What are the 7 Deadly Sins? | Vices & Virtues

Welcome to the Lenten study and the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to have you with us tonight as we begin a new study.
We’re calling vices and virtues.
This is the first session which is an introduction
to the idea of the quote unquote seven deadly sins.
We’ll talk why they’re called that
and we’ll talk more about that.
But as we get into this really we feel like in some ways
the place to start is rather than jump to the specifics
to have a general conversation about sin itself.
And what do we mean when we use that phrase?
Why do we talk about sin?
Why would Christians need to do that?
And really what do we have in mind
when we have that conversation?
Right, so the word sin comes from the Greek word
at least what we have translated in our Bible.
Sin comes from the Greek word hamartia
which means to miss the mark.
So when you have the sense of sin what you have is
that you’re off base or what you aim for is what you missed.
And what’s interesting about the Christian understanding
of sin is that though over time we flushed out exactly
what that particular sin might look like
in its original idea it was anything that diverts
from the proper order or the way that God made
and intended something to be.
So whether it’s obvious or not,
whether it’s particularly visibly destructive or not
does not necessarily relate to what we understand sin to be.
Sin is a far more theologically rich word
than just some of our cause effect idea sometimes.
And that word actually comes in the Greek
they used it to discuss archery when you miss the bullseye.
And when we think of sin if a person was standing
with a bow and they miss the entire target shoot out
into the field you know that’s serious.
But if they’re in the nine ring or the eight ring
or the seven ring you think oh well that’s not so bad.
And the early Christians used that word sin
to cover that whole range.
I mean there are big destructive sins
and then there are sins that don’t seem so bad
but they’re not right.
They’re not bullseye.
They’re not the will of God.
They are still off
though less obviously and some of what we’ll talk about in this series
will have to do with that.
And for Protestants that really kind of gets
into the idea of sin versus sinfulness.
In some traditions sin is what we do.
But Protestants our ancestors said yes
but it’s more than that.
Sinfulness is also our inclination.
We are wired to miss the mark.
We are sort of inherently programmed to get it wrong
not to get it right.
And this has been really important to Presbyterians.
Right and so we’ve got to actually put a pretty big caveat
at the beginning of this introductory conversation
because as we are looking at the idea
of the seven great sins one needs to be careful
to not become fixated on the sins themselves.
This is a real temptation is become fixate on the thing
that is by definition missing the mark.
Instead of putting your focus on the target
or the goal that the best plan that God has made
we focus so much on the sins themselves
that we from the start put our priority in the wrong place.
And when we do that we can even find ourselves
unintentionally glamorizing sin.
We don’t intend to get there
but if you put your focus only on it
and not God’s actual plan you begin to think more
about the sin than the virtue or the way to go at it.
And this series is loosely based.
This isn’t a book study per se
but we’re going to follow pretty closely
along with sinning like a Christian.
This is written by a pastor.
He’s also a bishop.
His name is Will Willimon.
And he has a quote in this text where he says
that we might be more impressed and fascinated
by human sin than by divine redemption from it.
And that’s exactly what we don’t want to do.
As Protestants we want to be very clear
this isn’t about learning what sin is
so that we can do it better,
right?
This is about us understanding God’s best plan
so that we can miss the mark less often.
And that requires some focus and intentionality.
And you may have experienced this.
Have you been to a Christian rally
or if you’ve experienced altar calls or camp meetings
those kinds of revivalistic type things,
right?
Who goes up front?
You never hear the person go up front and say
I grew up in church and never really did anything right.
It’s always somebody who messed up their life.
They were an alcoholic,
they were a drug addict.
It’s almost like we take the most sinful person we can find
to show how much they’ve changed.
And while that’s a great celebration for them
there is a sense in which we get kind of
too interested in the sinning
instead of in understanding sin.
And so as we go through this
we’re going to try and draw that distinction.
And we think this journey to Easter,
the Lenten season is kind of the right time to ask
what do we do with sin?
We all know, we all learned confirmation,
right?
Sunday school,
what does Jesus do?
He saves us from our sins.
But what does that mean?
Both how are we saved and what are we saved from?
And as we sort of investigate the from part of that equation,
how does being saved
then change our relationship with sin?
How do we on the other side of being saved
navigate being also people who are sinful?
And these will be a lot of the conversations we have
and they’re going to land in some specific areas
as we use the lens of the quote unquote seven sins
to talk about that.
But to get there,
we wanna do a little history.
In the very early church,
we’re talking the 300s
there was a movement called the monastic movement.
And the monastics were people who in order to kind of
they took seriously this idea of withdrawing from the world.
You know, the world is a sinful place
and to not be of the world.
And they took that so seriously,
they moved out to the desert together.
And they said, we’re gonna take a bunch of Christians,
we’re gonna go live away from the world on our own
so that we don’t have to worry about sin.
But it turned out not to work.
In the mid 300s,
there’s a monk out there named Evagoras.
And Evagoras doing his devotionals and he’s praying and he’s struggling.
And he’s looking around at his brothers,
these monks.
And he’s thinking,
gosh, we moved out here
to get away from sin.
But it seems like we brought it with us.
And he begins to categorize the ways in which he sees
sinfulness at work in this Christian community.
And he compiles a list called the eight evil ideas.
And these are the things that he thinks
affect monks the most.
So it’s gluttony, lust, greed,
sadness,
anger,
sloth,
which we might call laziness,
vanity,
and pride.
And that list kind of sticks
and it begins to get some traction.
And it kind of stays that way for a couple of hundred years.
And then the next thing happens to it.
Right, so you gotta fast forward about 200 years
then Pope Gregory the Great starts to move away
from the idea that these sins are specific
to the monastic community,
to those that are set apart.
And rather he begins to make the case
that this is for all people,
that this is intrinsic
to not just the clergy’s nature,
but it’s actually all people’s nature.
And so he makes the case that this is a root reality,
that this is shared by all humans.
And so in doing so,
shortens this to the number seven.
Mind you, a thing that the Protestant reformers
were very critical of the sins for was
there’s not a single spot in scripture
where these sins would be laid out in this number.
So the number seven was chosen more because seven’s a number
that pops up numerous times in scripture.
It’s the number numerologically that represents perfection.
So seven then became the number
that Pope Gregory recommends he drops pride
because pride’s the root of all sin.
So it doesn’t even fit on this list.
He puts sloth under sadness, he adds envy,
but some other people offer corresponding lists.
And then we’re gonna talk in this series,
not just about the sins,
but their corresponding virtues.
There’s seven virtues set against these corresponding sins.
We’ll talk a little bit about why we think that’s important.
But fundamentally, there’s some shifting that happens a couple hundred years later.
And that’s in nature of expanding
or understanding what the sin is
and also re-categorizing a little bit.
So that list is chastity,
temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility.
And it stays that way for about 700 years
until a man you may have heard of,
a Catholic theologian named Thomas Aquinas gets the list
and he swamps out sloth for sadness.
He puts sloth in, removes sadness.
And over time,
pride makes its way back onto the list,
replacing vanity, which is kind of a philosophical discussion.
Which is which?
Is vanity a form of pride or is pride a form of vanity?
They, Aquinas and those who followed like the idea
that pride is the root
and vanity is the fruit.
So that becomes essentially this final list
that you’re looking at.
Lust,
gluttony, greed,
sloth,
wrath,
envy,
and pride.
Of that,
I think most of those words
are self-explanatory to us.
Though a couple of them are not well used in our language.
Sloth is probably not a word that we use very often.
It essentially means laziness,
but when we get to it,
I don’t want to steal the thunder of sloth,
but linguistically sloth has an entire other side
that you may not know that speaks to sadness,
apathy, lethargy, it’s not just laziness.
It’s a little bigger than that.
Wrath,
we sometimes call anger.
Gluttony,
we don’t always, gluttony as we often hear the word
is explicitly linked to kind of food,
but really in the understanding from Christian history,
it has to do with all kinds of appetites,
not just what we eat.
It’s just gluttony and greed are pretty closely connected.
And so, but this becomes the final list.
And as we’ve said,
and Jan, you made the case,
it is a Catholic list.
Historically,
this is from the Catholic church.
This list is written in stone
before the Protestants even get there.
We’re 300 years before Martin Luther, right?
And so when we break with the Catholic church,
we’re not exactly sure what to do with these.
Part of that is the way that Catholics
understand sin in general.
The Catholics make some categories of sin
that looking back,
Protestants aren’t very comfortable with.
And we’ll try to explain that to you here.
Yep, so very briefly,
in the Catholic theological understanding of sin,
you have what you might call mortal sins and venial sins.
And these make sense when you put them in relationship
to the Catholic understanding of the afterlife.
I’m gonna be very brief,
and this is for formed people talking.
So we have to put major asterisks.
This is not our bread and butter,
but theologically, the idea is, have you ever heard of purgatory?
This idea that there’s an intermediary space
in the afterlife between our existence and eternal bliss,
or the beatific vision or experience of heaven,
however you want to describe it.
And the idea of purgatory
is that that is a place of purging or cleansing.
So that if one commits venial sins,
or in other words,
sins that don’t lead
to permanent death or destruction or hellfire,
then the idea is that you can’t make it into heaven
because heaven is a place only for the just,
and you’re not just,
you’re not prepared for that.
So there’s this intermingling place in eternity
where you are cleansed and prepared for heaven.
The people who go there commit venial sins.
They’re sins that are not intentional.
They’re sins that don’t lead
to the destruction of the soul or the self.
They can kind of be made up for in purgatory.
If you commit a mortal sin,
that is a sin that can’t be forgiven.
You can’t even get into purgatory.
There’s not enough time in eternity to fix that problem.
And so that’s just a one-way street to hell.
This is the Catholic theological understanding of it
as told by a Reformed pastor,
big asterisk.
But so all that said,
the reason I’m sharing that with you
is because you need to have some sense for that
when we talk about the seven great sins,
right?
What does it mean to be deadly as opposed to not deadly?
You have to have,
you have to understand that concept
that when they say deadly,
they mean deadly.
They mean,
these are the sins that if acted upon
and if they are allowed to grow,
much like a weed in a garden,
that these are the seeds that will exterminate the ability
for you to experience that kind of cleansing
on the way to heaven.
So this is, in other words,
a really big deal.
These are framed as incredibly important
and dangerous sins to be aware of.
And I just wanna clarify that when Michael says,
“Can’t go to heaven,” he means if you die in that state.
You can be forgiven of all those sins.
You could go to confession,
you could do penance.
But if you died,
if you had murdered someone
and become wounded and die in the process
and you die without confession and that sin is with you,
then that’s not a purgatory sin.
Because as a mortal sin,
it has severed your connection to God.
If you die with,
“I yelled at somebody in traffic,”
then you do a little time in purgatory.
But you’ve not severed the relationship with God.
That’s a venial sin.
Again,
I don’t know if that’s a venial sin.
I’m just saying,
but you get the difference,
right?
There are sort of big sin, little sin.
But you ought to be a little careful with that.
That’s even hard for Protestants to say.
We just don’t think this way.
But this language of the deadly sins,
the word that they used is called capital,
and capital means the head.
So they’re the chief sins.
They’re the main habits or offenses,
capital vices.
And the idea is that if you look at this list
on the left here,
these are the behaviors or the realities
that the sort of garden that produces
most of our sinful fruit.
Any action you can think of that is sinful
could very likely be traced back to something on this list.
So in some sense,
these are the root sins.
These are our chief misses.
And it’s interesting that if you look at this list,
one of the things that strikes us about it
is that it’s pretty mundane,
right?
Murder doesn’t make the deadly sins list.
Adultery doesn’t make,
I mean,
for crying out loud,
and this was part of the Protestant pushback,
those things are in the Ten Commandments.
They don’t make your seven list,
but these aren’t the actions.
These are the sinfulness, the inclination,
that precedes the action.
And so while they seem pretty tame,
what they produce is very destructive.
Deadly, to quote.
And so it is in some sense their ordinariness
that makes them so dangerous.
They are subtle.
In fact, in the world we live in,
some of these things are considered quaint.
Right,
yeah, and this is where this begins,
I think, from even a Protestant perspective
to begin to become helpful.
They become a lens through which we can look
into our own culture,
and we can begin to see some of those things.
So take, for instance,
in a Western American context,
we value very much the idea of personal expression,
individual freedom.
This is a part of who we are as people.
One of the dangers of that is that we can draw the line
of behavior at the point where it becomes visible
and destructive, right?
The point where you’ve stolen money,
the point where you’ve broken your marriage commitment.
These things are the things that we draw
a stark, bright red line, cannot cross.
But what the sins that we have presented before us
in this series are going to be asking us is,
where did that grow out of?
We know where it got you, right?
But where did it start?
And the contention is it started as a seed.
It started as a small thing.
And that that was germinated and then grown over time.
And then it came to the place where we see
that red line being crossed.
We, because of our temptation to fixate on the sin of others,
become tempted then to not become reflective
as to the places that we’ve allowed
that very seed to grow in us.
And we’ll talk a little bit about this,
but the thing that makes these dangerous
as opposed to quaint is the fact that when one starts,
they tend to bring in the other.
There’s an amazing way that when one gets a foothold,
the next finds a sneaky door around the way.
You get one stamped out and that’s the very moment
in which another begins to take root.
So though it may seem to us to not have clear concrete
kind of visible, demonstrable examples,
these sins,
that’s the point.
The point is that this is to show us
that early stage growth at which we can begin
to get a sense of what’s happening and growing.
And interestingly enough,
Protestants have been suspicious.
Presbyterians have been slow to think about the sin.
This has not been in our history,
but the last, oh, 30, 40 years or so,
we have found this kind of rubric,
this kind of conversation helpful.
Because Presbyterians, while we don’t talk about big sin and little sin,
we do talk a lot about sin.
Presbyterians love sin.
We are steeped in it.
And we have always professed that we are sinful.
If you’ve been in my Calvin class, right?
Calvin, total depravity,
nothing good in us.
We are sinners to the core.
And Presbyterians have always connected
that sinfulness with our sinful actions.
So when we come to this,
we do have some tools,
even though this has been outside of our tradition,
we do have some tools to kind of help us
have the conversation and help us understand it a little bit.
Though initially, it seemed a lot Catholic for our tastes.
But I think Presbyterians have been more willing
to have the conversation.
And part of that is we look around the world
and we see that almost nobody cares much about sin.
Sin is in many ways outside of the church,
in some ways inside the church,
becoming a kind of outdated concept,
where we talk a little bit more about what’s right for you
and what’s true for you.
And as we have some of those conversations in culture,
it has become a little more difficult to claim
that something like envy or pride
can be deadly to our spirits.
We treat them as kind of outdated.
In fact,
I was telling Michael this,
the last time I taught or preached the seven deadly sins,
I looked them up and obviously,
you’ll be a little careful doing that.
But there were seven deadly sins calendars.
There were seven deadly sins candles,
their dinnerware,
clothing,
perfume,
card games.
Well, in the 10 years or so that that happened,
there’s evidently now a Japanese-
Anime game,
movie, show.
It’s called the seven deadly sins.
So now the first 10 pages of Google search
are all Japanese anime characters
who are named for the seven deadly sins
in this game/movie/whatever it is.
And so even something like seven deadly sins
is now sort of funny.
I mean, it’s marketing.
It doesn’t carry much weight.
And Protestants,
particularly Presbyterians, I think, in fact, there was a book out a few years ago,
“Whatever Happened to Sin?”
And I think as we kind of wrestle with that,
we find things like this helpful
because when we come back and actually listen to it,
okay, we don’t buy the mortal venial thing,
but we do know about sin
and we do understand that sin is dangerous,
partly because it becomes acceptable.
And when it becomes acceptable,
we have issues.
We have problems.
Yeah, and to be clear,
when Clint says that we as Protestant Presbyterians
love sin, he obviously doesn’t mean we love committing sin
and embrace it wholeheartedly,
right?
Though if we’re honest with ourselves,
we are drawn to sin.
But the reality is we as a family
have spent a lot of time considering
the ways in which our nature has been hijacked,
that it’s not just an unfortunate Wednesday night decision.
It’s the idea that if you look deeply at the problem,
the problem is intrinsic to our nature.
And so therefore, we are not surprised
when our nature leads us down a path
that unchanged would lead us to destruction.
And so for us,
though we don’t share
the Catholic understanding of different levels of sin,
for us, anything that puts you outside
the realm of God’s perfection is sin enough
to separate you from a perfect God.
So for us, those distinctions may not be compelling.
What is compelling is the reality
that when you turn your lens inward
in a season of Lent like this,
and you’re willing to look at a frame like these seven sins
and ask yourself true,
honest questions about
have I practiced greed,
right?
Is there a way in which I have been willing
in this moment to give in to anger,
right?
We discover suddenly that these things do take root
and they have to be actively garden.
I think the idea of removing weeds
is the most helpful image for an introductory conversation
because we may not want them to be there,
but they keep coming back.
I mean, there’s no gardener that’s beaten weeds forever,
right, and that’s fundamentally the thing
that we seek to accomplish in this
is to find not just the identification
of what we find to be missing the mark,
but also to then establish in the conversation
what’s the thing that we are seeking to move forward towards?
What are the virtues that we seek to move towards?
I continually come back to this image, this psychological experiment,
and maybe you can remind me of the name of the psychologist
who did it, but who asked students
to not think about a white elephant.
Have you heard of this experiment?
The psychologist said, now I want you to do anything
you can except do not think about a white elephant.
And then inevitably all the students
start thinking about white elephants,
right, because they were told not to do it.
That is the thing that we are seeking to be mindful of
in a conversation of sin.
You don’t fixate on the thing,
and then you find that thing to be driving
your motivation and behavior.
Now instead,
as Presbyterians, we’re gonna say you focus on the grace of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
And in Jesus Christ,
we find these virtues, and they’re not,
none of these virtues exist
outside of God’s grace.
None of them would live inside us
without the animation of God’s spirit working that within us.
But yet, we must focus on that good
as opposed to entirely focusing on the weeds themselves,
right, we have to identify the weed,
remove it.
But you also wanna know what plant you’re trying to grow.
And that’s a simultaneous,
and I think, joint part of this conversation.
Yeah, in the coming weeks,
we will take some of these
probably two a week generally,
and we’ll have significant conversation about them
and their role in our life and in history
and the corresponding virtues
that hopefully help us navigate them well.
But what we wanna encourage you is that
this is an opportunity, we hope,
to think behind the end result.
So Bernie Madoff, right, we all know,
the guy steals a bunch of money from everybody,
runs a Ponzi scheme,
greed,
rampant greed, and we say clearly that’s sinful.
But if you ask people what went before that,
was it sinful to thumb through the Porsche catalog?
Was it sinful to look at your neighbor
and say I’m gonna have more money than they do?
Was it sinful to say that guy’s got a yacht,
I’m getting a bigger yacht, right?
We tend to equate sin with the end result.
And I think the wisdom of these monks
was to say sin is not simply what we’re led to do,
but the things that lead us to do it.
And I do think that that’s helpful.
I do think that’s a helpful conversation for Christians
because if we’re willing to look in our own souls,
our own garden, so to speak, and say,
yeah, you know,
boy, pride shows up a lot,
I need to wrestle with that,
I need to worry about that,
I need to work on that,
and how could I do it?
What does humility look like in my life?
How can I practice it?
How can I implement it?
I think that it gives us a path,
hopefully,
to leave those things behind
rather than to be directed by them.
And that’s what we hope to do
to kind of take these seriously,
understanding that they’re deadly,
not always in their action,
but in their intention,
that they’re virtues that balance
and sort of protect us as antidotes.
And I think there will be some interesting conversations.
There may be moments that are uncomfortable.
I would say that between all of us,
I would not buy that anybody can read those seven
and say, no, I’m good,
right?
I mean,
I’m theologically suspicious of that.
And so when we bump into some of our own stuff,
that may be uncomfortable,
which is not our intention.
Our intention is,
as we uncover those discomforts,
to know that, oh, there’s maybe something there for me,
that there’s something for me to pray over,
there’s something for me to work on.
That’s why we use this season of Lent
to prepare to understand grace.
The idea is not guilt.
The idea is discipleship.
The idea is not to feel bad because we struggle with sin.
The idea is hopefully to have less struggle,
to enact more grace.
And so we hope this might be a helpful way to get into that.
I don’t,
I think some of these ideas will be new to you.
You know,
some of these things we’re well familiar with,
well acquainted with.
I think some of them you’re going to be a little surprised
at the wisdom of people who lived in the 300s
and what they seem to have known
about what we would call modern living.
I think they are timeless in that sense.
So once again, if you want to read along,
we’re gonna be jumping through the book,
but if you’re interested,
come up after, or I’ll put in the description of the podcast here,
“Sinning Like a Christian,”
and you look at “The Seven Deadly Sins,”
that’s by Will Williman.
If you’re not really a sort of theology book
reading type person, you know, I think a narrative book
that may be a great partner to this conversation
would be C.S.
Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,”
in which he tells the story of how a demon is tasked
with the goal of leading a person astray in their faith.
And throughout that, you’ll find these seven sins
not named explicitly, but they operate very, very, very poignantly.
And there’s one particular character in “Screwtape Letters”
who the demons tasked to divert this man
who’s recently become a Christian
is to convince him that he is indeed
taking the path of greatest humility.
And he gets him so fixated on how humble he is, he becomes prideful.
And I think it’s in that kind of narrative story,
if that’s the kind of way that you might approach
a topic like this, that we discover
that this may,
at the first level,
honestly sound theological,
right? Sounds like two pastors who had 45 minutes
that they needed to burn on one hand.
If you’re willing to get underneath that,
this is unbelievably practical,
like getting into your car and going home practical,
like the thoughts that we allow to circulate about that person,
about that task, about who we are.
I mean, this touches the reality
of what we might think of as no big deal.
The seven great sins may call out as the starting point
of the greatest falling point in our life,
the greatest choice that we make down the road
that we didn’t intend to make,
but built towards along the way.
I think the sense that our culture has, in many ways,
made sin the context of personal choice,
takes away from the power of sin
to transform our imaginations
and convince us that we’re making the choice we want,
as opposed to the choice that would lead us
down the road to destruction.
So if you’re willing to take
the seven great sins seriously,
you may find yourself in a circumstance where you say,
that isn’t trivial.
In fact, that transforms how I even consider
thinking about this thing or this choice or this action
or this habit that I have,
not to go too long,
but the only conversations in my time as pastor,
I’ve had a conversation with someone about sin,
it was after they did a thing that they felt guilty for.
But in conversation,
almost every time,
you get a sense for,
no, the problem here isn’t the thing that you did.
It was the thing that started you down the road to get there.
And when a person wants absolution for our action,
they’re looking for absolution in the wrong place.
Reconciliation,
forgiveness needs to happen at the root,
and that requires having the imagination
and willingness and courage to look at the root
and to find what,
if we’re gonna be honest,
I think it’s even a darker stain.
The worst things that we’ve done,
if we see where they started,
is far harder to look at
than we can imagine.
Yeah, it’s fascinating.
When you go back into those Catholic monastics teachings,
the things we think of as scandalous,
they treat it as lesser sins.
So fornication,
they said, yeah, that’s bad,
but lust is worse.
I mean, it surprises us that they were very familiar
with things that seemed shocking to us.
Not that they condoned it,
I don’t mean that.
I just mean that they didn’t think
that getting caught was the worst thing.
They thought that the inclination
to do what you got caught doing was the worst thing.
We think of sin as the bomb that goes off,
but it’s most often the water
that finds cracks in
the foundation
that you’re trying to keep out of everything
because it is so resilient and it is so tenacious, right?
Yeah, you say, well,
I’m not greedy.
Oh, I’m proud of not being greedy.
Dang it, that got me,
you know?
I don’t care what my neighbor has,
but man, it makes me mad
when he parks out front of my driveway.
You know, I don’t care about his RV,
but he shouldn’t put it,
right?
And you go right from one to the other
without even knowing it.
And I think that’s the danger of sin.
I wanna leave you with a story
and then we’ll take some questions
if there’s any discussion.
I listened to a podcast several years ago,
fascinating, it was a Navy fighter pilot
who had the opportunity to go,
you know the movie Top Gun.
Well, Top Gun’s a real place.
It’s a training center for what are considered
the best pilots.
He went to Top Gun and he said
the most frustrating thing he remembers,
you do these combat exercises against the instructors.
And he said, I had this instructor and he infuriated me
because he’d say, gotcha, two minutes.
And then two minutes later,
your buzzer would go off that you got hit.
He’d say, gotcha,
45,
44,
43.
Until he had you.
And he said, what I learned is it’s not when you get hit
that you made the mistake.
You did something a minute ago.
You turned too far or too steep.
You made the mistake back there
and it catches up with you down the road.
And he had this instructor who would tell him,
gotcha now.
And a minute later,
it happened.
Well, that’s the seven deadly sins.
We think the sin is when it happens.
But if you could trace it back, you would find,
ooh,
five minutes ago,
five days ago, five years ago,
I got off track and then it got me.
And I think that’s the approach we’ll take in this.
And I really think that’s a helpful way for us
to look at sin because we’re so entrenched
in the idea that sin is what we do
without thinking about why we do it.
I think that the 10 commandments make sense to us
because of the verbness of them, the action.
Do and do not.
Yeah, right, exactly.
And so there is a,
and I don’t mean this negatively,
but there is a kind of pharisaical make sense-ness to it
that we can make a checklist at the end of a day,
we can evaluate how we did in these particular areas.
And the 10 commandments are particularly helpful because they’re communal.
They’re both about our relationship with God
and also our relationship with neighbor.
What makes this seven deadly sins,
I think,
both conversant with it,
but maybe more challenging individually,
is it asks us not to talk about or to think about
the ways in which we’ve breached relationship
with God or neighbor,
but rather that we’ve allowed the missed mark-ness
to take root in our own life.
It exists in our own kind of spiritual awareness and reflection.
That becomes an amazing tool
as we’re doing this kind of spiritual assessment.
It’s not particularly helpful
when we’re teaching a confirmation kid,
this is what it looks like to be a person of good character.
This is what it looks like to live in the world
as a disciple of Jesus Christ.
That’s sort of a teaching by showing.
This is a teaching by inner searching,
and this becomes a way to really give us a vocabulary
to do that searching.
I think you could argue with some of that vocabulary,
though you’ve got thousands of years of thinkers behind it,
so we might wanna do that with some humility,
but I think it’s less about identifying the particular word.
It’s more about identifying that thing that’s growing
that shouldn’t be growing.
And I don’t think that’s unknown to us,
Jan.
When Jesus revisits the Ten Commandments,
he says, “You can say I haven’t murdered,
“but I tell you,
if you’ve been angry at your brother,
“you’ve murdered him in your heart.”
I mean, we get the idea that the Ten Commandments
is not a safe checklist of yes or no,
and I think we see in Jesus an invitation
to think broader.
If you look at someone with lust,
that you’ve broken the commandment,
because Jesus was surrounded by people
who liked the idea that they are external,
and Jesus said, “No,
they’re internal,” is how I would interpret that.
Willamann made a point,
I just wanna share
with you quickly, that I thought was really helpful,
’cause he made the case,
especially if you’re a perfectionist
or if you have perfectionistic tendencies,
the idea might be,
“Well, I’m gonna round up my soul,
“and no weeds will live there,
and it’s gonna be great.”
I can get rid of them perfectly.
And he makes the point that these sins are
not only a part of who we are intrinsically,
but that their power over us changes
over the different stages of our life.
So his point is,
when you’re a 16-year-old boy,
the sin of lust is particularly poignant
in that stage of your life,
but he makes the case that as he became an older man,
and that sin for him became less and less tempting,
for him, he made the case that pride slowly became
more and more appealing in his age.
Now,
that’s not to put that on anyone,
or to say that would be shared in your experience,
but I think the point being that as we go
through different stages of our spiritual development,
then different ones of these sins may,
at that point, be more powerful or more insidious.
That, I think, does give us a framework to recognize
that there is no winning,
right?
There’s no wake-up,
sin-gone moment, but rather,
what is the thing today
that I’m most susceptible to?
And that enables, once again, I think, this is far more of a spiritual practice
that is a kind of theological ultimatum.
And if we receive it that way,
I think it’ll be helpful.
Yeah, I would say this is much more
of kind of a discipleship conversation
than a theology conversation in some sense.
And even in the broader scope of what Jesus said,
though we believe he didn’t mean it literally,
if your eye causes sin,
take it out.
If your hand causes sin, cut it off.
Better to be maimed and blind than to be in the fire of hell.
So I think both of those,
I think both of those themes are evident in Jesus’ language.
I mean, Jesus took sin,
I’d say, incredibly seriously.
And I think calls us to do the same.
That’s actually unfortunate, and maybe we’re getting close to time here.
I think that’s a really unfortunate reality
of modern sort of theological scholarship.
We for a long time fixate a lot on sin,
and Jesus is a very clear calling out of it.
In some ways,
we’ve sort of tactfully avoided
some of the very hard sin language that Jesus spoke of.
And it was most often almost exclusively related to religious hypocrisy.
So it’s very difficult to hear,
but Jesus regularly taught about where that missed mark
created divergence from what God intended.
And if we’re going to be people
who take our faith seriously,
at some point we’re going to have to stand and face that.
The reality that Jesus walked into the temple
and threw tables over.
That’s not a pleasant image,
but to be a well-rounded Christian,
to include the virtue and the vice
is going to require at some point owning the vice.
And Jesus did that.
If we read the whole of the scripture,
we’ll obviously see that.
So we will,
I hope have the experience
as we go through these sessions.
You will, again, I think,
you know, I suspect most of us could kind of look
at the list and say,
I don’t look forward to that one.
And so we’ll have an opportunity
to hold that mirror up to ourselves.
Next week,
we start with pride and greed.
I can tell you that I’m not greedy,
but I don’t like the other one much.
So we kind of get right to the heart of things next week.
The idea of part of the foundational reality of sin being
that it always points us back at ourself.
And sin is very much self-referential
in our experience of it.
And so we start with pride and greed next week
and I hope you all will be with us or be able to listen.