Bullseye: Sin as Missing the Mark, and the Near Enemies That Cluster Around Every Deep Truth by Eric Hepburn
Updated: Oct 9
The original definition of sin was 'to miss the mark' as an archer misses a target. Perhaps this definition is a way to leave behind all the toxic ways sin has been used. Perhaps the metaphor of the bullseye and the target can teach us something deeply true about the nature of the spiritual life - and within it our own search for the right targets.
If you had asked me when I was going to preach a sermon on sin, I would have guessed never. This is the first of what I expect to become a series: taking a word we've developed an allergy to and asking whether there's something honorable and recoverable in it.
I start with a parable about two Habitat for Humanity volunteers and a screwdriver, and why one of them won't touch one. The injury is real. The workaround is understandable. And something about it still impedes the work at hand.
Then the engineering diagram that gave this sermon its title. Accuracy is how close you land to the bullseye. Precision is how tight your grouping is. Imagine a target after twelve years of disciplined practice — a dense scatter of holes all around the center and not so many in it. Those holes are the near enemies. Interpretations of sin that make you feel ashamed, or afraid, or angry are some of them: you can tell, because it isn't trying to make you better. It's trying to trigger what keeps you stuck.
There's one place the archery metaphor breaks, and it matters. An archer gets immediate feedback — you can walk to the target and pull the arrows. Life doesn't work that way. Life is more like farming: one experiment a season, ambiguous results, three thousand variables. Which is part of why wisdom takes a lifetime, and why we need practices that get us out of our heads and into flow, into play.
Full Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript
Eric Hepburn: Welcome to the tenth episode of the third season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode.
Today's episode is called "Bullseye." It touches on the troubled notion of sin, and asks whether its many misguided interpretations prevent us from finding the concept itself potentially useful — and maybe even deeply true.
We'll begin with our Great World House segment on the looming election season, and then have our Voice of Wisdom, read by Joey Cruz.
Great World House
Eric Hepburn: This is our Great World House segment, where we hold up the hopes, the needs, the aspirations in the larger world outside these walls.
What I want to center today came up for me when I sat with some of y'all this past Wednesday night for our grief circle.
Two years ago at this time, I was feeling confidence in humanity. I really felt that our fellow human beings were smart enough, wise enough, mature enough to see through the false promises and the nastiness, and to make a healthier choice. Obviously, like many of you, I was real disappointed when that didn't happen.
But I find echoes of it coming back right now. And I imagine a lot of you are in that place where your phone's blowing up all day, every day, with people saying five dollars here, a hundred dollars there — please, please, please, you can make a difference.
And you probably feel like I do: that if throwing money at the problem is really the only way to make a difference, I'm not so sure I'm up for that. It seems like the wrong kind of attention in some ways. Not that it's not necessary. Not that I haven't clicked the donate button several times.
Voter registration ends tomorrow. It's the last day. If you have not bothered to check and make sure you are still registered to vote, please do. It's a quick stop at an easy-to-find website, and you can validate that you didn't get wiped off the rolls. Early voting is soon. And then finding out the results of all this is going to be here before we know it.
We just don't know. We don't know if it's going to be news we consider good news, or mixed news, or more bad news.
But we hold space with each other here to weather that storm, no matter what it is — and to keep doing work in our lives and in this community to make the world the better place we think future generations deserve to inherit.
That's our work, and we're going to keep showing up to it. Whether a critical mass of people remove their heads from their bums or not.
Voice of Wisdom
Joey Cruz: We welcome this Voice of Wisdom, carried through Eckhart Tolle.
According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of "original sin." Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.
Unfolding in Word: Bullseye
Eric Hepburn: If you had asked me at what moment I was going to get up and preach a sermon on sin, I would have probably guessed never. But I plan to defy your expectations about what a sermon on sin might be like.
I'm going to start with a story. A parable, if you will.
The screwdriver
Pat and Chris are Habitat for Humanity volunteers. They haven't known each other long. They're regular volunteers, so they show up several times a month, work on the houses. They've come to know each other casually through that. They recognize each other. They say hi.
One day they're in a room working together and Pat's up on the ladder, needs a screwdriver. Hey, Chris, can you hand me a screwdriver out of my tool bag down there, so I don't have to get off the ladder?
Yeah — sorry. No. No, but I'll hold the bag up and you can get it out.
Okay. Doesn't think much of it.
A couple weeks later they're working on some other little thing, and the screwdriver thing comes up again. It starts to occur to Pat that there's a screwdriver thing happening here. Oh, can you help me with this?
Oh, yeah — no, I, uh, you better do that. I don't use screwdrivers.
Pat's like, okay. That's weird. But whatever.
They continue working together. They have a good working relationship. They start to become friendly. And eventually Pat gets curious enough about this screwdriver avoidance to just ask. Hey — what's up with that?
Chris doesn't answer the first time. Yeah, I'm not ready to tell you that story.
But eventually their friendship deepens, and Chris says: okay, here's the deal.
When I was a much younger person, I was working in a situation not unlike this one. I was working for Habitat for Humanity. I was younger — my parents got me into this work — but I developed a friendship with somebody. With Alex. And we were both young, and we ended up getting in a fight, and Alex stabbed me with a screwdriver.
And it was bad. I spent a couple days in the hospital. My family didn't have insurance, and it was years before we paid off the medical bills. It was a big hardship. And before that happened, Alex was my best friend. But now, I haven't seen them or spoken to them since, and don't ever want to.
Now, the thing about parables is there are lots of different ways to look at them. Lots of ways to peel the onion. Here's what I want to focus on.
First of all, the injury is real, and messy, and complicated. The trauma from the injury and the ruptured relationship is real, and it calls on us to respond with empathy and compassion for what Chris has been through.
And yet we are still left with the sense that there's something off about this screwdriver allergy. That it is somehow a misplaced association — and that even though Chris has found ways to work around it, it impedes Chris's ability to just show up to the work at hand.
Prison culture
So today we're talking about a word — sin — that has been similarly weaponized. Many people in the world, and probably many people in this room, have been both injured and traumatized by the way that word was weaponized against them.
And if you walk outside these doors, you will find the equivalent of what I thought of this morning as prison culture, where every screwdriver is first and foremost a shiv.
What I'm saying is that there are still deep habits of using this word primarily as a weapon. Of not understanding it as anything else. The legacy of how to use a screwdriver is how to stab someone with it — not the idea that it might have any other potential uses.
I'm going to back up from sin for a second and say that in my mind, I'm planning for this to become the first of a sermon series where we take one of these problematic words and ask whether there's something honorable and revivable about it. Just get curious about it.
I'm not inviting you to start using the word every day, or to make it one of your favorite words in your lexicon. But through micro-exposures, I want your allergy to not be so bad that it's a tool you couldn't possibly reach for in your own work, if it's the right tool.
Some of the other words we have allergies to — it's common in UU spaces for people to have allergies to the word God. It is also a word that has been frequently and greatly weaponized, and still is. I don't want to treat this like some mythical past where people used to misuse that word, but not now. No. Still active, ongoing harm.
But here's the thing, folks, and I think it's why the screwdriver story resonated for me: any tool can be weaponized, and any culture can make a habit out of weaponizing certain tools. But it doesn't eliminate the fact that the thing might have other uses. Trying to get the light switch cover off with the butter knife is tough. If you would just pick up the screwdriver, you might be done with that task a lot faster.
Accuracy and precision
Part of the impetus behind this sermon series relates to my doctoral work. You're going to hear that phrase a lot for the next eight months. Maybe not quite eight — I like to pretend I still have eight months left. I don't. More like six. Probably closer to five.
I sometimes forget that not everybody had the same weird education I had. I was an engineering student in undergrad, and the visual that kept coming back to me, as I was trying to understand this relationship between toxic words and their recoverability, was the image we used to use to differentiate between accuracy and precision. It's that visual that got this sermon its title.
Accuracy is how close you're getting to the bullseye. Precision is how tight your grouping is.
Imagine somebody shooting five or six arrows at a target. If all those arrows are tightly clustered but not near the bullseye, they have bad accuracy but good precision. Whatever they were doing, they were able to do it repeatably — over and over — and get a similar result. Now all they have to do is figure out how to migrate that precision into the middle of the target, and then they'll have both.
The opposite is when the arrows are scattered all over. Bad precision, but the average location of the arrows is the middle of the board. They missed in random directions. Good accuracy, bad precision.
Word arrows at conceptual targets
Here's how this lands for the idea of concepts and words, in my way of thinking about it.
You're aiming at the bullseye. You load your word-arrows into your quiver, and you shoot them at your word-targets. We're shooting word arrows at conceptual targets. Or, as the Buddhists like to say: the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Don't mistake the word for the thing it points at.
We're trying to point here — especially in a spiritual community. We're trying to point at deeper truths. And words are the tool we use for pointing.
But if I'm learning how to shoot, my first three arrows are probably not even going to hit the target anywhere. They'll go above it, below it, way off to the side. As I get better and I practice, I start to get better accuracy and precision. I start to shoot tighter. Now I'm not in the outer ring. Maybe I'm in the inner ring. Maybe I'm getting closer to the bullseye with all my days and weeks of practice.
But still — imagine we took my target after twelve years of disciplined practice on the same target. There would be a lot of holes around the bullseye, and not so many right in the center.
Those holes all around are what I think of as the near enemies. Those are the near enemies of the target we're shooting at. There's this ideal bullseye right in the middle of the red circle, and then there's all the times we got close, but not quite.
To use our word for the day: an example of a near-enemy interpretation of the word sin is the one that's used to make you feel ashamed. To make you feel afraid. Or to make you feel angry.
We talked about our gut, heart, and head people. When the word sin is used by somebody else to manipulate you by making you feel ashamed, or afraid, or angry — that is a near-enemy version of the word. We can tell, because it's not trying to get us to be our best selves. It's trying to trigger the things that make us stuck in life.
It's kind of like the news cycle in that way. It's not really interested in your betterment so much as it's interested in keeping you on the hook as a consumer.
Is that making sense to people?
Where the metaphor breaks
All analogies are stretchable to the breaking point. There's a way to stretch an analogy until it becomes counterproductive. But here's a way in which I think this one stays productive.
When you're actually learning archery, you have immediate, real, visceral, tactile feedback about what's happening. You can feel the wind on the range. You can walk to the target and pull out the arrows you just shot, and you can see how far off you were and in what direction. You can feel the bow in your hand and start to think — I notice it keeps whacking me in the arm right here. Maybe I need to adjust the way I'm holding my shoulder.
When we're doing something like archery, there's a bunch of rich, real, very immediate, high-feedback data that tells us how to get better.
Do we have that luxury in the world of words and concepts and relationships?
No. Not usually. It is not usually nearly that clear when our interpretation of something is off the mark by a little bit. We just don't have the feedback loop. It doesn't happen so fast.
That's why we say it takes a lifetime to develop wisdom. Because it's more like farming than archery. You plant the seed, you try a certain watering and fertilization process, you weed every so many days, and you get what you get. And then you're like: okay, which of those three thousand variables do I want to change for my next try? And you tweak a couple.
Nowadays it's really cool — you point your app at the plant leaf and it says, this is low in nitrogen. But the reason we have an AI that can do that is because we spent thousands of years learning that stuff the hard way. You get one experiment per season. Or if you've got a lot of land, maybe you run different plots so you can get a couple of experiments in every season and get some feedback.
But life is like that. Life is this slow feedback. And it's always ambiguous, isn't it? You're like — I tried this new thing with my colleagues at work, but I didn't just change one thing. And the situation was different than the last time I tried this, because these people left and these new people came in, and now the social dynamics are all different. So you don't get clean feedback data about what worked and what didn't.
It's frustrating, isn't it? You've got all this data, but all it does is work at cross purposes with itself. It's pointing all over the place.
Get out of your head and play
So I'm going to get on that same old tired saw that I always get on.
How do we make sense of all the crazy data, all the conflicting data? It is in fact more than our little pea brains can handle. I know we love to think of ourselves as terribly clever and smart — and we are. We exist on a gradient of smartness that's pretty cool. We can think a lot of things with our lovely brains and cognition systems. But they're not capable of encapsulating the level of data of the biosphere, or the world, or the universe. They're just not.
So we develop spiritual practices, in my humble opinion, to get to a grounded place, so that we can figure out how to respond to all the crazy data coming in.
And they've written a book about that as it relates to archery, too. I believe it's called Zen in the Art of Archery.
Any Ted Lasso fans in the room watching the new season? There's a player who's got so much talent she can't get out of her head. And finally the coach figures out: you've got to get out of your head. You've just got to start playing. Stop overthinking the plays. Go play. And he finally manages to get her into a headspace where she can just go and play without overthinking the whole thing. She goes out and does great — of course, because it's Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso is the Wiz.
If the world only worked like Ted Lasso, where one moment of wisdom resulted in immediate feedback, wouldn't that be great? That's a beautiful thing about writing a TV show. You get to make that happen, because you wrote the script: insightful act of wisdom leads to improved performance, immediately, clearly and cleanly. Yay. And you're like — I wish my life was like Ted Lasso.
But I think the seed Ted Lasso is trying to plant is the same seed I'm trying to plant.
There is a way to know the next right thing to do, but you've got to get out of your head and play.
There is a way to know the next right thing to do, but you've got to get out of your head and just play. You have to play life.
And I'm using the word play really intentionally, because there is joy in play. There is openness in play. When we're playing, we open up our whole body and our heart and our head, and we just go.
They call it flow in psychology. Get into the flow. I always massacre the name — are y'all familiar with Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow?
Flow, in my humble opinion, is psychology finally figuring out how to measure and calibrate what people are like when they are spiritually activated and alive. When their body, heart, head, and spirit are all working together and they're just able to be present. Deeply, really, strongly, fundamentally present in that moment — responding to the realities of that moment without imagining that they have to do it all with their head. Their head, in fact, is made stronger when it's in collaboration and harmony and right relationship with the gut and the heart, and this etherealness that we all sense we're connected to.
Why it matters
So to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.
One of the things I like about Eckhart Tolle is that he's not afraid to mix religions. He brings in some Buddhist language to ground the consequences of sin in words we're less likely to be allergic to than the ones Christian theology usually attaches to it. So he uses the Buddhist term suffering to indicate why we would care about sin at all.
Like — whatever, man. I missed the target, high and to the left. My accuracy is meh. But why would you care? Why do you want the feedback to make it better?
Because that act of continuous improvement in your own life — and I want you to hear this — you are worth it. You are worth it. You are worth getting to be in that state of flow I was just describing, in your own life.
There are few joys in life as deep as being in that moment where you get to be present. Present in your whole body, doing something you love and enjoy. And if you are not adjusting your aim, you're going to spend less time in that state than you deserve to.
But it's not free. It's not a gimme. The capacity to do it is a gift. The cultivation of it — as in the cultivation of a garden — takes some effort on your part. Takes some attention. Some mindfulness.
I don't want you to live unskillfully or blindly. I don't want you to contribute to your own suffering, or the suffering of others. We all still do it.
I think some people hear me talk like this and assume I have some idea of a panacea — a world where the suffering has all stopped. I hate to tell you, I don't think the suffering is ever going to stop.
But I do think we could get to a place — and I don't mean we as in me and you, or the people in this room. I mean we, life on this planet — could get to a place where we are not the main causes of our own trauma through unskillful living.
There are still going to be challenges. Droughts are going to happen. Meteors are going to fall from the sky. Non-human-created climate change is going to happen. Human-created climate change is going to happen. Challenges are going to keep coming.
This isn't about getting to some utopia where the challenges all disappear and we're all like the Lollipop Guild. This is about figuring out how to show up to the world as it is, in a way where you get to experience the joy of being alive in your own life.
And the beautiful, magical flip side of that — in my understanding of the world — is that you being able to show up in flow in your life, in real moments every day, whether that's on Sunday or at work on Monday or with your kids on Saturday, wherever it is: you in that moment are pushing the world gently in the direction of a better world. Just you doing that. Just you figuring that out for you, and living it in that moment.
It starts to push the boulder up the hill. And I do believe there is a critical mass moment where enough of us nudging that boulder with our little everyday acts of joy creates a tipping point — where the boulder is not going uphill anymore. Where wisdom becomes a cultural practice. Where learning to be in flow, and in deep relationship with one another, and expressing our love and compassion and caring, instead of having to be afraid and hypervigilant and angry and ashamed all the time — becomes a new norm.
There's a difference between something being normal and something being healthy. There's a lot of stuff in the world we live in right now that's normal and extremely unhealthy. Normal. Quotidian. Happens every day.
The Zen archer
I think the screwdriver of sin is worth recovering, because what it deeply points at is our desire to do all the stuff we talk about in our own chalice lighting. To mature. To deepen. To grow. To connect. To rest when we need to.
Sin can be a tool that helps us remember that just because we got close on that one shot doesn't mean we've got it all figured out — and that we shouldn't become convinced of either our own self-righteousness or our better-than-other-people-ness.
It's more like a reminder that we are all shooting at a messy, messy target. The turbulent wind patterns between me and the target, and between everybody else and the target, are unclear and ambiguous.
So it's more like: I'm going to keep trying to get better, by figuring out how to find presence and joy in my life. So that I can become the Zen archer who doesn't have to calculate the winds in my head.
But like the Jedi Knight of lore — becomes one with the bow and the arrow and the target. Grounded and centered and connected to all that is.
And when the moment comes, release.
And with eyes still closed, know that you have hit the target.
Amen.
Eric Hepburn: Until next time. Thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer.
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The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted by Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Keith Hutchinson, Lance McCollum, and Matt Tardy. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn.
See you next time.
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