THE WAGES OF SIN

I couldn’t believe he said it. “The Almighty’s un­derstanding is far beyond ours.” Every fucking time. That’s such a cop-out. What he’s really saying is, “I don’t know why this part of my religion makes no sense, so I’ll use a well-known cop-out.”
Every Christian I’ve debated brings up the same points and counterpoints. The parallels are uncanny. And now, once again, amidst a sea of disagreements, he used it as a lazy reset.

“That’s bullshit,” I said. I wasn’t a respecter of men anymore.

“That’s another thing,” the preacher said, lean­ing forward. “You know your religion, there’s no doubt about that. But you don’t practice what you preach. You use so much vulgarity—”

“No. That’s the difference between me and you. I only practice. I don’t interpret or misinterpret.”

“Misinterpret?”

“Sir. Where in the Old or New Testament does it say ‘Thou shalt not cuss’?”

“Yeah. But if you want to be a vessel–”

“If somebody walked in with a gun and I said, ‘Shit! Watch out!’ Which would be more important? The swear, or the fact that I saved your life?” 

“I just think if you’re trying to convince some­one on what to believe–”

“Sir,” I had to cut him off, “The Almighty say lift up your voice like a trumpet and spare not. That’s it. I ain’t tryinta convince nobody nothin’. I ain’t tryin’ ta make friends. I’m just tryin’ to follow the Most High­’s Law.”

“The Mosaic Laws.” He said with a mocking tone about his voice.

“The All Mighty’s Laws,” I said, with a ‘no ass­hole’ tone about mine.

“The only laws that God himself made were the Ten Commandments. The other six hundred-some­thing laws were made up by Moses. They were only appropriate for the period…” 

I shook my head while he kept rambling. Leaf­ing through my concordance, I tried to remember where the verse was. I was sure it said YHWH himself gave the laws to Moses and Moses gave them to the people of Yisrael. This was disappointing. In my prime, when I used to study all the time, I could rattle off exact scripts and locations. Everything happens for a reason. Maybe this was to show me that I needed to take this more seriously.

“…like animal sacrifice,” he continued, “That’s an Old Testament Law, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said, without lifting my head. I kept searching through the pages.

“What do you mean ‘No’? They sacrificed ani­mals and made burnt offerings.”

“Sir,” I said, “Say what you just said again.”

“I said they used to sacrifice animals to God,” he said.

“Those were burnt offerings, right?”

“They were.”

“OFF-ER-INGS. Listen to yourself. To offer — that’s not a command. The word itself means it’s given freely. If it were law, He would have commanded it—”

“He did.”

“He didn’t.”

“He has very specific LAWS on how to make offerings—“

“How. If they do. If they decide to make offer­ings, he has laws on how—“

“But, why?”

“I don’t know, sir. The All Knowing’s under­standing is limitless. Isn’t that what you said?”

He smirked with an annoyed turn of the head.

“Okay,” he said. 

“Just because people do something in His name doesn’t mean it’s right,” I said.

“True, but—“

“You of all cults should know that. Think about the crusades and the witch hunts and all of the mur­ders Christians have carried out in his name.” 

“That was different–”

“No. It’s the same thing. It’s interpretations, misinterpretations, and bias—”

“Please stop talking over me—“

“Make it so bad, he said that his sacrifices are a broken spirit and contrite heart.”

“Then how do you atone for your sins?”

“Sir, if you read the script—“

“STOP calling me Sir!”

Quiet. He was right. I was being an asshole with the sir thing, and he called me out on it. I waited another beat before I decided to speak again.

“Okay.” I said, slightly more respectfully, “The way you atone for your sins is to stop sinning. You don’t sacrifice a bull; you just stop doing bad things. Yah’s laws are not some written code for you to inter­pret. They are near to our hearts. You know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

I finally found the verse I was looking for. I held it down with a finger so I wouldn’t lose it again. I looked up to gauge his temperature. He was nose-deep in his own book. No wonder Christians are so back­ward. They start at the back of the book. I tried not to smile.  I figured I should read straight from the Bible from now on and keep my snarky comments to myself.

“Here it is,” I said, “Leviticus 26:46. At the end—after all the laws were stated, it says, ‘These are the statutes and judgments and laws which YAHWEH made between him and the children of Israel.’ See. These are the Most High’s Laws, not Moses’. Moses just relayed the message.” I sat back with an exhalation and a sense of finality. What more could he say?

I never really understood Christianity. Even when I was a Christian. On Sunday mornings, I’d watch my mom nod along with the preacher when he said, “Turn the other cheek.” By Monday afternoon, back in the real world, she’d tell me, “If somebody hits you, hit them back. And if you can’t beat them, pick up a stick.”

When I finally left home and had the freedom to dig deeper, I realized something simple: all it took was study. Deep dives. And suddenly things started to make sense. When religion wasn’t treated like some mystical, untouchable thing—but paired with nature, science, history, and plain common sense—it stopped feeling like dogma and started looking like a universal truth. It wasn’t a religion anymore; it was a system, al­most like math. Predictable. Orderly. Solid. It gave me confidence, knowing that facts couldn’t be debated.

Lately, I haven’t been studying the way I used to. On the Sabbath, I’ll open the book and try to read a few chapters, but most times my eyes glaze over, and the words slip through my mind like water through a sieve. That morning was no different. I was staring at the page, letting my thoughts drift wherever they wanted, when a knock pulled me back.

I opened the door to find the preacher standing there, Bible tucked tight under one arm.

“God bless, son,” he said. “Are ya saved?”

“Saved from what?” I said, which was my knee-jerk challenge.

Any other day of the week, I probably would’ve just said, “Sure,” while shutting the door. But like I said—it was the Sabbath, the one day the Almighty commands us to do basically nothing. So any distraction that wasn’t against the law was welcome.

I let him in, and we got to talking. He came in confident, quoting verses, smiling like he had me cor­nered. But now? Not so much. Now he was slumped in the chair, shaking his head, mumbling under his breath, reaching for words that wouldn’t come.

It was tough. He was trying to convince me, a sinner, that a father and a son are both one and are separate and died and are alive, and cannot be seen, but can be heard, and must be believed, so I can live in clouds and not burn underground. 

Finally, he lifted his head. 

“You know, Marcus, a lot of what you say makes sense, and there is a lot of truth in it. But just be­cause you’re passionate about something, doesn’t make it right– doesn’t make you right.” 

I let him have that. I raised my eyebrows, hop­ing that he’d listen to himself and take heed.

“Christianity is more than just words on a page. It’s a feeling. It’s about community. It’s about family,” he said.

“Ugh,” came out of my mouth.

“You… Have problems with your family?”

“It’s…” I wanted to say complicated, but I did­n’t want to say complicated because that’s such an overused term when describing conflicts between par­ents and offspring.

“–a lot,” he said, “Family is a lot.”

“Excisely,” I said.

“Family makes you vulnerable,” he said, look­ing away, “Having something that you love that much–something that you would kill for to protect.”

He shook his head as he turned back to me, seemingly coming back from a dark place. 

“But,” he said, “it teaches you to love some­thing greater than yourself.”

I wanted to say “Ugh,” again.

He glanced around my shabby duplex, taking in the threadbare rug I’d scavenged from near the dumpster, the darkened paint by the couch where my feet had left streaks after hours of TV marathons. I did­n’t have to tell him I was an isolated bachelor with no one to impress; the room spoke for me.

“You need people,” he said, his voice carrying the maturity of a quiet insistence.

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes, “I know.” 

“What are you doing tomorrow?” he said. 

And that was the last straw. This is the same way it always ends. Nothing is resolved, and I’m invit­ed to a madhouse where people speak in tongues and spontaneously dance in reckless spasms. I didn’t want to go to no damned church. You can’t ask questions in a damned church. You just have to sit there and listen to the preacher try to indoctrinate you with his bass ackwards theories and screwed-up beliefs.

I was like a cashier stuck behind a register, an­swering the same stupid questions day after day. Stupid to me, because I had learned everything so long ago it felt like common sense. And now it made me cynical—hating everyone, itching for payback.

“Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “Do you have a business card?” And then I cringed, thinking, okay, that was my last snarky comment for real.

The next day, I found a lone pew near the back of the church. This, however, didn’t stop an elderly woman from sitting right next to me.  She glanced over at my stack of books. I had The Holy Bible—well, The Holy Old Testament and that other book written 400 years later that was attached to it for some reason. I also had Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, which I use to compare English translations with their original He­brew or Greek meanings. For example, using this book, I can find out that  “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is more accu­rately “Thou Shalt Not Murder,” meaning “Thou Shalt Not Shed an Innocent Person’s Blood.” I also had a dic­tionary and the Apocrypha, which were writings they decided to leave out of the book when they stitched it together for some reason.

The elderly lady curled her lips into a worried smile and then nodded. I nodded back politely.

Child, that service was for me! I know you’ve heard your aunty say this before, but, for real, it was. I knew this because of the subject of his homily. He basi­cally told me that the B.C. stories were just that, stories. Examples, if you will. I listened. I was even prepared to leave without saying a word, but the opportunity presented the hell out of itself when he took offering.

“Before I conclude, I just want to ask if there is ANYONE—anyone at all—who needs JESUS to do something in their life. Please raise your hand. Hallelu­jah! Remember, there is no PROBLEM too LARGE, no PROBLEM too small, Hallelujah, that God can’t fix! Can I get an ‘Amen’?”

The crowd said “Amen” on cue. If he’d said, “You all are the oogliest muthafukkas this side of eter­nity,” everyone would still say “Amen.” Everyone ex­cept me. I didn’t say amen. I didn’t raise my hand. I stood up.

“You say we shouldn’t follow the laws of the Old Testament,” I spoke loudly and clearly, but I had to wait for the buzz of the audience and the music to die down before repeating myself. The crowd looked at me as if I were naked. “If that’s true, then why do we pay you our tithes, preacher?” It felt like there was a spotlight on both of us. “Isn’t tithing a law from the Old Testament? How come that law isn’t done away with, like you said the rest of them are, Sir?”

I heard a hum of whispers ripple through the “holy” space. The congregation looked at the preacher as if he had accepted my challenge of nudity and start­ed nervously stripping himself. His eyes narrowed like they were trying to pierce my soul. Then he looked down. Silence. I sat. There was only one spotlight now.

“Well…” He was completely stuck, and he made this obvious. There was a nervous laugh and then a buoyant smile.“Well, brother, as it says in Luke: ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom.’” The congregation seemed to sigh with relief. He was their collective voice, and they didn’t want to choke under pressure. “‘For with the same measure that ye mete, it shall be given unto you again.’ Can I get an ‘Amen’?”

The old lady beside me nodded with satisfac­tion as she cooled herself with a colorful fan.

“Amen!” She said, looking right into where my soul used to be.

He got me with that one. Honestly, I didn’t fully understand what he said. The New Testament has so much therefore, whenceforth henceforth so and so, it’s hard to keep up. I smiled at his “answer,” and when the ser­vice concluded, I slipped out quickly, just in case some­one wanted to assassinate me for asking a question in church. 

I sat in my vehicle and grabbed the door han­dle. I stopped, thinking. Why was I doing this? Was it for the love of my people, like I claimed, or was it for something else?

My phone rang like an answer. I paused when I saw “Mom” on the display. 

“Oh. Right,” I said. 

How did she get my number? I pulled at the car door, feeling some resistance, while the phone con­tinued to ring. I just stared at the word “Mom.” Phones are so strange. If she were standing right before me, saying, “Marcus, Marcus, Marcus,” I wouldn’t just stare blankly, unsure if I wanted to respond. Yet this small device lets me freeze time to make a decision.

I pulled a little harder on my car door, the met­al frame resisting stubbornly, until a jolt of realization snapped me back into reality. A woman was standing there, blocking it—that’s why it wouldn’t close. My senses slowly began evening out as her blurred, fit fig­ure came into focus. The late afternoon light caught the edge of her relaxed black hair, the sun illuminating the dark brown undertones of each strand, and I could make out the sharp determination in her stance.

“Why did you ask that question?” she said, her voice calm but probing, carrying the weight of some­one expecting honesty.

I wasn’t sure if I should even begin. What I be­lieved wasn’t a witty one-liner; it was a different way of looking at life.

She walked to the passenger side and got in.
“What’s your religion?” she asked.

“I don’t have one. But I go by the Old Testa­ment. I don’t believe in the New Testament aside from what it took directly from the Old.”

I had answered so many questions about my religion over the years that my replies came out in pre-packaged chunks, like cards I could flip through. I no longer waited for people to ask; I just moved ahead to the next thing they were going to challenge anyway. The most important question usually came next.

“So you don’t believe in Jesus?,” she asked.

“No,” I responded.

She didn’t flinch. She just waited.

“Look,” I said, “No man can die for another man’s sins.”

“Jesus wasn’t a man—”

“No one then. Not an angel, not a worm, not even God Himself.”

“God can do what He wants—”

“Then He wouldn’t want to. For one, God will never die. And two, my God—The original God from the Old Testament—wouldn’t break His own law.

“The Old Testament laws? Didn’t you hear the preacher?”

“Yeah. I heard him, and he’s wrong. If the laws are done away with, then that means we could murder, sleep with married people, rape, have our hearts filled with hate, and still be accepted in the eyes of the Most High. Your preacher contradicts the Old Testament just like the New Testament does.”

“You’re saying the New Testament contradicts the Old Testament?”

“So many times! The whole story of Christ di­rectly contradicts a law in the Old Testament.”

“What law?”

“It’s in Ecclesiastes somewhere.”

She looked at me.

“I’m not sure where. All of my notes are back home–”

She strapped in and clicked her seat belt.

“Ooh!” She said, “Can we stop by McDonald’s on the way? I’m starving!”

I blinked and almost jerked back as if she had tossed a flower in my face. My “debate mode” was dis­armed. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do.

So I started to drive with this stranger in my car, the scene feeling oddly domestic, like I had just picked my wife up from church. At the drive-thru, she leaned her thin frame across my lap to place the order. I turned my head aside to give her space, but I could only retreat so far. The warmth of her cheek brushed the air against mine, as soft as a lover’s breath.

“Hi,” she said, “Can I get a bacon and egg Mc­Muffin with–”

“No!” I said.

She looked at me. I could feel the employee staring at me through the monitor.

“You can’t eat pork in my car,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “Law?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok.”

“No bacon?” he said.
“No sausage?”
“No ham?”

The kid sounded dumbfounded, like he’d stum­bled onto some rare species of customer. What type of weirdo would eat a breakfast sandwich with nothing but egg and bread?

By the time we pulled up to my apartment, she was chewing. Ev­ery few bites, she’d pause with a disappointed expres­sion—like she kept forgetting and then remembering just how joyless it was without the salty goodness that is pork.

I opened my door, made the traditional apolo­gy for the mess, and offered her a drink. I turned to see her sitting on the couch. She kept her sandwich levitat­ed with one hand as she flipped through her Bible after another fresh bite. 

“You sad Ecclesiastes?” She managed around a mouthful, crumbs sprinkling from her mouth to the pages.

I almost smiled. There was something disarm­ing in her comfort, the way she treated a stranger’s home like a friend’s kitchen table. I gave her the chap­ter and verses that countered the rumors about the so-called “Anointed One.”

“Ah,” I said, “Ezekiel. I always get Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes mixed up.”

“Which verse?” she asked.

“Oh, 18:20,” I said. 

As she flipped through the pages, I thought about telling her what I considered a fun fact– how the word ‘Christ’ meant ‘anointed,’ and there was no record of Jesus ever being properly anointed,” but I kept my mouth closed this time.

“The soul that sinneth, it shall die,” she read aloud. I wasn’t sure why—maybe she hoped that when she reached the part that led to my apparent misunder­standing, I’d hear the words and realize, “Oh, I got it wrong.”

“The son shall not bear the iniquity of the fa­ther, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon—” She paused, inhaling and staring with her mouth open.

I knew from experience that this was the part where she would say, “This is before God saw that we had no control,” or “This is before Jesus changed ev­erything for the better.” I’ve even had one person look me straight in the face and simply say, “It doesn’t mean that,” without further explanation.

She said nothing. 

I’ve got to admit, it felt weird. Religion was per­sonal—too personal—and every other time I’d opened my mouth about it, everything got tense. People would be ready to fight as if I’d just insulted their mama. But her? She sat there calm, almost thoughtful, as if she were actually considering. That threw me. Christians don’t consider, do they? 

That was our first religious study, but it would­n’t be our last—I knew it. The next week, she brought a few elders from her church. I wasn’t surprised. These things always played out like a martial arts movie or a video game. First comes the rookie fighter—usually some everyday, working-class believer who’s never faced somebody pushing back on the mainstream faith. If their footing slips, they retreat and send reinforcements. Then the elders arrive, steady and polite, moving a little slower but carrying the weight of authority. I shut them down—as respectfully as I could. After that came the “human Bibles”—zealous history nerds who, like me, could quote verse and context down to the chapter and date. They were the mini-bosses, hard-hitting but beatable. And finally came the big boss himself—the preacher—ready to test his moves in the last round.

But this time was different.

For one, a history nerd caught me flat-footed. He pointed out that the original Hebrew word for “of­fering” didn’t necessarily imply voluntariness. At first, I scoffed. Then I checked the Concordance—and felt the sting of admitting he was right.

For two, the preacher had already faced me head-to-head. Normally, he was the final boss, the last fight before the whole thing ended.

And three? This time, the game didn’t end. Week after week, more members from the church slipped into my Saturday class. I even heard whispers that some of them stood up in service, pressing the preacher with questions about what we studied the day before.

The girl, Aletheia, was a unique one. She didn’t seem interested in debating for debating’s sake. When she asked a question, it seemed she sincerely wanted to know the answer. Or at least what I thought the an­swer was. She would greet me with a hug every Satur­day, and after everybody else left, she would stay and force the conversation off religion. I started looking forward to the weekend because of her.

We even met up on a Tuesday night to see a two-dollar movie at a declining mall. When she hugged me, it felt like I could wrap my arms around her slender waist twice. 

After the movie was over, I pushed through the crowd to make way so she wouldn’t encounter too much resistance. That’s when I felt her hand in mind. Even when we were in the hall and the people had more room to spread out, she kept holding on. 

I knew I was getting soft. When she showed up next Saturday, she was eating an egg McMuffin– with bacon. 

“Oh shoot!” she said, “Sorry.”

She started to leave so she could continue her meal on the porch.

“Nah, it’s okay,” I said.

I let her eat inside, and for some reason, that bothered me. I was compromising what I believed for this girl. And to add to that, she was still eating swine. After everything I told her, how it was prohibited in the Old Testament, about the parasites it carried, about the saturated fat, how it can transmit disease, how the pig was God’s perfect garbage disposal– she still had the nerve to consume.

I knew why I was really bothered. On Satur­days, she sat across from me with her Bible open, nod­ding along as if the truth was sinking in. But on Sun­days, she was right back in the pews, singing hymns and clapping with the rest of them. She wouldn’t choose a side. To me, it felt like trying to mix oil and water, like she wanted to merge two worlds that were meant to collide.

As she finished eating and we began setting up chairs for class, my internal conflict had a mind of its own. It finally spilled over to my mouth. I found my­self trying to start an argument with her. 

“I still don’t understand how you can eat that stuff,” I said.

With a full mouth, she smiled and said, “Be­cause it’s the best.”

“So you don’t care about what’s right and wrong? You just do whatever you want?” 

I kept on poking and prodding, wanting to make her see the error of her ways. Instead of getting defensive or upset, she stayed calm and composed. She didn’t argue, but when I finally asked, “Why?” plain and simple, she shared a story. She told me how pork saved her life.

With a gentle smile, she recounted a surprising tale. She was originally from a small town outside the city. Actually, she lived on the outskirts of the outskirts in a trailer deep in the woods. Her family was a differ­ent kind of poor, living off the land with no creature comforts.

She got used to the summers, but winters were a different story. They were always life and death. They didn’t have money for groceries, and even if they did, the nearest store was 45 minutes away. So when they got snowed in one year, all they could do was pray. 

Her father, who was ex-military and a hell of a hunter, managed to catch one thing that winter. A pig.

He pinned it to a tree outside with his hunting knife. Because of that one animal, they were able to survive. They made pork stew, bacon, and jerky. They dropped quite a bit of weight, but if it wasn’t for that “disgusting animal,” they would have starved to death.

The story stayed with me for hours. Even when everyone else arrived, even when it was time to start the lesson, I remained zoned out, my thoughts tangled in the remnants of her tale. I could feel the chill of those winters pressing against my own cozy apart­ment, the weight of her struggle pressing against my theoretical existence. She had lived, truly lived—tested in ways I could never imagine, while I measured life in old books and archaic ideas.

A tap on my left shoulder jolted me out of my thoughts. I looked over to see Aletheia’s warm face. I glanced around the room, noticing everyone’s eyes on me.

“Sorry about that,” I apologized. “I see we have some new faces here today. Normally, I’d start by tear­ing down the New Testament and the story of Christ. I’d usually justify it with a scripture from Jeremiah, where it says to pull down and destroy before you plant and build. But today, I’m going to switch things up.

“How many of you are here because you want­ed me to tell you the truth?”

Everybody raised their hands. 

“Okay. 100 percent. Cool.”

After some laughs, I had everybody turn to First Samuel 8:4. 

“‘Then all the elders of Israel gathered them­selves together and came to Samuel, and said unto him, (blah blah blah) ‘make us a king to judge us like all the nations.  But the thing displeased Samuel,’ (yad­da yadda yadda) ‘And Yah said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people’ (something something something): ‘for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me.’”

I looked around to see if there were any en­lightened expressions. There weren’t.

“Of course, study, and read the rest on your own, to make sure I’m not taking this out of context, but The Most High never intended for us to have a leader. So stop fucking looking for other people to tell you the truth. In Deuteronomy, Moses says that God’s commandments are in our hearts. We know what’s right and wrong. We are born with it. It’s inherited. It’s a feeling–” 

After a familiar buzz, I stared at my phone as the world faded away. It rested on a pile of religious books on the chair beside me. Even face down, I knew who was calling—it was like I could recognize the standard ringtone. I reached over to grab it, but it slipped from my hand and tumbled to the floor. As I knelt to pick it up, Aletheia stood up to do the same. Just as my hand touched the phone, a sudden percus­sive noise rang out, followed by the sound of shatter­ing glass. I blinked in shock, and when my vision cleared, I saw a red splatter on my hand. Dazed, I looked around and then up, just in time to see Aletheia collapsing toward me.

The room erupted into screams and panicked shouts. Chairs toppled, books scattered across the floor. People were ducking and stumbling, their cries bouncing off the walls in a deafening cacophony. My ears rang as I caught Aletheia’s body. We were paused, frozen in time, while the chaos whirled around us. She was gone with no goodbye—no last breath to clutch, no trembling confession, no heartbreaking admission. The world around us became a blur of terror and con­fusion—faces twisted in horror, hands flailing, voices shouting, and yet all I could focus on was her.

I didn’t know it then, but later I would discover that the preacher had been a sharpshooter in the mili­tary. I would have been dead if I hadn’t ducked to grab my phone as he pulled the trigger. Later, he was ques­tioned by the police. Through tears, he said he just wanted to “kill the Antichrist.” Me. I was indeed an­ti-Christ, so this was appropriate. But he missed. Well, he missed me.  

The last things the preacher saw in his crosshairs–not even a second after my head disap­peared from view, after he had already pulled the trig­ger, before he gasped in horror, was that young lady, the person who fell towards me; the one I had met in the parking lot that day. He saw Aletheia. He saw his daughter.  

If you loved the religious story THE WAGES OF SIN, you’ll probably enjoy the very carnal UNPERFECT WORLD.