What I Learned from Talking with Kids About Sin
By Carol Braun
Sin was on my mind this summer.
In the sticky heat of mid-July, in a beautiful, lofty, sweltering old fellowship hall illumined by a stained-glass rose window, I sweated my way through leading my small parish’s Vacation Bible School. My six students ranged in age from five to ten years, and so each day meant facing the struggles and the gifts of a one-room schoolhouse. My patience ran thin in inverse proportion to the rising temperature. But, as often as I strained to keep the kids focused at both ends of the age spectrum, I was delighted to see how they helped each other—how the younger ones learned from the older ones, and how the older ones sat up a little straighter as they took the lead.
The packaged curriculum that I chose for the week, from Concordia Publishing House, caught my eye for its emphasis on the benefits we have in Christ. Each day’s theme spelled out an aspect of what Jesus has done and continues to do for us: Jesus came for me, Jesus heals me, Jesus cares for me, etc. On Thursday came the theme that inspired this essay: Jesus saves me.
As I saw it, the day’s main challenge was to engage the children in understanding what it means that Jesus saves them. What does Jesus save them from? And how? And what words can we use to explain such things in ways that young children today can understand?
The Bible stories for the day were Luke’s account of the crucifixion (Luke 23:32-49) and Matthew’s account of Easter morning (Matthew 28:1-10)—passages that held the kids’ attention and made it clear that salvation from Jesus has something powerful to do with death and resurrection. But how to fill in the rest of the story?
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) – Christ triumphing over Death and Sin
From Wikimedia Commons
As it happened, the instructor’s guide that came with the curriculum spelled out the crux of salvation in terms of God’s law and God’s gospel, like this:
Law: Because of Adam and Eve’s first sin, all people are sinful. Sin causes our world to be full of problems, pain, and sadness. The punishment for sin is eternal death.
Gospel: Jesus saved us from eternal punishment through His sacrificial death and resurrection, giving us joy in the sure hope of eternal life.
That’s a hell of a lot to unpack for a five-year-old. (When I’d asked one of the youngest students, at a parish Easter event a few months earlier, if she knew what the holiday was about, her only answers had to do with the bunny.) After we’d talked through the Bible readings that day at VBS, I decided to ask the kids what we mean by sin. That’s where my own learning began.
First lesson learned: Stop and think about what sin is.
Children who are regularly exposed to a traditional Lutheran liturgy hear about sin a lot, but in my experience they’re slow to pick up on its meaning. (My son tells me he used to think sin was a good thing and then wonder, during the Agnus Dei, why the Lamb of God would take it away from us.) When I asked the VBS kids if they knew what sin was, the younger ones said no, and the older ones said yes but then couldn’t put it into words. Even for adults, ‘sin’ is one of those words that feel alien outside the walls of a church. Drop it into casual conversation in a secular context, and it’s likely to land with a thud, as a kind of category-mistake misfire—almost an impropriety. It’s a small word freighted with an enormous theology.
So, it was useful for us to take some time spelling out what sin is. We spoke of things we do and say and think and want that go against what God wants for us and demands of us. Things that damage our relationships with God and with each other; ways we turn in on ourselves and sink into selfishness. We remembered the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, and talked about sin as something we’re all born with, a condition of being human, something we can’t avoid or escape by our efforts to be good. I told them I sin every day.
Second lesson learned: Defining sin is one thing; applying it to oneself is another.
To make things more concrete, I mentioned a couple ways I’d sinned in the past twenty-four hours—losing my patience with my boys at home, being too quick to anger—and asked the kids if they could think of ways they’d sinned. They took the assignment seriously, and the older ones gave evidently heartfelt little confessions. The younger ones, with charming guilelessness, answered in a very different way, launching into accounts of the naughty boys who always get into trouble at school, gleefully cataloguing those other kids’ most shocking misdeeds. It was a poignant reminder of our human tendency to point the finger at others’ faults instead of our own—the other’s mote often more glaring than the self’s beam. The older kids were quick to point out how they’d misunderstood the instructions. The younger kids tried again.
Third lesson learned: Kids today use different language about behavior and discipline.
As I planned that Thursday lesson, a sentence from the instructor’s guide snagged my attention: “The punishment for sin is eternal death.” This is certainly the language with which I came to understand my salvation in Christ when I was a child. But, immersed as I am in today’s parenting culture, I’m aware that “punishment,” particularly in the context of young children’s lives, ain’t what it used to be. Born at the tail end of Gen X, I understood punishment as a part of normal life as a young child—a price paid for misbehavior, albeit with loving and instructive intention. By the time my younger sister got to punishable age, rather than getting sent to her room for punishment she was given a “time-out.” This was a change not merely in name but also in message: less “You have been judged for your action,” and more “You need to take a break and reset,” like a basketball team in need of a quick drink of water and a word from the coach. Since then, parenting culture has moved on from time-outs to “time-ins,” which carry an even gentler message: “Let’s pause to talk about how you’re feeling and some better ways to handle those feelings.” Add to this change the grown-up fact of Western culture’s long move away from the death penalty, and I’m left wondering how “The punishment for sin is eternal death” rings differently in ears today than it did fifty, one hundred, five hundred years ago.
From Canva
When one of my youngest students tried again to apply the concept of sin to herself, she arrived at an example, and the language she used to explain it was eye-opening. Describing an occasion when she’d been aggrieved and hurt by another child and then retaliated physically, she noted several times that she was “overstimulated, and I didn’t mean to do it, but it I did.”
I heard in her words an echo of the recent “gentle parenting” movement, which interprets children’s misbehavior not as willful naughtiness but rather as a natural reaction to external stressors. As described by Jessica Winter in a 2022 book review for the New Yorker, “One of the major themes in [the book] ‘Brain-Body Parenting,’ and in gentle-parenting discourse generally, is that children don’t defy for the sake of defiance, but that their challenging behavior is a physiological response to stress and should be seen as essentially adaptive.”
Fourth lesson learned: None of that stops kids from seeing their need for forgiveness.
My first thought upon hearing my student talk about overstimulation was how differently kids today seem to think about personal accountability for their actions. Doesn’t this framing of behavior absolve us of guilt on its own? What need is there for repentance, or for salvation itself, if my faults are not my fault?
Eventually I came to see the narrow-mindedness of my first reaction. We all know from experience that our circumstances can make it easier for us to lash out or be selfish; my own patience waning with the rising heat was a case in point. Surely this is one facet of the weakness Saint Paul was talking about when he wrote that “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6 NRSV). My student’s statement of “I didn’t mean to, but…” is not so different after all from Paul saying that “I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:14-15 NRSV), and, a few lines later, “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me” (7:20 NRSV). With this connection in mind, the segue from my student’s youthful self-examination into a discussion of sin and forgiveness can flow quite naturally.
On the question of different views of punishment, I came to two conclusions. First: Although some parents today talk less about punishment and more about guidance, I know from my sons that kids today retain a bone-deep sense of punishment—whether they call it that or not—as a meting out of justice, exacting a price to restore fairness, especially when two kids are involved and one has been wronged by the other. Second: Even kids who aren’t used to the concept of being punished are used to hearing all about the consequences of their actions. From here, too, there’s a natural bridge to the language of Romans: “The wages of sin is death.” Actions and attitudes have consequences. In the words of my instructor’s guide, “Sin causes our world to be full of problems, pain, and sadness.” And, yes, death—eternal death, eternal separation from God. This death is the price Jesus paid for us when he hung on the cross in that passage we read from Luke; this is the slavery he freed us from forever when he rose from the dead in that passage we read from Matthew.
Grasping my own need for salvation in Christ has sometimes involved a deeply felt acknowledgement of my own wretchedness, and I know I’m not alone in that. What if a mind-body, gentle-parenting analysis of wrongdoing leads to less angst, less depth of remorse about one’s own sinful nature? Well, for one thing, it’s not clear to me that the one really does lead to the other. The “I didn’t mean to, but…” speaks, at its base, to an awareness of God’s law and, I think, a consequent pricking of conscience. Furthermore, we do well to recall that repentance means turning from one thing to another, with or without the sackcloth and ashes. Our salvation rests on what Christ has done for us, not in how bad we make ourselves feel about our need for that salvation. Any discrepancy we perceive between what we know is right and what we think and say and do is surely enough for the Holy Spirit to work with so as to point us to Christ as the path to life eternal and abundant, in freedom from slavery to sin.
In short, I plan to keep talking about sin and forgiveness in the Christian-education conversations I lead at home and in my parish, keeping in mind the above grounds for connection with today’s parenting styles and views on wrongdoing. My students this summer taught me at least as much about sin as I taught them, and for that I thank God.
Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
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