose more and more into alignment with Creator’s life. In this sense, “sin” is less focused on missing and, instead, asks “How much closer can I get to being on track with Creator’s ways that my heart, soul, mind, and strength are shooting towards?”

As we shoot ourselves toward the target of our Creator, we quickly realize how far away we are from the bullseye even though we may think we are close. And furthermore, even as we land on the target, we also recognize that the arrow of our lives has to penetrate the bullseye deeper and deeper in order to truly target the infinite depth of our Creator who made us. Maybe that’s why it takes lifetimes of regeneration to even land on the target let alone to begin to get in proximity to the bullseye.

Because we are seeking after an infinite creator of the universe, this realization should act upon us to keep us humble and open to the fact that we don’t always have our spiritual chops down, even though we may think we do. For example in Jesus’ day, there were people who thought they were hitting the target but were far from it. Jesus railed against the theocratic, religious rulers of His day, faulting them for many egregious issues. But their biggest “sin,” Jesus said, was to deny (speak against) what the (Holy) Spirit was doing through His ministry, attributing His healings, casting out demons, and raising people from the dead to Satan. So even though they highly esteemed themselves, the religious leaders were missing the mark so much that Jesus said their “sin” would not be forgiven. Wow!

And let’s not also forget that to love the Creator is to love one another. In fact, Jesus said that if we don’t forgive one another, God won’t forgive us. Our relationship to our neighbor is tied to our relationship with our Creator. It’s tied to our ability to hit the target and bullseye!

So in a way, maybe we can construe “sin” differently from the connotations it has picked up over centuries. If our desire is to live lives focused on the Creator, we should be able to become comfortable with evaluating if we are landing on the target, or how close we are to the bullseye. Maybe we can say: “I’m getting better all the time, better, better, better.”

[1] Sin actually has about 20 words associated with it in the Hebrew language, but for our purposes we will simplify it by using the Greek definition, missing the mark.