Bullseye — Sin as Missing the Mark and the Near Enemies That Cluster Around Every Deep Truth (10-4-2026)

<p>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&#39;ve developed an allergy to and asking whether there&#39;s something honorable and recoverable in it.</p><p>I start with a parable about two Habitat for Humanity volunteers and a screwdriver, and why one of them won&#39;t touch one. The injury is real. The workaround is understandable. And something about it still impedes the work at hand.</p><p>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&#39;t trying to make you better. It&#39;s trying to trigger what keeps you stuck.</p><p>There&#39;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&#39;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.</p>