Sermon preached at St. Stephen's Canterbury on the First Sunday in Lent 2005

Bible Readings for the Day:

Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7
Romans 5.12-19
Matthew 4.1-11

The more time you spend in the study of people, the more possible it is, I think, to see patterns in behaviour and motives. Very few human actions are completely motiveless or random. There is usually an explanation somewhere in the depths of the person’s psyche, history, social background.

And what is true for the individual can also be true for the species; the student of humanity can often see, depending upon the questions she asks or the point of view she adopts, an arrangement, an orderliness, about the creatures she studies.

Nowadays those students are usually sociologists, psychiatrists, political scientists. In the past they would have been theologians. When theologians study the relation of God with humanity it is clear very quickly that something is getting in the way.

The earliest Christian theologian realised this as well:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it… For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind…

[Romans 7.15,18b,22-23a]

This strange behaviour, knowing what was right but being unable to do, behaving destructively, and against our own long-term good, was given a name, and that name is "sin". Sin means sharing in that aspect of human nature that falls short of the glory of God; it doesn’t mean a shopping list of bad behaviour, and it especially doesn’t mean behaving in a trivially selfish way that is only moderately irritating to your neighbours. Cream cakes on Friday are not sin!

Modern takes on sin

A couple of years ago, Unilever, the giant American company that produces so much of what we need and buy for our homes, decided to add a little spice to their range of Magnum ice-creams. They brought out a "limited edition" of seven flavours of ice cream "each attached to one of the deadly sins". For the wizards of Unilever:

Gluttony meant "chocolate mud cake ice cream smothered in rich chocolate",
Vanity was vanilla (geddit!) and champagne swirled ice cream covered in white chocolate topped with silver cake decorating balls,
Lust was strawberry flavoured (!).

How trivial. How childish!

At least the survey published last week about the nature of sin recognised the question as being slightly more important than artificially coloured and flavoured ice-cream! The survey was commissioned by the BBC television programme Heaven and Earth to discover what people thought sinful in today’s world. What is sin, what is the worst sin, is there anything that should now be counted as sin?

"Which, if any, of the following seven deadly sins have you committed in the last month?"
was the opening gambit.
"Which, if any of the Seven Deadly Sins would you most enjoy committing?"
(Guess which sin came top on for that question!)

Anger is far and away the sin we’re most willing to admit to:

79% of us are willing to confess to getting hot under the collar, compared to

Pride (63%)
Envy (61%),
Gluttony (59%),
Lust (57%)
Sloth (56%)
Greed (54%).

Interestingly, 9% of those sampled claimed never to have committed any of the traditional seven deadly sins - although, given that dishonesty isn’t on the list, you don’t have to believe them.

Recognising that there is nothing that cannot be updated or modernised the programme then asked "if there are ‘modern sins’ which have taken the place of the seven deadly sins". On this new list:

Cruelty comfortably topping the polls (39%), followed by

Adultery (11%)
Bigotry (8%)
Dishonesty (7%).

Of the original seven, only Greed (6%) made it on to today’s list.

The survey report says:

It’s very striking how attitudes to sin have changed. Although most of us are willing to admit to committing the traditional seven deadly sins, we’re not nearly as concerned about these qualities as we are about actions which hurt others. For instance, we’re now much less bothered about anger than we are about cruelty; and while many of us actually enjoy lust, we still frown on adultery, which some might see as lust-in-action.

[BBC]

Augustine, Aquinas and Dante on sin

This shows how people are trying to reinvent something that has already been described. For the theologians of sin, like Thomas Aquinas, like Augustine of Hippo, like Dante, already knew that there was a distinction between dispositions and actions; they have already explored and described them.

The sin-in-action sins moral theologians call mortal sins;St Augustine said that mortal sin is something said, done or desired contrary to the eternal. But mortal sins are not the origin of sin or sinfulness; despite being a "grave matter" they are expressions of sinful dispositions that are described in the so-called seven "deadly sins".

These sins are more properly known as the seven Capital Sins, from the Latin caput, "head". They stand at the head of the other sins, which proceed from them. Theft is sinful, but theft only occurs because the thief has already surrendered to avarice. Adultery is sinful, but only because the adulterer has already surrendered to lust. Which is worse, which is the greater threat, the working out of the sin or the initial corruption? Jesus was clear on that question:

You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

[Matthew 5.27-28]

Of course, the moral theologians of the past had a much more subtle, sophisticated and authentic Christian understanding of human nature and sinfulness than the half-remembered, quarter-understood and never-practised understanding that the great British public display today. For the moral theologians the capital sins were seven fundamental expressions of human weakness, the disposition within us to behave in a destructive fashion. They also assigned the capital sins an order; some are worse than others.

In ascending order of wickedness, they are:

Lust: Dante defined lust as the "excessive love of others", thereby detracting from the love due God. It is more than that, in that lust turns another person in God’s creation into an object, an instrument, to be used for our self-gratification. If God made a whole person, to be known and loved by him, how can we turn them into a thing?

Gluttony:: not just overindulgence in food, or uncontrollable sensual desire for food, but also withholding food from the needy. Eating a single prawn, farmed in the Bengal delta, with its accompanying devastation of the marine environment for the poor of Bangladesh, is as much an expression of gluttony as cream cakes every day.

Avarice: is related to gluttony, because it is a desire to possess more than one has need or use for: it is covetousness, greed; in this case for material possessions other than food.

Sloth: according to Dante, is the "failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind, and all one’s soul", and a failure to put that into a physical, practical expression. Laziness, cowardice, lack of imagination, complacency, and irresponsibility are all examples of the characteristics of sloth.

Anger: the only capital sin still thought to be one today. Anger is NOT irritation raised to a higher level; it is not the emotion we feel when we see injustice in the world. Rather the capital sin of anger is inappropriate, unrighteous, feelings of hatred, revenge or even denial: Dante again put it well:"love of justice perverted to revenge and spite"

Envy: is resentment of others for their possessions. Dante said it is "Love of one’s own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs". The American writer Gore Vidal once said "It’s not enough for me to succeed. Others must fail". That is the capital sin of envy.

Can you see why the moral theologians elevated this to number two in the list of capital sins? Think of how many other, mortal sins, sins-in-action, find their origins in envy.

Pride: is the greatest (worst) of the capital sins, and perhaps the one sin in which all sins have their origins. It is NOT self-esteem (although lots of sins of pride camouflage themselves under that label); it is NOT self-respect or a proper knowledge of one’s own abilities and attributes. Rather the capital sin of pride is, in Dante’s definition the "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour". Elevation of our individuality above everybody else around else. How much sadness and wickedness in the world comes from that?

The meaning of the Fall

This is the human story; this seems to be the nature of human nature. This is the point of the story of the Fall that we heard in the Old Testament reading this morning. The point of Adam and Eve is not to describe what happened in a Garden in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago; the point about the story of Adam and Eve is not to say that God wanted to infantilise us, and that Eve was a hero for rebelling. The point about the story of Adam and Eve is to explain, in a way that made sense for its writers and listeners, that the wickedness of humanity, our inability to do the right thing, is something universal. It is not dependent upon our race, our tribe, our abilities or our wills. It is something to do with the very nature of being human. There is something in the heart (mind? soul? spirit?) of humankind that prevents us, as individuals and as a race, from living in peace and harmony.

Someone recently described me as "a old-fashioned fundamentalist bigot who was out of touch with the way our society was developing". Perhaps I am; perhaps I am no better than the liars and the hypocrites and the sexual perverts who disguise themselves as televangelists in the United States. There is an alternative that is being presented to us in our society:

on the one hand, we are told, there is head-banging bigotry,
on the other hand there is compassionate live-and-let-live non-judgmentalism.

It is a false alternative; that really isn’t the choice that we face. The choice we face today, the choice that humanity has always faced, is more important and more stark. It is the choice between life and death:

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God… , by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you… . But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish… I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.

Choose life…

[Deuteronomy 30.15-19]

The Reverend Justin Lewis-Anthony
Rector, St Stephen's Canterbury
Lent 2005