THE SEVEN DEADLIES: A SERMON SERIES - Spring 2007

The Seven Deadlies: Pride

February 11, 2007

Franktown UMC

Mark 7:14-23

Summoning the crowd again, he said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand. Nothing is outside of a person going into him or her which can defile him or her, but that which is from inside the person going out is what is defiling a person.”

When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, "Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

And he said, "It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For within, from the heart of people, the evil thoughts come out, fornication, thievery, murder, adulterous acts, greediness, wickedness, treachery, sexual excess, evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness. All these evils within come out and defile a person.”

One of my favorite folks is Brantley Craig, somebody I got to know at UVA back when I was the Wesley Foundation director and also a fellow grad student with him in the religious studies department. Brantley stuck with the program, is finishing up his PhD work and will one day be recognized as one of our greatest teachers in the area of Christianity and culture. This week I sent him a birthday note and, as I did, mentioned that I was getting ready to do a sermon series on the Seven Deadly Sins, starting with pride. Brantley wrote back with this introduction, (appropriately since he is known for his introductions), which I could not improve on. So I want to start today with this mock response to my proposition to talk about the Seven Deadly Sins:

“Hey, Alex—what gives? I see in the newsletter that you’re going to start a sermon series on the Seven Deadly Sins. Seven Deadly Sins? First of all, I thought you were supposed to preach against sins, not on them. But more than that, this sounds sneakily Catholic to me. And sort of medieval. And we all know from Pulp Fiction what happens when people start getting medieval.

See, I’m no fool. I read your blog; I sat through your sermons. I even checked out some of those theology books you’ve been adding to the media center (yes, I’m the one). I was coming to understand that ‘sin’ was a human condition: brokenness, selfishness, separation from God, radical and unpleasant finitude and mortality. I was on my way to thinking that checklists of particular sins were so last millennium.

But here you come with these Seven Deadlies. That sounds like not only are there individual sins, but some are worse than others. Who ranks them? Church folks? And have we added homosexuality? ‘Cause I’d like to add denying global warming, reckless driving on bridges, and letting your cell phone ring during the emotional moments in plays and movies. Or is it God who ranks them? Well, that’s even worse. Because that sounds petty to me, like God is my mean old fifth-grade teacher who wrote our names on the board and put an ‘X’ by them each time we ‘acted up.’ And a God like that doesn’t sound like the gracious God you’ve been preaching to us. That doesn’t sound like the awesome and unpredictable God who spoke in the hurricane to that guy you like who owned the island (Hardhead Fishnet or whoever). That doesn’t sound like a God who would send Jesus to redeem, as you said, even Nassawadox Creek. That sounds like a God who holds grudges, micromanages, and keeps more stats than a baseball fan. What does something like Seven Deadly Sins have to do with 21st Century Methodists? Did you take one too many rolls in the kayak, or what??”

It’s scary to get an e-mail like that. Shows me for one thing that Brantley has heard and read way too many of my sermons. But as I said, I couldn’t improve on that. He gets right at all the problems with doing what I’m getting ready to do. Why is it that I would go back to this old way of numbering the sins? What value is there in talking about sins as opposed to sin? In the case of pride, why does it register as a sin at all since there are so many ways that we talk about pride as good thing? And what are the Seven Deadly Sins anyway? Why seven and why deadly?

Well, let’s start right there. You may know the Seven Deadly Sins from the mobile phone commercials or maybe from the Brad Pitt movie Seven, which came out a few years ago, but they are a whole lot older. In fact, they go back to the 6^th century or earlier. Pope Gregory the Great generally gets credit for putting them in their current order. Pride comes first. (I guess you could say it gets pride of place.) The others are probably familiar to you, too. In no particular order we have to deal with anger, greed, lust, envy, gluttony and, everybody’s favorite – sloth. Why seven? Well, it’s a little bit arbitrary, but seven is a number that has a ring to it since it is a number of perfection and completion in biblical terms. You might say that you get a complete picture of the depth of sin by looking at in these seven dimensions.

Why are they deadly? Well, that goes back to a distinction in Roman Catholic theology between venial sins and mortal sins. Venial sins are offenses that do not threaten a person’s eternal fate. These are considered minor acts against God that are done without thought or intention. This may seem like a slippery slope to those of who know how insidious sin can be. But there is a biblical basis for this division of sins. 1 John says, “If you see your brother or sister committing what is not a mortal sin, you will ask, and God will give life to such a one -- to those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin that is mortal; I do not say that you should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal.” (1 Jo. 5:16-17, NRSV)

Mortal sins, by contrast, are serious offenses that have the potential to separate us from God and condemn ourselves to damnation unless we confess them and seek absolution for them. In this sense, these sins are deadly because they threaten the life we have from God in this world and in the next. That is the realm we are in when we talk about the Seven Deadlies.

But all of this sounds very strange to Protestant ears. United Methodists are not used to talking about a list of sins that can get you into special trouble. As followers of Luther and Wesley we know that sin is trouble in all of its varieties and it takes hold of us in such powerful ways that the only we can talk about being freed from it is through God’s grace. Whatever list of the Top Seven you give us is going to seem incomplete and a little too tidy. Sin is much deeper and messier than that. Despite Thomas Aquinas’ attempts to put it all together in a nice system in the Middle Ages, we know that no system can capture the darkness of the human heart nor the greatness of God’s love that we know in forgiving grace.

We’re not alone. Those who are growing up without a deep Christian grounding are also suspicious of the list. When the BBC polled the British public on the Deadly Sins recently they found that only one of the traditional seven made the list as one of Britain’s greatest sins. And it wasn’t pride. You know what made the list? Greed. All the rest were out, replaced by things like cruelty, adultery, bigotry, hypocrisy, selfishness, and dishonesty.[i] Do you notice what has happened? Our sense of what constitutes a grave sin is now determined first by what we do to other people. There is no reference to what we do to God, which Christians might say is the root of all those other interpersonal sins.

Interestingly, we still keep track of those other sins. Beliefnet is still conducting an online poll asking people which of the Seven Deadly Sins they are guilty of most. Right now, leading by a large margin, lust is winning.[ii]

But again, even as Christians we are confused about this list. What is the point in keeping such a tally and keeping such categories? Actually, even as a Methodist who is used to the language of grace, I think it is helpful to take a look at this list. Aquinas was on to something in the 13^th century. He was not just trying to build a handbook for priests to flip through when they got to confession. (“Let’s see here. You coveted your neighbor’s cart? That will be fifteen Hail Mary’s and a nice donation to the bishop’s palace. Next!”) What he was really after was trying to illuminate the human heart in all of its potential and all of its murky depths. He would have called these vices, habits of our heart that lead us away from God. They each had a corresponding virtue, which were habits that would lead us toward God. But if we could really get a handle on what was going on in our vices we might have a better sense of what needed to be transformed within us so that we could truly respond to God’s grace and to live. And not just to live but to live abundantly.

The heart is where we need to go. Jesus talked about sin as holding us in its grip, but he also talked about the place where it took its root. It is in our hearts. Things can be done to us, but it’s when we internalize evil that it takes its greatest toll. Poverty is a sin that attacks us, demeans us, dehumanizes us, but when we internalize that dehumanization it deforms not only our economic circumstances but our souls. Physical abuse, racial injustice, class bias – these things show a deep sin in our society, but when we allow those things to define who we are and what we are in God’s eyes, then the sin has worked its way in deep.

That’s why Jesus also said that there is nothing from without that can defile a person. It is what comes from within that shows our true deformation. Murder, theft, adultery, greediness, lust, evil thoughts, pride – all of these things come forth from our hearts and they reveal who we really are when we have been overcome by sin. So it is right that we spend some time, as we move toward Lent and a season of reflection, it is right that we try to let some grace shine in those dark recesses of our souls. And if the Seven Deadlies can help us uncover those places where we most need to be transformed, then I say, “Lead on!”

So we start with pride. Which seems a strange place to begin. Oh, I know that the Bible speaks often about pride and it is usually in a very negative sense. “Pride goes before destruction,” Proverbs says, “and a haughty spirit before a fall” [Pro. 16:18]. We know that pride has the potential to “set us up.” Sometimes it has tragic consequences, as when a leader ignores the limits and tries to forge ahead with a grand plan or a war believing that they must be vindicated by their ability or foresight – sometimes dragging many others with them to their doom. Sometimes pride plays out as comedy as when we see people deluded by notions of their own grandeur come crashing back to earth. Like all the bad singers on American Idol who finally have their run-in with Simon. As the cartoonist Bernard Baily once said, “When science discovers the center of the universe a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.”[iii]

Yes, we know that pride is at least problematic, but is it all bad? We like to tell folks that they shouldn’t “get above their raisin’” or, if we’re in another generation, that they “ain’t all that,” but there is a kind of pride that we celebrate, too. There is a kind of pride that we want to instill in our children. We talk about taking pride in our work, about pride in our country, and by this we mean a healthy self-confidence. Even the apostle Paul talks about this when he writes to his churches. He says to the Corinthian Christians, “I often boast about you; I have great pride in you.” [2 Co. 7:4] Plus there’s something about this kind of pride that is attractive to us as Americans. As the pitcher Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”[iv]

But the pride that the theologians are talking about is a much deeper recognition of who we are as human beings. The Bible knows that we, as opposed to any of the other creatures of the land and sea, have an infinite capacity for self-delusion. We sometimes forget who we are and what we are supposed to be. We can think we are doing something noble, but end up doing something disastrous. We can think we are doing right, but end up doing wrong. We can think we are saving the world, but in the end we find that we are incapable of saving even ourselves.

It was all inscribed there from the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden is often where theologians go to explain the nature of human pride and it is a good place to start. You remember Eden? It was a place where all that was needed was provided. It was a place where the man and woman lived is communion with God, with the rest of creation and with each other. It was place that from the beginning was good. How do we know this? Because that is the blessing God pronounced over it. “This is good. This is very good.”

The desires of the humans were good as well. They were created with a love for beauty, truth, goodness, and communion with God. But something happens. It’s not that Adam and Eve went out looking to sin. They had no need to do that. They had no inner compulsion to do that. But their natural desires led them to the tree – the tree in the middle of the garden – the one that God had told them not to eat from.

Now there was a serpent and he had a role to play. But the voice was already there, dancing in their heads. “God has given us all this and it is good. God has given us all these trees. There must be some more good to be had from that tree. We won’t die. We will become like God. We will know good and evil and be able to determine for ourselves what we ought to do and not do.”

Then what happened? Eve looked at the tree and she saw that its fruit was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, that it was desirable to make her wise…what possible reason was there not to follow those desires? And Adam must have felt the same. So they ate. The sin was not that they had chosen evil. The sin was that they had chosen to determine happiness for themselves with no reference to their natural limits, with no reference to God. Once that step was taken, who was there to tell us when we go astray?

We bought the illusion that we could determine our own course. And we’ve bought it ever since. It seems so natural. As Karl Barth put it, “When [a person] desires the enjoyment and use of his [or her] freedom is he [or she] desiring anything more or other than the most obvious and natural thing in the world?...Where is the wrong in this?...It does not look as though [the person] is wanting to be as God, to be God, and in that way becoming a sinner. It looks rather as though [the person] is modestly doing that which is obvious and right, fulfilling his [or her] true humanity and in that way the will of God as rightly understood.”[v]

But you know and I know how we use our freedom. Left to our own devices we can be pretty immature, pretty nasty, pretty destructive to ourselves and others. Most of the time we don’t even recognize it until too late. We look back at the decisions we made…decisions that seemed so good at the time…so right…and we wonder how did we make that wrong turn? I thought I knew better than the rules that time. I thought I was mature enough to handle it on my own. I thought my friends were wrong. I thought the people who cared about me were naïve. I thought I could get by without prayer, without listening to God, without any visible means of support. And look where it got me!

We never think we’re the ones who are trying to play God. It’s always somebody else. But it’s because we can’t see ourselves as we are that God must come. It’s because we can’t understand how helpless we are to see who we really are that God comes as a helpless one. You see who went to the cross? That helpless man who is at the mercy of soldiers, thieves and traitorous crowds? That is God taking the form of you and me. That is God revealing who we really are. That is God letting us see beyond a shadow of a doubt how deeply sin has deformed us and how ridiculous we look when we go about the work of saving the world or saving ourselves. That Jesus on the cross? He’s taking your place. He’s showing you up for all of your pretensions. There is hope for you and me. It’s in him and it’s in the work God does to resurrect even those made dead by sin. Even us.

Frederica Mathewes-Green tells the story of how she feels about Christmas letters describing the accomplishments of another year. You know the kind she’s talking about. The one’s that say, “It’s been a great year for the Lamplighters! Greg had been hoping for a promotion, but what a surprise when the CEO came to his desk and begged him to take over the company. The whole office chipped in and gave the family a week in Paris to celebrate. Wasn’t that nice?”

We get letters like that and we think – yes, pride is a terrible thing. How could those Lamplighters be so prideful, so self-promoting, so vain? We think, “They should have been more humble.”

But then she says she looks back at the letter and realizes they weren’t really showing off. They were just sharing what happened. “They’re telling you these things because they thought you were their friend. If you are, you’re happy for them and rejoice for them…Their success does not make you a failure.” As it turns out, Frederica says, they weren’t exhibiting pride, we were. It was our bitterness that wanted to see them brought low.

This, she says, is why we need a Savior. “We look so nice on the outside, but in the caverns of the heart vicious Pride is always brooding, ready to spring. Humility smashes our defenses, enables us to admit these dark emotions that frighten us, and admit that we need help to be the people we long to be.”[vi]

Pride is only the beginning of the thorny mess we often find ourselves in. But it is the start of so much more. If we are to know ourselves, truly know ourselves, we have to start with the ways pride has messed us up. As long as we believe we can help ourselves we will not understand the cross and we will not understand why it is that Jesus makes all the difference in the world. Humility is what brought God to the cross. Humility is what can bring us to ourselves.

We are not beyond redemption. We are in God’s hands. If only we can recognize it. Thanks be to God.

[i] Heaven and Earth Show, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/heavenandearth/features/sins/sins.shtml, survey conducted 10-13 Dec 2004.

[ii] www.beliefnet.com/polls

[iii] http://www.quotationsbook.com/quotes/32325/view

[iv] http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=503362

[v] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1., p. 420.

[vi] Frederica Mathewes-Green, “Pride: The Anti-Self-Esteem”, www.beliefnet.com/story/110/story_11056.html

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The Seven Deadlies: Envy

February 18, 2007

Franktown UMC

Titus 3:1-7 [NRSV]

Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

At some point we’re supposed to get over it. A mature person is supposed to be able to get it, to realize that the world, despite all of our wishes, does not revolve only around us. In infants it is a forgivable thing. When they cry it is out of frustration that their needs are not being met. They are wet, they’re tired, they’re hungry, they’re sick, they’re uncomfortable, they’re scared and they will not suffer in silence. They will wail until someone responds. We all come into the world thinking, “It’s all about me,” whatever ‘me’ means.

But later, as children, as youth, as adults, at some point, we’re supposed to realize that the world is more than ‘me.’ There are other people with needs of their own. We share our lives and the world with them. One of the first and hardest lessons we have to learn is just that – that we must share.

If we find our lives in Christ, as Christians, we realize something even deeper – that our lives are not, in fact, our own. Jesus comes to say, “Those who find their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” [Mat 10:39, NRSV] Somewhere in that mystery is the promise that by letting go of the life centered on me we will find the life that is given to us in Christ. As Colossians says, “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” [Col 3:2-3] It’s not about me anymore. Or perhaps better said: I find myself as I discover my life in Christ. And because I am no longer preoccupied with myself I am free to love God and love others.

As I say, at some point we’re supposed to get over the idea that the world revolves around us, but even for those who realize that Christ came to save us from ourselves, the sin remains. Last week we talked about it under the title of pride, but really all of the seven deadly sins have this problem at their root. It is because we cannot let go of ourselves that we get into trouble.

And so today we move to envy. We think of envy as a sin of comparison. All advertising is built around this notion. You have a plasma TV and I want one, too. You don’t have the latest video game? How are you surviving? That model sure has nice skin and I want it. There’s even a cell phone campaign right now that shows people lusting after a cell phone and the name of the cell phone is Envy. Advertising doesn’t want you to resist the temptation to act on your envy; it encourages you to give in to it! What it seems to say is that we know you have the desire to possess our product. You will feel envious if you see someone else with it. So why hold back? What good is your impulse control?

But envy is more than wanting what other people have. It’s deeper than that. Sin is never just about things or actions. It goes to the soul. And what envy is really about is turning love inward and away from the things towards which it ought to be directed. We are supposed to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is the great commandment. But when we only love ourselves we find that love cannot be what it is supposed to be.

Envy tells us that what others have should be ours. Not only that, but envy leads us to sorrow at another’s good. That was Thomas Aquinas’ definition of it in the Middle Ages.[i] When we feel injured when someone else succeeds or experiences some blessing…When we take secret joy when someone else fails…we are feeling the effects of envy. And because this is the sin we so rarely admit, it is hard to recognize how much it affects us.

Let me tell you a story. It’s a familiar scene. One we can easily imagine. Two women sharing coffee at a breakfast table. Veronica is visiting her friend, Mary, in the late morning. It has been a while since they had the chance to do this because Veronica is usually caring for her teenaged son who is disabled.

“I’m so glad you were able to come over this morning,” Mary says. “You have been so faithful to Larry. I’m glad that you have another caregiver who is able to come and give you some relief. Larry really seems to like this new woman.”

Somehow Veronica does not look relieved. She stares down into her coffee cup, lines of worry still crossing her face. She doesn’t respond besides a slight nod.

“Are you all right, Veronica? It is working out with the new caregiver, isn’t it?”

Veronica doesn’t look up, but she responds, “I suppose.”

“You don’t sound too sure. She’s been there, what, three weeks now?”

“Yes, well, I don’t know if she’s really going to be right for him. She doesn’t handle him like I would. The way she feeds him seems a little uncomfortable to me.”

“Wasn’t this one highly recommended to you? You were so happy with her when you interviewed. And I remember the first week you sounded so relieved to have her there.”

“I know,” Veronica says, “and Larry seemed to like her. I just have this uneasy feeling, especially when I’m away, like now. Like I need to be there.”

“So what’s the problem, Veronica?”

“Mary…” She pauses. A long pause. “Mary, the real problem is me. I find myself thinking about this caregiver in terrible ways. I keep wanting her to fail. I look for little mistakes that she makes…little signs that she doesn’t care…little things that I magnify and blow up into major issues. She is doing a great job, but I have a hard time admitting it.”

“Why would you do that?,” Mary asks. “Why would you want her to fail? You’ve been praying for this for a long time. You kept saying how grateful you would be if you found someone to take care of Larry, if only for a few hours at a time.”

“Mary, I’ve had five other caregivers before this one.” She pauses again. “Can I confess something to you? I got rid of all of them. I let them all go. Not because they were bad but because I couldn’t handle them being there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I can’t stand the idea that somebody could mean something to Larry...that somebody else might be able to love him, too. I can’t stand the thought that somebody else could be the center of his attention or any part of his attention. I can’t stand the idea that I’m…that I’m not indispensable. That’s what it comes down to. I can’t stand the idea that I might be replaced, if only for a few hours. It doesn’t matter how good this woman is. I’m always going to find fault in her. Because she’s not me.”

“But Veronica, you’re not that way. You’re a saint. You have cared for Larry for so long.”

Finally Veronica looks up at her friend. “Mary, don’t do that. Don’t take away my ability to be a sinner. You don’t know how many times people have told me how good I am. ‘O noble Veronica! She’s taken care of her child all these years and sacrificed so much to be his caregiver. She has to be on a first name basis with God. She has to be a saint!’ But nobody knows what goes on in here, Mary. Somebody’s got to let me confess these feelings of envy. Because that’s what it is. I’m envious of anybody who might have a piece of Larry’s world. I know that’s strange and wrong, but it’s the sin I need to be healed of….the sin I need to confess to a friend.”

Mary puts her hand over Veronica’s and smiles. “O.K., but only if you allow me to confess to you as well. Because I envy the love you have for your son.”

Envy is a theological problem because it stems from a basic lack of trust in God’s blessings for us. When we do not feel at home in the world, when we feel insecure, when our trust in the goodness of life is wounded, we tend to interpret the good things that happen to others as something threatening to us. And when bad things happen to others, something sinister in us smiles in delight. The novelist Walker Percy had a handle on this dark side of ourselves when he wrote in the book Lost in the Cosmos: “the self – though it professes to be loving, caring, to prefer peace to war, concord to discord, life to death; to wish other selves well, not ill – in fact secretly relishes wars and rumors of war, news of plane crashes, assassinations, mass murders, obituaries, to say nothing of local news about acquaintances dropping dead in the streets, gossips about neighbors getting in fights, or being detected in sexual scandals, embezzlements and other disgraces.”[ii]

It is a puzzle as old as humanity. Last week we looked to the story of Adam and Eve to see the origins of pride. You only have to go one chapter further to see the first instance of envy. Cain and Abel were the children of the man and woman. Cain was a tiller of the ground, a farmer, and Abel was a shepherd. They both brought offerings to God, but only Abel’s gift received God’s attention. There is no word about why Cain’s offering wasn’t accepted.

What was Cain’s response? Was he happy for his brother? Was he delighted that God had blessed Abel? Hardly. Cain flew into a violent rage and in his anger killed his brother. Envy and jealousy had led to the worst of crimes so that Abel’s blood cried out to God and Cain was condemned to walk the earth as a marked man, forever known for the result of his crime.

Envy has always been a devastating evil. We don’t feel good about ourselves when we allow ourselves to feel it. Even if we take a perverse delight in other’s misfortune, we know that it is a perversion of what we ought to feel. The community suffers as well. That is why the New Testament book of Titus talks about the new Christian community as a place where the old ways are transformed. The writer remembers that “we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another.” But that changes when God appears in the form of Jesus the Savior.

Because of Jesus we live by grace and find our lives in him. Because of Jesus we are no longer captive to a life where everything has to revolve around me. Because of Jesus the sin which resides so deep in our souls that most of the time we’re not even aware of it is judged and purged and nailed to a cross. Because of Jesus the desperate attempts we make to prop up our own lives without regard to God are shown up for what they are. Because of Jesus the pretensions fail and the walls we erect to keep ourselves from truly relating to others fall and the barriers we present to God when we turn in on ourselves are useless and ridiculous.

Then we are free to do something we were made to do from the beginning. In Jesus we are free to love. This is what envy prevents us from doing – it prevents us from truly loving and experiencing love. There is no more powerful experience than being so close to someone that we can truly share their joy and share their sorrow. This is the promise that is built into Christian community.

It’s a practice that goes beyond Sunday morning. The business of sharing one another’s lives and of practicing the love of God together is one that takes more than an hour on Sunday morning. It takes regular gathering and regular prayer. It takes confessing the places where we still need healing and accepting the grace that comes through a brother or sister offering us forgiveness. It takes a community.

This place can be that community. Your brothers and sisters are close at hand. Christ has already opened the way for us to God. What he asks is that we be transformed. Thanks be to God.

[i] Summa Theologica, II.ii.,Q.36, A1.

[ii] Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 57.

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The Seven Deadlies: Anger

February 25, 2007

Franktown United Methodist Church

Ephesians 4:17-32 (NRSV)

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

I don’t know what your experience of this sermon series on the Seven Deadly Sins has been like, but I have found that each week, as I began to explore the sin that is coming up, I have said to myself, “Oh…that’s mine. That’s the one that I’ve got to deal with.” So the first week, I was certain that the besetting problem of my life was pride. But then last week we talked about envy and how insidious it is and how deeply it works into the fabric of our lives and I said, “Oh, no. Envy is definitely my problem.” And now, it’s anger. Anybody want to raise your hand for this one? I’m ready to.

You know there are a lot of folks who feel that this may be our country’s greatest sin. We live in an angry society. When people in the rest of the world think of the United States they think of guns and the largest, best-quipped military in the world. While we pray that these are never used unjustly, to many people these are signs of aggression and unchecked anger. And we know how often we face tragedies like workplace shootings and school shootings where anger spirals out of control. Our sports like football and the swagger of basketball are brash and “in your face.” Our entertainment is built on anger as well. TV shows like Survivor and The Apprentice are built on the drama of people becoming vengeful and trying to “eliminate” the competition. Rap music is full of aggressive and violent images. And our movies like The Patriot, Kill Bill, and any Jean Claude Van Damme film are bloody celebrations of revenge carried out by innocent people who were terribly wronged.

Of course anger can take less obvious forms as well. There is the quiet destruction of anger turned inward. How often have we heard about a long-suffering victim of abuse turning to drugs or alcohol or self-mutilation to try to cope with anger they can’t express? Or perhaps the anger turned inward becomes an ulcer or a heart condition or obesity or depression, which someone once described as anger without enthusiasm. Or maybe we express our anger is some passively aggressive form.

A wife and husband were discussing their anger once as part of a marriage enrichment exercise and the husband said, “You know, when I get mad with you I go chop wood. Somehow, just getting out there with an ax just really helps me let go of my frustrations. How do you deal with your anger?”

The wife said, “I usually clean the toilet.”

“Clean the toilet? How does that help?”

“I use your toothbrush.”

There are some healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with anger, obviously. But some of us have a hard time accessing that anger and I’m one of them. I remember going through my internship and chaplaincy training in seminary and what I heard over and over again was, “Alex, you’ve got to find some way to get in touch with your anger. You never get mad. That’s not healthy. You’ve got to sense when you’re feeling upset and express it.” You know, that really made me…angry. (So I guess it worked.) But I came from a family where it wasn’t O.K. to be angry and it was an emotion I had to come to terms with and learn to at least understand how it was affecting me.

Will Willimon, the United Methodist bishop of the North Alabama Conference, writes about a time when he was talking to woman whose husband had left her with no warning after only two years of marriage. He asked her, “Are you angry that your husband did this to you?”

She said, “No, I’m not really angry just hurt.”

“Not angry?”

“No, just hurt.” She was a bit like me. Didn’t think it was acceptable to be angry.

So Willimon, who was her pastor, said, “You know, I think you’ve got a right to be angry with him. And maybe angry with God, also. After all, God told you to be faithful in your marriage vows and you were. But the other side of the bargain wasn’t kept. I would think you would be angry!”

“No,” she said. “Just hurt.” Willimon said that he decided then and there that anger suppressed and denied could do some devastating things.[i]

But if Christians are confused, it’s because we’re getting some mixed messages about anger. If we go to the Bible, it seems that there is some confusion about what God asks of us. It even seems like God is confused. On the one hand there are some clear indications of how devastating anger is to our relationship with God. Jesus’ teaching about anger in the Sermon on the Mount is so strong that there is no room for questioning. This is from Matthew 5, verses 21 and 22: "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' [This was from the law we find in the Old Testament.] But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.” [NRSV] Now if you read that in the King James Version of the Bible, you will see that it says, “if you are angry without cause,” but the earliest Greek texts of Matthew don’t have that phrase. It was probably added by people who wanted to soften what Jesus was saying. But there is nothing soft about Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. He wanted us to hear clearly that it wasn’t just adultery but lust, it wasn’t just theft but greed, it wasn’t just murder or hateful acts, but anger itself that was the danger to our souls.

Robert Thurman says, in his book called Anger, that what Jesus seems to say here is that anger is not natural to us as human beings. We have a tendency to view it that way. When my growth group was telling me to get in touch with my anger…when Will Willimon was trying to get his parishioner to ‘fess up to her anger…there is an assumption there that this passion is so natural to us that we need to express it somehow. But that is not what Jesus says here. Thurman says the assumption here is that “the human’s nature is social, made for cooperation and tolerance and gentleness, and anger is therefore a harsh distortion of that nature.”[ii] Anger distorts who we are and makes us less than we are supposed to be.

It’s for the same reason that the Bible tells us that vengeance…do you know the rest of this quote?...it comes in several versions in the Bible, but you most often hear it from Romans…”Vengeance is…mine, says the Lord, I will repay.” [Rom. 12:19, NRSV]. Don’t give into your own anger and desire to harm others. It is God’s role to execute justice because God knows how easy it is for us to have our ideas about what is just perverted by our own anger.

Think about Star Wars. If you’ve seen the movie series you know that this is the reason Anakin Skywalker becomes the evil villain Darth Vader. He is motivated, initially, by a sense of justice. As a young child taken into the care of wise teachers, we see his promise and potential and the hint that he might be “the One” who will restore balance to the universe. But the more he experiences slights and frustrations the more he gives into dark temptations. The scene in which we know he will go too far comes in Episode II, or, if you are as old as me, Episode V since it’s the 5^th movie released. Going back to his home planet he discovers that his mother has been kidnapped by Tusken raiders, these strange sand people of the desert. When he discovers her she is in very poor condition and dies. In his anger Anakin takes vengeance himself and slaughters all of the Tusken people in the camp. He comes back and says, “I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They're like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM!”[iii] Once Anakin has given in to his hate, there is no question what he will become. The words of Anakin’s wise master Yoda from Episode I haunt him, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”[iv] Once Anakin becomes Darth Vader, there is suffering for everyone.

But I said that we Christians have some mixed messages about anger. We know how destructive anger is, but we also hear in the Bible that it’s OK to be angry. When Paul writes to the Ephesian Christians in the passage we read this morning he says, “Be angry…but do not sin.” That suggests that there is a kind of anger that is acceptable to God. In fact we are even encouraged to be angry, though Paul is quick to put it in the context of a community where people build one another up. Just a few verses later he tells the Ephesians not to store up bitterness and wrath and anger. It seems that flashes of passion are to be expected, but the Ephesians should temper them with the more important goal of being a faithful community known for its love and truth. This is why Paul gives that famous admonition that we should not let the sun go down on our anger, which is not just good advice for married couples, but for everyone.

It’s not just Paul who gives us these mixed messages, though. It’s Jesus, too. The other passage we read this morning has Jesus going into the Temple and, in a fit of righteous rage, throwing the moneychangers out. This is not the “softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling,” Jesus. This is the Jesus who will not be satisfied until the earth conforms to the vision of God. Here anger is put at the service of the kingdom.

This is the God we know from the Hebrew Scriptures…the God whose anger burns against injustice, who knocks down Babel’s tower and smites Egypt’s firstborn…the God who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and will not tolerate the prophets of false Gods. This is an angry God and one that we have a hard time reconciling with our understanding of what is just and right. What do we do with a God like this?

When I finally got in touch with my anger, I really related to this vision of God. Looking around me at the injustices I was seeing in the inner-city in Dallas, I discovered a prophetic voice. I was angry at a city that let miles of public housing go unoccupied while homeless people filled the streets. I was angry at neighborhoods that were torn up by internal divisions that sapped their ability to deal with the real issues they faced. I was angry at families that let drugs and violence tear them apart so that children came to me with nowhere else to go and suffered scars that they would carry for the rest of their lives. I was angry at probation officers who called the youth they worked with “throwaway kids” and angry at churches that wouldn’t claim them as their own.

I was really angry and it made me a great student. After a year out serving in the streets of Dallas, I came back to seminary for my last year with what I thought was a clear mind and many an ax to grind. I knew what God wanted and I was ready to fight for it. My papers that year were filled with passion and fire and a desire to change the world to look like God’s kingdom. And I wasn’t wrong. I was right.

Martin Luther, the first Protestant, worked pretty much the same way. He was a volatile guy and he believed that anger was an ally for him. “I never work better than when I am inspired by anger” he said, “for when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperature is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.”[v] Have you ever felt like that? Like when you get mad suddenly you can see exactly how things ought to be. But how trustworthy is our vision then? It’s really easy for our vision to be clouded by the anger. It’s really easy for us to justify horrible things. It’s really easy for us to do great damage. As Will Willimon notes about Martin Luther, the same anger that led him to such great work that really did change the face of Europe, also led him to justify horrible actions against the poor and against Jews. I felt that same blindness when I was writing in seminary. Anger, in our hands, is an untrustworthy instrument.

This is the great temptation in righteous anger. We do know it can be dangerous, but it is very easy for us to believe that we can harness it for good. We know that we can use it on behalf of others, on behalf of God, and so bring about the kingdom. But for the same reason that vengeance is God’s, so we need to recognize that what we are really expressing in work on behalf of the kingdom is justice, not anger. Billy Graham says that this is what Jesus means by blessing the meek in that same Sermon on the Mount. “The word ‘meek’,” he says, “actually means that you become controlled by the Spirit of God. As a wild force tamed, so the Spirit of God can tame your tongue and tame the passions of you soul, if you surrender your heart and your life to Jesus Christ.”[vi] It is not about getting rid of the passions but putting them at the service of God and claiming the passions that are from God.

I need to say a word, too, about another way we get distorted by the sin of anger. There is a sense in which our culture has accepted anger as a means of self-expression. The rap singers and the TV shows I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon are really not so much angry at the world as they are saying, “Hey, look at me! If anger is the thing that will tell you who I am and make you look at me, I’m going to use it.” Since we have accepted as a society that anger is unavoidable, that we must be in touch with it, that it is some force that can only be managed but not eliminated, we have accepted that people will use it to express themselves. Used this way, anger is once again another expression of that root sin of pride, which sees the whole world as curved in upon me. Anger is about my frustrations, my hurts, my need to express myself in ways that will make you (and maybe God) know that I will not be ignored.

So what do we do with this anger? How do we release ourselves from its grip? Well, first, by acknowledging that we are in its grips. Whether we express anger by lashing out physically and striking someone else, or by turning it inward in depression, we are in its grip. Secondly, we can follow Jesus’ teaching that leads us beyond acts of anger to the workings of our minds and souls. Hateful acts have their origin in the way our minds work and in the attitude we have toward the world. When we can learn about how we give anger reign over our bodies, our reason, our lives perhaps we can understand the truth that what goes on in our heads can be as damaging to our souls as murder. I don’t think we can do this alone. I think this is the work of prayer and it is the work of community. If we do not have brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we can share these dark struggles of our souls, we will not be able to move beyond the grips of anger. You need a small group. Perhaps this is a Lenten discipline for you!

Finally, we have to nurture within ourselves the life which we know in Christ. There was righteous anger in Christ, but there was also compassion, patience and love, even for those who were far from God. He sat with prostitutes, tax collectors, Pharisees and lawyers, all of whom could have led him to righteous anger.

Once when James and John, two of his disciples, faced a crowd that rejected them, they came back to Jesus and said, “Hey, you know when this happened to Elijah, Jesus, he called down fire from heaven on the people who rejected him. Can we do that?” But what did Jesus say to them? “No. You don’t know what manner of Spirit you are of, because I came not to destroy lives but to save them.” [Luke 9:54-55].

Jesus knew how easily our anger turns to violence, hatred and exclusion. God knows how much damage we do to ourselves and others when we don’t confront our anger. And God knows, because God did it, that the answer to the world’s injustice is not anger but forgiveness.

The author Jack Miles says, “To this day, few of God’s creatures, including the vast majority of Christians, treat their enemies as Jesus treated his—allowing them to put him to death while praying only for their forgiveness, never for the defeat or their humiliation. But Christianity has never been able to suppress the scandal of how its version of the epic of God’s wrath ends. It ends when the lion becomes a lamb, and nothing in the Bible, absolutely nothing, is more disturbing than this.”[vii]

It’s disturbing because if we conform to the image of this God that we know in Christ, we have to change. The world has to change. Wrath doesn’t have the last word. Love does. And what would we look like if we stopped nursing our anger and embraced God’s radical love? What would you look like? Maybe there’s a Lenten transformation for you. Thanks be to God.

[i] William Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), p. 71.

[ii] Robert A.F. Thurman, Anger, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 43. Thurman says this in reference to Seneca whom he sees as being in line with Jesus’ thoughts in this passage.

[iii] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121765/quotes

[iv] http://www.ericdavid.info/default.asp?id=70&newsaction=newsdetail&articleid=70

[v] Martin Luther, Harper Book of Quotations, 3^rd ed., ed. By Robert I. Fitzhenry, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), p. 36, quoted in Willimon.

[vi] Billy Graham, Freedom From the Seven Deadly Sins, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1955), p. 29.

[vii] Jack Miles, “If God Smites, Why Can’t We?”, www.beliefnet.com/story/112/story_11216.html.

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The Seven Deadlies: Sloth

March 4, 2007

Franktown United Methodist Church

John 15:1-8 [NRSV]

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.

“You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

“Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

Now I know what some of you are going to say today. You know I’ve been doing a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. And for three weeks, I’ve been hitting pretty close to home, haven’t I? We’ve talked about pride; we’ve talked about envy; and we’ve talked about anger. And as sins go, these are pretty big ones. I’ve certainly recognized them in myself.

But today, you came to church and you saw that I’m preaching about sloth and you said to yourself, “This time he’s gone too far! It’s one thing to take on pride because we know that we sometimes think too much of ourselves. And envy? Well, yes, sometimes we do covet what our neighbor has and take pleasure when bad things happen to them. And yes, anger does keep me from seeing God’s justice instead of my own sense of what’s right.

“But sloth? What does Alex have against a cute little three-toed animal that hangs from trees in the Amazon? How in the world can a sloth be deadly? I don’t think they even have teeth! All they do is suck on leaves!”

To that I say, “Let me explain myself.” Granted ‘sloth’ is not a word we hear much any more and when we do it usually is referring to the cuddly-looking, leaf-sucking beasts that swing in the rainforest trees. But that’s not the kind of sloth I’m talking about. The sloth I’m talking about is, once again, like pride, envy and anger, something that is found deep inside and, like these other deadly sins, it threatens our life with God.

Now if someone has ever accused you of being a sloth, of the ten-toed variety, they were probably accusing you of being lazy. That’s the generally-accepted synonym for sloth. Slothful people lie about and do nothing. They refuse to put themselves out for anything or anyone. They just don’t seem to have a whole lot of ambition. That’s how this line of argument usually goes.

Now if that’s the case, sloth might seem to be a problem, and maybe even a character flaw, but we’d hardly describe it as a deadly sin. In fact, in a society where nobody seems to have enough time for anything…when 24/7 is the standard measure of how much we want to be available to work…when families are stretched because of work schedules, ball schedules, music lesson schedules and even church schedules…when everything is rushed (even on the Eastern Shore!)…when high stress lifestyles lead to high blood pressure problems…when there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that we feel we have to do…you know, a little bit of sloth might be a healthy thing.

In fact, there is a health researcher in Germany who has suggested just that! Professor Peter Axt, in a paper entitled “The Joy of Laziness,” says, “The benefits of procrastination are grossly undervalued in modern society. People are working longer hours and trying to fit more into every day. But when you are already stressed and anxious, it can be much better to do nothing than rush to the gym for a workout…People who would rather relax in a hammock than run a marathon certainly have a better chance of living to old age.” And they may be smarter.[i] Now that’s my kind of study.

So sloth, if it is laziness, sounds like a pretty minor sin. And not only that, it might even be healthy. There is a group out in San Francisco called the Lazy Eight Foundation, (I kid you not), that says, “Quality laze-time can give rise to the most creative, inspirational and original ideas.”[ii] That may go against the American Protestant work ethic, but it sure sounds nice.

But what if sloth is something more? Surely it must be since it made the list of the Seven Deadlies. What was it about sloth that made this sin seem like such a threat to our very souls?

In my first pastorate in Virginia I worked with a young man who was very gifted. He was bright, sociable and had all kinds of potential. He had a lot of things going for him. He had all these things going for him despite the fact that he had a lot working against him, too.

He was being raised by a mother who had overcome her own drug addiction to straighten her life out. She had been through a resurrection of sorts, leaving behind the death that her old ways represented and creating a new life for herself and her two boys. She had done this with the help of family and with the help of God who had given her this new life and who was opening her up to give to others.

This young man, in other words, had a great mother, who had a strong faith, but she didn’t have a lot of money and she worried over her son. He often got into trouble and, even though he was smart, he didn’t get the best grades. Even so, when he graduated from school she worked hard to get him into college.

It was late in the summer before he got a place and they were sure of being able to pay for his tuition. A generous scholarship from the school helped. Then he started school with all of his potential and all of his gifts.

But something happened to him at school. The dark shadows that often overtook him followed him there. Despite all that he had and the support that he had and the promise that this new life represented, he made some bad choices that got him kicked out of school. What finally did it was smoking pot in his dorm room, but something worse than drugs had gotten him. Something worse than laziness. He had given in to his own joylessness and given up on being what even he knew that he could be. What struck him was the sin of sloth.

The ancients used to call sloth “sadness” and by that they meant a deep despair that kept people from living up to the potential they had. The desert monks of the fourth century referred to it as “the noonday demon” because it crept in in the middle of the day when the sun was at its hottest. It’s the time of day when the life and energy they experienced in the early morning was burnt off by the heat and what was left was a sense of the pointlessness of work in the midst of a desert day. Why not sleep? Why not give up on the work they were given to do?

I know this experience. I know it well. How many times have I met with people at the beginning of a project when everyone is excited by a new idea! We all sit around the table and say, “Yes, we will start an evangelistic campaign!” “Yes, we will draw up plans for a new building!” “Yes, we will read through the Bible!” And everyone is intoxicated by the notion and assignments are made, plans are put in place. Then a few weeks later, the energy has flagged. Everyone still agrees that it is a good idea, but the work has ground to a halt. Nothing seems to be moving forward. Sloth has set in. It’s as if there is a great drowsiness in the land.

We all know the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is for this reason that Jesus didn’t say to folks, “Let your mind transformed. Believe differently. Try on a new mental paradigm.” He did want our minds to be transformed, but he wanted us to do more than that. He wanted us to bear fruit.

This is the point of the parable from John which we read this morning. When Jesus says that he is the vine and we are the branches, the next step is for the branches to produce fruit. If we only hear the word…if we only listen and believe…but then do not go on to live the word and put into practice in our lives, then what good is the word to us or to the world? God’s desire is that we bear fruit and in that way be Jesus’ disciples.

Sloth is the sin that threatens that fruit bearing. It is, as Thomas Aquinas said, “that sluggishness of mind which neglects to begin good.”[iii] It is the impairment in our souls that prevents the motion we feel towards God from being expressed in action. It is when it seems that we are collapsing in on ourselves, like some dying star. You know how when a star collapses it becomes so dense that not even light can escape it and eventually it becomes a black hole? (Somebody can correct my astronomy later…that’s how I envision it happening.) We also can experience a collapse so that we can’t see the good in doing good…the light which we are supposed to be for the world cannot go forth from us…and eventually we become inert. Maybe we even drag down those around us.

This is a lot more than laziness. Even busy people can suffer this kind of sin. Wendy Wasserstein, who wrote a satirical book all about how to be slothful, says busy people in our society are the ultimate examples of slothdom. They are übersloths. She admits that it’s hard to imagine: “Any woman who is obsessed with her Palm Pilot, her Blackberry, and her cell phone can’t possibly be construed as” a sloth, but they are. “When you achieve true slothdom, you have no desire for the world to change. True sloths are not revolutionaries…It doesn’t matter if the world evolves, because your purpose is not to get things done. Sloths are neither angry nor hopeful. They are not even anarchists. Anarchy takes too much work. Sloths are the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo.”[iv]

The lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo. Wasserstein suspects that there is no point to all of our work. It’s a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Are we really producing anything of value? Is all of our activity really leading us somewhere new? Somewhere important? Why are you so busy and is it working out for you?

It turns out that sloth is really not about laziness at all. It’s about paying attention to what really matters. It’s about paying attention to God. And whether you’re sitting in a Barcalounger with a TV remote 7 hours a day or working like a maniac 24/7 you can still be caught in sloth. Either one can be pointless and can lead you away from what really matters.

When Jesus goes with the disciples to the garden of Gethsemane to pray, what happens to them is symbolic of what happens to all of us. Jesus has only one simple request to Peter, James and John as he goes off to pray. Do you remember what it was? “Stay here and keep awake.” But what is it that they do? They fall asleep. Their intentions were good. They were willing to do whatever Jesus asked of them. But they were overcome by sleep.

Our sleep takes many forms. Our ability to be responsive to God can be impaired in so many ways. And even in America, where we have such a noble commitment to work, we can forget what truly matters.

Sloth is the shadow side of pride. If pride is thinking too much of ourselves, sloth can sometimes show up as thinking too little of ourselves and of our abilities. It is failing to claim the capacities that God has given us to be the people we were meant to be. Sometimes that comes across as low self-esteem, and how many young women are crippled by this? Sometimes it comes across as a busy-ness that distracts us from the abundant life Christ calls us to live. Either way, we fail to be what God has made us to be.

But the most devastating effect of sloth is how it saps our joy. When we lose the capacity for joy we have entered into the deadly realm. What the forces of evil want more than anything is for us to lose our ability to take joy in the world around us, to take joy in the people around us, to take joy in our lives, and to take joy in God.

The movie Life is Beautiful depicts the love of a father and son as they are taken off to concentration camps in the middle of World War II. The father is a born comic and he is able to convince his son that they are part of some great contest. It is the father’s ability to maintain his joy even in the midst of the most dehumanizing conditions that sustains the boy and sustains hope.

Jesus, when he went to the cross, was able to remind his followers that no one was taking his life from him. He was laying down his life willingly. He was suffering the worst that the world had to offer, but he was not giving up the joy, the hope and the promise that God had put into the heart of creation. Those things would remain. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he said. “And do not let them be afraid.”

God does not want sour-faced Christians who do not know how to experience deep joy. God wants you with all of your capacities for life and joy and fruitfulness. It doesn’t matter what obstacles you face. It doesn’t matter where you have been or what you have done. It doesn’t matter how far you have felt from God to this point…God is calling you to life. This is our hope. This is our strength. This is the promise that we know in Christ Jesus, who will not be defeated, even by our slothfulness. Thanks be to God.

[i] Anastasia Stephens, “Sloth-the cardinal virtue,” The Independent Newspaper, 2001.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Summa Theologica, II.2.35

[iv] Wendy Wasserstein, Sloth, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 104.

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The Seven Deadlies: Greed

March 11, 2007

Franktown United Methodist Church

Luke 12:13-21 (NRSV)

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'

“But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures but are not rich toward God.”

O.K. Here we are on Deadly Sin Number Five. Since I've had to raise my hand every week before this, I think it's no surprise that I'll have to raise it again today. After spending some time this week thinking about greed I have to say, “Yes, in addition to struggling with pride, envy, anger, and sloth...I'm greedy.”

I can trace my problem back to a very early stage in my life. Most of us come into the world with a propensity toward greed. Learning to share our toys with others is an early lesson in tempering our avarice. One of the first things we learn to say, maybe even before 'mama' or 'dada' is the word 'mine.' So we get this greed thing early on. One image for who we are as human beings is the seagulls in the movie Finding Nemo who hover around the water saying, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” A lot of our life is spent trying to claim the same thing.

But I wasn't trying to explain how you might be struggling with greed. I was telling you how I realized I was greedy. It was comic books. I read a lot of comic books as a kid. Captain America. The Flash. The Green Lantern. Shazzam. And in the back of the comic books there was usually a section devoted to really cool gadgets. It was kind of a classified section for everything an adolescent boy might dream of having. X-ray vision glasses that would allow you to see through walls. Practical jokes like chewing gum that would cause your mouth to foam or your tongue to turn black. Miracle methods for developing muscles. Itching powder.

It was the itching powder that did it. Most of those things inspired me to think, “Man, my life would be so much better if I just had that. Now don't ask me why it was the itching powder that most inspired my need to acquire, but that was it. My friend, Philip Jaderborg, and I pooled our allowance money and sent off an order for itching powder.

You know, I think it was Old Bay seasoning. That's what it looked like when it came – like somebody had taken some Old Bay and put it in a plastic bag. No instructions on how to use it and we really weren't creative enough to figure out how to inconspicuously put it down somebody's back or in somebody's underwear so we ended up using it on each other just to see if it worked. What a total disappointment.

You would think an episode like that would have started me down the path to virtue and to realizing that things, stuff was not going to be the magic cure for my desires, but like most everyone else in this society that is built on the need to get more stuff, I haven't shaken that childish belief that my life would be better if I just had that. You've seen the bumper sticker, “The one who dies with the most toys wins”? I may not have that on my car, but that belief that I'm somehow in an unholy competition to get more stuff sometimes works on me.

We've talked each week about how insidious these sins are. Greed, I believe, is in a class by itself. Not only has greed managed to get close to us, it has managed to convince us that it's not even a vice. It masquerades as a virtue.

What do I mean? Well, think about how our economy is built on the notion of greed as good. Advertising appeals to the acquisitive, covetous side of our natures. This iPod? It's not just a desirable little piece of technological wonder. You need an iPod. This Hummer? You could rule the world with this vehicle! This cereal? Your breakfast is going to be so much better with Count Chocula! Everywhere we look we are being told that there are things that we don't have that we not only want, but need.

This week I was in Nashville doing some filming for a DVD for a curriculum that I've been writing on vocation. For the first time in my life I had to sit and be made up for 30 minutes. The young woman doing the make-up said, “You have very dry skin. You should get some man lotion.” Man lotion! I didn't even know there was such a thing. And now that I know there is such a thing, how can I get along without it? I need man lotion! You can bet that before I went to location for the second day of filming I had bought me some man lotion! This is how we get trained in the ways of greed. Henry Ford knew this when he started selling cars at the turn of the last century. He knew he couldn't just poll the people in the market to discover what people wanted. As he said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they'd have said, 'a faster horse.'”[i] He felt he had to educate them on a need they didn't even know they had.

We have even become convinced that buying things is a noble activity. Shortly after the attacks on 9-11 and on at least one occasion since, our president has urged us to keep shopping as a patriotic exercise to support our economy. If you're like me, you probably felt a little uneasy about that. Of course, we want our economy to be healthy, but there is something wrong about the health of our nation being dependent on whether or not I own a TiVo or another pair of trendy shoes.

In the 1987 movie, Wall Street, Oliver Stone created a character that has come to symbolize the worst excesses of greed in our society. Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, is a New York financial tycoon who makes his millions by buying other companies, milking them of their profits and then selling out. In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, Gekko gets up at a stockholder's meeting of Teldar Paper and declares that what we generally have thought of as immoral is, in fact, a great civilizing impulse:

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”[ii]

Greed is good. This is where we have come. Most of us would not agree with Gekko. Most of us believe that there are limits and that individuals, groups, corporations can all go too far in overreaching. But not many of us would agree that it is good to be greedy. It's just hard to know where to draw the line. As Bishop Will Willimon puts it, I am pretty good at seeing when you have crossed the line but pretty poor at seeing when I have tripped over it myself.[iii]

So what's a Christian to do when Greed clothes itself in the garb of a righteous person? How do we know when we've gone too far? We need some “stuff” to survive, but when have we gone from simply living to being truly greedy? As with all these deadly sins, the reason they still beset us is because they have settled in very close to home.

Jesus knew this about us. The temptation to greed wasn't invented by the advertising industry. He knew how easy it was to be distracted by things and the desire for things. He also knew how dangerous it was. It wasn't for nothing that he told the disciples that it was easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In the gospel passage we read today, Jesus tells the story of a rich man who had an incredible harvest on his farm. That's the good news. But he thinks to himself, “Self, what am I going to do? I don't have enough space to put all of my stuff.” And since this was in the era before climate-controlled rental storage units, he said to himself, “I think I'll tear down my barns and build bigger ones so that I can put all of this grain in there.” Sounds like a pretty reasonable plan if you've got the means to do it. Pretty sound thinking.

But then he does something else. He says