On a recent Saturday morning, bright and cool and crisp, my friends and I helped clean a portion of Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, one of a series of litter cleanups we are hosting this April in honor of Earth Month.
Though we devoted a full morning to the cause, we managed to clean only the equivalent of a city block–and even then only the areas closest to the roadway and its storefront, so polluted was the neighborhood. Though we collected nearly a dozen bags of trash, a decent haul considering our small and motley crew, our morning’s contribution had in the end cleared only a miniscule portion of the roadway.
We have woefully polluted our world. If twelve bags of trash can be pulled from an area less than a block, then how many can be gathered from the rest of Rivers Avenue? Of Charleston as a whole? Of all the world’s cities? Wherever we go, our waste follows us.
I am convinced that only a small portion of garbage is deliberately thrown into the environment. Much comes from negligence. I have, far more often than I care to admit, seen trash flutter out of a truck bed on the highway because the driver forgot it was there. Much also comes from the wind that catches overfilled trash cans or our utensils as we dine outside. But the winds and waves would not have the chance to act upon the garbage, of course, if it were not for our creating it in the first place.
As I leaned, bent, and squatted to fill my bags this morning I had ample time to reflect upon the stunning parallels between human pollution and sin.
First, consider the above: The ways sin enters our lives aligns well with how garbage enters the environment. Some cases of sin, like litter, are certainly intentional. These tend to be our most flamboyant issues, the places where we ignore our screaming conscience–in anger on the highway, judgment of differing political views at work, lust at the end of a long day. These are either conscious choices for us, where we know we should know better, or else actions made unconscious through habitation.
Though certainly not always the case, these forms of sin, while obvious, are usually small in impact; inflicted upon ourselves and to the individual(s) at whom they are directed. But consider also the ample sins of omission we commit daily and unconsciously through negligence: the numerous poor and homeless whom we did not assist, the countless opportunities where we could have shared the Good News or a word of encouragement but didn’t out of fear, the grieving friends we could have consoled but convinced ourselves we knew not how. Negligence vastly multiplies our iniquities, as it does our garbage.
This is why Jesus in Matthew 24:42 urges us to “stay awake”; it is easy to slip into indifference. Numerous philosophers have further noted how the modern age of democracy has multiplied these sorts of apathetic sins, though it has dramatically reduced many violent sins common in days of old (an individual could be put to death for just about anything only a few lifetimes ago).
C.S. Lewis has written on this phenomenon masterfully in his essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” There, during a fictitious graduation address, the character Screwtape notes that though the “great and toothsome” sinners of old have become rarer (“Oh, to get one’s teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler!”), the harvest of “small and flabby” souls has never been greater. Screwtape describes modern persons, because of the overwhelming conforming force of democratic equality, as “creatures that have almost ceased to be an individual” and become so “passively responsive” to their environment that they “sink into a more or less contented subhumanity forever.”
Is this passivity not also present when we allow our homes to persist in filthy waste? When we do not seize the moment to steward our neighborhoods and instead declare removing the defilement to be someone else’s responsibility?
And as for the times when nature itself blows our waste into its lands and waterways, Christ in the Parable of the Sower explicitly warns that the troubles of this world itself can aggravate sin and choke out grace: “As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away” (Matthew 13:20-21).
Pollution, like sin, becomes far more invasive and difficult to remove the longer it remains in the environment. Many a time I would stoop to pick up a plastic lid or straw, made fragile by many months of sun and rain, only for it to crumble into dozens of smaller pieces. When litter is fresh and intact, it is very simple to clear away. But broken, scattered waste, like countless microscopic cancer cells that must be scraped away to be healed, is an entirely different story.
Once litter has degraded to that point, it is easier to grab a shovel and remove the entire patch of soil it sits upon (and thereby inflict further harm upon the land) than to remove it piece by piece. So also removing a hand or an eye (Matthew 5:29-30) is possible with isolated bodily harm, but if sin is allowed to metastasize beyond these places, if it has become so ingrained within us as a cancer in its latter stages, the cure can become as damaging as the disease.
Litter that has long remained in the environment, I have also noted, tends to become more entangled within its vegetation and therefore doubly difficult to remove. It is as if nature, grown long accustomed to the cover of the blight that smothers it, has forgotten its formerly clean and glorious state and protests at the blight’s removal; like a rescued animal that refuses to leave its cage even when the door is opened.
Do we not, in our deepest heart of hearts, also cringe fearfully at what freedom from our sins would truly look like? It is far easier to give into temptation, to remain wallowing in the decrepitude surrounding us, than to remain like an ever-active sentry attentive to its detection and removal.
My final reflection, this bright spring morning, was on how completely inadequate my team was to the challenge at hand. This area of North Charleston is highly neglected; the ritzy environmental groups filled with recent South Carolina transplants do not come here. They go to the beaches and other public-facing areas, cleaning areas deemed “strategic” for the city’s aesthetic beauty.
But as the gravity of the garbage’s omnipresence began to mount, I caught myself taking the same superficial approach. As my back began to ache and my focus began to wane, my goal became to merely remove the most conspicuous pieces of trash and skip the years of accumulated cigarette butts and plastic shards scattered between them. My goal became aesthetic cleanliness.
This is the last danger that sin retains in her deck. So often we pursue purity in our outward appearance to fool others and appear better than we really are. But we only fool ourselves by doing this. As Christ so repeatedly warns, sin comes from the heart.
Yes, it is impossible for mankind to completely disentangle from the environment the pollution we have wrought. And yes, it is impossible for a man to alone disentangle sin from his soul. But praise God that we have a High Priest who can do so, who has infinite power to wash clean every mark and shard of sin. And by His grace, both us and our world will be healed.
