Soul Force

Seven Deadly Sins

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

March 14, 2010

^Readings

John 8:3 Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, ⁴ they said to Him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. ⁵ "Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?" ⁶ This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. ⁷ So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, "He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first the first stone." ⁸ And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. ⁹ Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. ¹⁰ When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, "Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?" ¹¹ She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said to her, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more." (NKJ⁾

^{Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not
the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.
B/ Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1995, pp. ix-x.}

^{… I am trying to
retrieve an old awareness that has slipped and changed in recent decades. The
awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled
from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins....}

^{But the shadow has
dimmed. Nowadays, the accusation you have sinned is often said with a grin, and
with a tone that signals an inside joke. At one time, this accusation still had
the power to jolt people....}

^{Many American
Christians recall sermons in which preachers got visibly angry over a
congregation's sin. When these preachers were in full cry, they would make red-faced,
finger-pointing, second-person-plural accusations: "You are sinners —
filthy, guilty, miserable sinners!" Occasionally, these homiletical
indictments veered awfully close to the second-person singular....}

^{Still, you were never
in doubt what these preachers were talking about. They were talking about sin.
In today's group confessionals it is harder to tell. The newer language of Zion
fudges: "Let us confess our problem with human relational adjustment
dynamics, and especially our feebleness in networking." Or, "I'd just
like to share that we just need to target holiness as a growth area."
Where sin is concerned, people mumble now....}

^{The word sin … now
finds its home mostly on dessert menus. "Peanut Butter Binge" and
"Chocolate Challenge" are sinful; lying is not. The new measure for
sin is caloric.}

^Sermon

^{This is an old legend
retold by Leo Tolstoy.}

Two women approached a wise man and asked for instruction. One of them regarded herself as a terrible sinner. In her youth, she had deceived her husband, and she tortured herself constantly with the memory of her infidelity.

The second, on the other hand, had lived her entire life within the law and by the rules. She wasn't conscious of any serious sin, had nothing much to reproach herself with and felt quite pleased with herself....

The wise man said to the first woman, `Go, daughter of God, and look for the heaviest boulder you can find — one that you can barely manage to carry — and bring it to me.'

And you,' he said to the second woman, who could not recall any serious sin, `go and bring me as many stones as you can carry, but they must all be small ones....'

[When they returned,] the wise man examined the stones and said, 'Now do as follows. Take the stones back and replace each one of them exactly where you picked it up, and when you have put them all back where you found them, come back to me....'

The first [woman] very easily found the place from where she had taken the huge boulder, and she replaced it where it had been. But the second had no idea where she had picked up all her little pebbles, and had to return to the wise man without having carried out his instruction.

`You see,' said the wise man, 'that's how it is with our sins. It was easy to take the big, heavy boulder back to its place because you knew exactly where you first found it. But it was impossible to remember where all those little pebbles came from.'

And to the first woman, he said, 'You are very conscious of your sin. You carry in your heart the reproach of your husband and of your conscience; you have learned humility, and in this way you have been freed of the boulder of your wrongdoing. You, however,' he said to the second woman, who had come back still carrying her sack of little pebbles, 'you, who have sinned in many small ways, do not know any more when and how you did wrong; you are not able to repent. You have grown accustomed to a life of little sins, to passing judgment on the sins of others while becoming more deeply entangled in your own. It has become impossible to free yourself of them.' [Retelling of a story by Leo Tolstoy]

^{Let me first say that
talking about sin from this pulpit is not easy. I have a feeling that in times
past it was a more customary topic of sermons; as our reading earlier
suggested, there was a time when preachers spoke as much of sin as of grace,
and I suspect that was the case in this place as much as in many others, at
least during our earliest years. Our theologians speak much less on this topic
than they did in times past, so I went back to some of our founders to
understand how our tradition has understood the concept of sin.}

^{William Ellery
Channing, the first to openly and proudly embrace the title “Unitarian” for his
Liberal Christian faith, suggests that the word “sin” itself is difficult:}

Sin … is a word seldom used in common life. It belongs to theology and the pulpit.... Sin, in its true sense, is the violation of duty.... [Sin] is to yield ourselves to those appetites which we know to be the inferior principles of our nature, to give the body a mastery over the mind, to sacrifice the intellect and heart to the senses, to surrender ourselves to ease and indulgence, or to prefer outward accumulation and power to strength and peace of conscience, to progress towards perfection. Such is sin. It is voluntary wrong-doing.[i]

^{Hosea Ballou, one of
the key Universalist preachers in the early years of that strand of our
tradition, wrote in 1805 in his Treatise on the Atonement:}

It is as much the nature of sin to torment the mind as it is the nature of fire to burn our flesh.... [Sin] represents stolen waters to be sweet, and bread eaten in secret to be pleasant. In a word, sin is of a torment-giving nature to every faculty of the soul, and is the moral death of the mind.[ii]

^{Here are two more
contemporary reflections on the nature of sin; first, from Forrest Church:}

If you don't like the word "sin," substitute another—"humankind's innate inhumanity," perhaps—but don't underestimate the concept, or think that we are all born good and then somehow get destroyed or twisted by society. Given our natural egotism and instinct for survival, which through opportunistic self-rationalization easily morph into the drive to dominate, sin is bred in the human bone.[iii]

And this by Fred Muir, minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Annapolis, in his book A Heretics Faith:

Sin ... is anything that I do that isolates, ostracizes, or separates me or others from the human community (and by extension, from the web of life) which results in robbing or denying human uniqueness and potential. Call it evil or flawed behavior; call it missing the mark; call it brokeness; call it denial, repression, or reaction formation—it's all sin if it separates, ostracizes, or isolates us from the ground of our being, from that which defines us as human beings. Sin is behavior that prevents a person from living out their potential for human being-ness.[iv]

^{Despite the difficult
and discomfort that the term “sin” itself raises, it is the most useful term I
can come up with as a shorthand term for what we are talking about today, so,
begging your indulgence, I will use that term; feel free, as Fred Muir
suggests, to substitute another term if that one doesn’t work for you; hear
instead “flawed behavior” or “missing the mark,” or “brokenness;” by whatever
term we use, this behavior is universal among human beings.}

This is the season of Lent, which started on Ash Wednesday, February 17^th this year and extends to the day before Easter. Lent, like the Days of Awe in the Jewish tradition, is a time for reflection on our lives, our deeds, our sins, if you will, a time for examination of conscience. While we do not adhere strictly to the Christian liturgical year here, it seems timely during the season to consider what we as religious liberals might do in a similar fashion to examine our own conscience. Consider if you would the classic definition of the seven deadly sins, drawn from the Catholic tradition, each balanced by its corresponding virtue:

Pride or vanity are competitive. If someone else's pride really bothers you, you have a lot of pride. This is balanced by the virtue of humility.

Greed or Avarice want us to get its "fair share" or a bit more, balanced by the virtue of generosity.

Envy resents the good others receive or even might receive. Envy is almost indistinguishable from pride at times. Its opposite is love.

Wrath or Anger – often our first reaction to the problems of others. Impatience with the faults of others is related to this; the virtue is kindness.

Lust – the self-destructive drive for pleasure out of proportion to its worth. Sex, power, or image can be used well, but they tend to go out of control; so self-control is the countervailing virtue.

Gluttony pertains not only to food, but to entertainment and other legitimate goods, and even the company of others. Temperance is the virtue.

Sloth is related to the other sins, which work together to deaden the spiritual senses so we first become slow to respond to God and then drift completely into the sleep of complacency, and is countered by zeal.[v]

Is any one of us free from all of these vices? We would actually probably be boring human beings if we exhibited none of them, but most of us are like the woman in the Tolstoy story who believes she has never sinned, never missed the mark, and who therefore have in fact a multitude of tiny but unacknowledged brushes with one of these traditional sins, notably the pride of believing that we have never sinned. Indeed, pride has, as it were, pride of place among the Seven Deadly Sins, because our self-regard is at the heart of much of the belief that we, unlike everyone around us, are unfailingly virtuous. Pride in turn plays itself out in all of our social institutions. As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it,

… no matter how wide the perspectives which the human mind may reach … or how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.[vi]

It is much easier for us to see how others miss the mark than to observe it in ourselves. It is much easier to see how unjust, prideful and greedy the enemies of our nation as well as our personal enemies are, than to recognize these tendencies in ourselves. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our own virtues. This reminds us of something Jesus said, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but not notice the log in your own eye?” [Matt. 7:3, NRSV] One of the most telling accounts in the Hebrew Bible is the story of how King David committed adultery with his neighbor’s wife Bathsheba and then arranged for her husband to be killed in battle to cover up his misdeed. The prophet Nathan came to him and told him a story about a certain rich man with many sheep who, when company came to his house, stole the sheep of his poor neighbor who had but one sheep, to make a feast. King David was furious and demanded that such an evil man must be sternly punished. Nathan then reminds David of his own sin when he says, “You are that man.” In the same manner, our pride makes it easy for us to find fault with others while failing to examine our own conscience. Indeed, the greatest sin is to deny that we sin. The story of the woman caught in adultery from our readings gives a pungent example of how easy it is for those who have accumulated many pebbles to condemn those who have committed great sins. Jesus disarms this self-righteousness when he challenges the eager accusers who gather around the woman by saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” In a similar fashion, our story for the children today serves as an example of how even the greatest in the land must acknowledge the ways in which they too have missed the mark.

There was a time in our tradition when we found it easier to acknowledge our own shortcomings out loud. For example, here is the general confession from one of the Orders of Service in Hymns of the Spirit, our old red hymnal:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

Some of us find these words more difficult to recite today, and sometimes words repeated over and over lose their ability to move us and touch us. Perhaps it is easier to consider the way Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs express the concept; they say that we must make a “fearless moral inventory” and then to “make amends” insofar as possible to those we have wronged, and then to seek forgiveness for our behavior. We find the same concept in the Prayer of Jesus when we say, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” A more pungent but perhaps more honest form of the prayer says instead “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

I have lately been including in the pastoral prayer a call to acknowledge those things we have done that we ought not to have done, and those things we ought to have done but failed to do, as one way of expressing our need to find occasions to acknowledge where we have failed, where we have missed the mark, where we have fallen short of our own expectations and ideals, where we have sinned, if you will. We need to find such occasions, and while we don’t observe Lent or the rites of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish tradition, we need nonetheless to find opportunities for the examination of conscience, acknowledging them to ourselves, and seeking forgiveness insofar as we have harmed our families and our neighbors.

Let me close with words that are attributed to King David, Psalm 51:

^NRSPsalm 51:1 <To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.> Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. ² Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. ³ For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.... ⁶ You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. ⁷ Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.... ¹⁰ Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. ¹¹ Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. ¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Amen www.secondparish.org