SIN

Purple, Orange, Green, Blue, Gray, Black & White
Lent -- the forty days of fasting (not counting Sundays, when you are excused from your Lenten Fast) before Easter Day -- Lent is time to be self-aware and especially of sin. That is to say, of one’s own sin, not of the sins of others. Sin is defined with ecclesiastical stodge and not very helpfully in The Cathechism (BCP848):
  1. What is sin?
Q. Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation. 

On second thought, it’s a fair definition if we realize that sin is not a list of answers in the back of the book, but an arithmetic problem, simple subtraction: sin is the difference between what God thinks and what we think. We know what we think, but how do we know what God thinks? In our Anglican way of theologizing, we know what God thinks by Scripture, Tradition and Reason: what the Bible says; the teachings of the Church down through the Christian ages; and our intellect, common sense, given to us who are created in God’s image and guided by the Holy Spirit. Knowing what God thinks, seeking the mind of God, then, is a process, tempered by the Summary of the Law: Love God, Love Neighbor as Self.
In our society, sin is an outdated, medieval, even stone age (current foment in Afghanistan, e.g.) notion. But suddenly not so in America 2012, when Leap Year is poxed with a presidential election campaign that is degenerating into bitterly contrasting religious certainties, even about (shades of Ireland) Contraception. At the ongoing level of mentality, surely we shall also hear of reviving Prohibition and Blue Laws before Wednesday, November 7, 2012 mercifully dawns and the creepie crawlies slink and slither back into the woodwork and under their rocks.
Frederick Buechner is helpful:
Religion and unreligion are both sinful to the degree that they widen the gap between you and the people who don’t share your views.
  • Leap Year 2012: year of the widening gap.
  • Traditionally, kneeling on Sunday is forbidden, Sunday being a Feast Day.
  • All Sundays of the Year are Feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ (BCP16). Is it therefore a Sin to blaspheme Sunday by fasting?
TW+
Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, Harper & Row, 1973, p.89.