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Bosch painted weird pictures of them. Chaucer depicted them; Dante walked
down, down among their victims; C.S. Lewis rode an imaginary tour bus through
them. Faust sold his soul for just to enjoy them for a season. Hollywood
canonized them.
But it was the Christians of the fifth century who actually named them:
The Seven Deadly Sins.
The Bible sometimes describes
them individually, at other times lumps them together in a list. In its pages
you’ll read stories of people who had become entangled in them, but others who
resisted them through the power that God provides.
What the Bible teaches and what early Christians and poets, writers, and
artists have discovered, and now social scientists are admitting is this: sin
is real and sin is deadly—some sin much more deadlier than others. So we’re
going to take the Sunday mornings during Lent to think about sin and the
saving grace of Jesus.
I
know what you masochists are saying, “Oh boy, seven weeks of sin! Cool!”
The rest of us are saying “Oh boy, seven weeks of sin! Wake me up when its
over!” Let me say right up front that I have no deep attraction to sin. In
eight years as pastor of this church, that’s three hundred and twenty-four
sermons, I devoted only a single sermon to sin.
I’m part of the Woodstock generation. I was raised with the generation that
got rid of sin. We changed the name to become “personal problems,” the result
of a lack of education, or just emotional maladjustments all of which could be
improved through therapy. So, for much of my life there was no sin; sin
simply did not exist. We could overcome aberrant behavior through education
and therapy alone. I was also an early disciple of Norman Vincent Peale and
Robert Schuller; I still value positive thinking and possibility thinking.
I’ve attended both of their churches. There, talk about the power of the
human spirit to overcome obstacles had replaced any talk about sin.
Then in 1972 Karl Menninger finally broke the silence. He wrote a book
entitled, Whatever Became of Sin? He argued that when we threw out
“sin” we got rid of the very language that made us take responsibility for our
actions.
Two experiences changed my Woodstock paradigm.
The first was sitting in a classroom at Princeton Seminary one semester. The
class was on Domestic Violence and Abusive Behavior. I discovered that
psychotherapy and education alone couldn’t solve the problem of bad behavior.
To that point, I thought that the reason why men beat up on women was simply
because they were poor or because they were not educated. Yet I found that
abuse happened just as frequently among the wealthy and among the Ph.D. types
as they did among the down-and-outers. Education and affluence has nothing to
do with rage and violence. It is sin. And it is deadly.
The second experience was a visit to Dachau and Auswitz, two nazi work camps.
As I toured the concentration camps, I smelled death. I went through one
barrack after another observing the remains of those who were imprisoned. One
dormitory, for instance, was filled with suitcases and duffle bags and
clothes. Another was filled with human hair, cut from its prisoners to be
made into Nazi clothes. Yet another room was filled with dolls and
toys—things that children had clutched as they were herded on to the trains.
Finally, the last room was filled with toothbrushes and combs mostly. That
was the last piece to remind them of their dignity. I have seen how deadly
sin can be – it can impact an entire world if not named and confronted.
In the Genesis story about Adam and Eve, we see our own story, don’t we?
Notice the progression of the story. First, we are gardeners. In our
innocence we are in harmony with God and with community around us, and with
our families. But then we step outside the boundaries and suddenly we become
rebels. We wanted to apply for the job of God, but instead we now
become fugitives, shamed and hounded by guilt, hiding from God.
The story teaches us an interesting lesson. While there is something within
us that impels us to put ourselves and our interests first, there is an
outside force that plays on us with destructive power.
In Romans 7, Paul describes that same story. He says that whenever he wants
to do the right thing, something is lurking nearby that draws him to do the
wrong thing. He finally gets around to naming that power to pull him down:
sin.
So during Lent, we’re going to focus on seven of the most dangerous, deadly
sins that we could possibly face. Why seven? Isn’t all sin terrible? That’s
what I’ve always heard. Yes, all sin mars God’s image in us, shames us, and
breaks our relationship with God.
But some sin places us in greater spiritual jeopardy than others do. Some
sins have deep hooks that latch on to us and bind around us so tightly that
they actually become part of who we are. Theologians call this the
“dispositional” nature of sin. Once sin becomes dispositional in us, that is,
it becomes part of the very fabric of our personality, it no longer matters
how educated we are, how cultured we are, or how wealthy we are. The fact is
we are bound by a deadly sin that has placed us in great spiritual jeopardy.
And unless we can get help from outside of ourselves—from our community, our
family, and most importantly, from the saving grace of Jesus—we will never get
free from it.
The deadly sins are deadly because once we’re caught in their web it’s very
difficult to be freed from them. The deadly sins are deadly because of the
impact they have on us, on others, and on our community.
But
hear the good news! I will never, ever talk about sin without talking in the
same breath about the saving grace of Jesus! These seven weeks will remind us
not just about what sin can do to us or the impact it can have on others, but
we’ll also discover that Jesus came to break the power of canceled sin and set
the prisoner free. Jesus said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free
indeed.”
As
we close this morning I want to make three promises to you. First, I will not
lead you through a morbid introspection of sin; I will only talk about deadly
sins in light of the saving grace of Jesus. Second, you will learn each week
helpful ways to recognize how specific sin tries to enter our personalities
and lives and how to resist it. Third, You will hear grace – helpful ways of
how Jesus frees us and through us how he seeks to free our society of the
seven deadly sins. Amen.
1. The seven deadly
sins are expressions of love bent inward.
—
“All the Seven Deadly Sins are demonstrations of love that has
gone wrong. They spring from the impulse, which is natural in us, to love
what pleases us, but that love is misplaced or weakened or distorted” (34).
—
These sins in the end “interrupts, and in the end destroy, one’s
capacity to love other objects that are also and perhaps even more deserving .
. . If the sins begin in love, they end in lovelessness. Given that they are
all loveless, they are all as serious . . . What the . . . Seven Deadly Sins
shows us is how various are the forms that this lovelessness can and does
take”
(35).
2. The seven deadly sins
are more likely to become dispositional.
•
“Are certain sins more serious than other sins? . . . although
no sin is a trivial matter, certain sins are worse than others . . . It [the
deadly sins] place us in greater spiritual jeopardy than others do” (1).
•
“Certain sins are judged to be deadly because they are very
likely to become dispositional, and thus relatively permanent features of an
individual’s orientation to life . . . The dictionary defines a disposition as
a ‘normal or prevailing aspect of one’s nature,’ . . . Thus, certain sins are
more deadly than others because they are more likely to become dispositional
in nature, disposing us toward a sinful orientation to life” (2).
3. The seven deadly sins
vis-à-vis the saving virtues.
4.
Why are some sins more “deadly” than other sins?
•
. . . the traditional deadly sins are “deadly” because they are
terribly difficult to get rid of once they have taken hold of us. Like a
deadly cancer, they are a wasting disease that spreads, expands, and takes on
new forms.
•
Capps also suggests that from these seven root sins branch out
all other forms of sin. That is, every sin is a variation of the seven deadly
sins. Every sin is a deformed, twisted version of God’s love.
