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The Seven Deadly Sins Introduction

18 February 2007

Within the last year or so I bought and read a new series of little books published by Oxford University Press from a series of lectures originally given in New York with the joint sponsorship of the Public Library.  The series of books testifies to the hold which an ancient concept has on the imagination even if modern people no longer subscribe to its original intent.  The series of books concerns the Seven Deadly Sins—each little book covering the ground of its own particular sin in, usually, an engaging and thoughtful way.  The series is relentlessly post-modern—at least in the majority of cases.  The book on anger is written by a Buddhist, the one on pride by someone who grew up without enough of it, the treatment of lust offering the view that, on the whole, lust is a good thing.  And so on.  But with the arrival of Lent and the fact that it has been quite a few years since we considered the Seven Deadly Sins, I thought it might be worthwhile to treat of them again.  There was once a time in Western Christendom when bishops required their clergy to talk about these seven sins twice a year! 

We have spent considerable time, I think, trying to envision the purpose which God has in mind for us.  We have used the Christian Life Model both for us as individuals and as a parish.  We have talked of our mission and the Diocesan development goals.  But it has been a while since we considered what exactly it is that we are up against.  Sin and evil are matters of everyday experience, yet we often do not think very deeply or very exactly about them.  What is evil and how does it relate to sin?  What is virtue and what is a vice? 

About 20 years ago, as I recall, there were several books in which the authors claimed to have rediscovered sin.  That is, as philosophers and psychologists, they lamented the fact that the culture had lost the concept of sin as a workable way to manage daily existence.  We Christians, and especially, Episcopalians, are used to the idea.  We confess our sins at nearly every Mass in a public way, although the practice of individual sacramental confession has slipped out of general use.  But I wonder what we think we are doing when we confess that we have sinned in thought, and word, and deed, by what we have done and left undone.  Is sin a big deal or a little problem easily dealt with?  I heard part of a TV interview a few months back with a rather prominent pastor of a huge mega-church.  When asked about sin, he said that they didn’t talk much about sin, because Jesus died to forgive it and so they figured it had pretty much been dealt with.  Now on to something more interesting, I suppose.  Unless I am wrong in my recollections, however, that is the same minister who had to resign in disgrace several weeks later for sins of his own that got out of control.  So maybe it would have been good to think more clearly about them. 

What I want to do during the Sundays of Lent is to consider all Seven Deadly Sins.  I hope to be finished by Palm Sunday, so that gives me only five Sundays, but that ought to suffice.  Today I want to think with you a little more about the idea of sin itself, before we get into the various forms in which it chiefly manifests itself.  What does it mean to sin?  I grew up with a definition of sin that I now reject as completely inadequate.  It was this: “Sin is a willful violation of a known law of God.”  This gets us into the whole idea of sin as disobedience and lawlessness and violation of commandments.  There is a side of sin that is like this, of course.  But it also leads to a stultifying legalism, in which some people think they have kept the law and look down on those who don’t.  It is especially nice if you can draw a legal circle around yourself and your own group and find another group of people who violate your laws.  You become the chosen and they become the law-breakers—those who have fallen from grace, the losers. 

The way it works, however, is that sin is narrowed down to a certain few rules that you and your group do not break, while things like loving God with all one’s heart are almost inconceivable.  Righteousness is narrowly defined to suit the sensibilities of your own sort of people.  Eventually there is a reaction to this, of course, and the good is thrown out with the bad.  Consider the phrase “living in sin.”  When I was young it invariably meant an unmarried couple living together.  Isn’t that fantastic?  If that was living in sin, then greedy, lustful, prideful behaviours sneaked in under the cover of this narrow idea of sin, and those who were guilty of them thought of themselves as virtuous because they were married or single, but still chaste.  Now, of course, we have thrown that idea out, too.  And it is hard to imagine what one would mean if he accused another person of “living in sin.”

One of the things that we Episcopalians know at least is that, whatever sin is, it cuts right through the hearts of all of us.  We are spared, I think, for the most part, the fashionable condescension of imagining that, unlike others, we are without sin.  We do, though, take our sin a little too casually.  And again I think it is because we do not understand it very well.  In our culture an evil person is a child molester or a serial killer.  Everything else seems to be on a sliding scale of insignificance.  About whom did I read only a few days ago who had embezzled millions or defrauded hundreds or at least betrayed the trust of many and apologized for some “mistakes in judgement”!  One of the problems with frequent public confession of sins in the general confession is that it might make us complacent in this way—on the order of the old Frenchman who said that of course God would forgive, that was his business! 

I want to recall something for you this morning to which I have referred in the past, but it seems more significant than ever to me: the writings of Thomas Merton on sin.  I know that there are a few people in our congregation who inwardly groan to hear the name Merton, but of all I have read over the years, his explanation of the inner logic of sin makes more sense to me than any other.  I think many others have picked up on his writings and you may encounter the ideas without the name attached.  But I give you the name so as to disclaim for myself the ability to have come up with this understanding on my own. 

I am encouraged to suppose that I have not been too far off over the years, because what he says is very similar to what I was trying to teach the children back when I first came in a first communion class.  I asked them: have you ever, when your mother asked you to do something, something you knew was good, needed to be done, was right for you to do, simply asserted yourself against her and said, “No”?  They all knew what I meant.  Is that so different from what Merton says here: “My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life.  And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.”  In other words, when we assert ourselves in ways that take us outside of God’s will for us, there is something false about the whole effort from the beginning.  We might think so, but what we are trying to do is exist as if we really could stand outside his will, his grace.  This is an illusion; an unreality. 

And then he goes on to say: “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin.  For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist.  A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.”  In other words, that is the real meaning of the phrase, “living in sin.”  He concludes:

“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.  Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real.  And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.”  You have all seen that old movie, “The Invisible Man”?  He was not perceptible until he put something around his invisible self.  Merton says our sinful self is this invisible man, the unreal, false self, we are trying to be on our own.  So much of what we do is like the shreds of cloth wrapped around an invisible, that is, unreal core. 

Sin, in other words, is what we do when we seize upon the ability God has given us to be what we want, to do what we want to do, by doing it in our own way, without consulting Him, even in outright rejection of His will if we know it.  Instead of looking towards God and learning the docility of spirit which would enable us to discover who God wants us to be, to learn a reliance upon the mercy that would help us achieve the self he wants us to become, we go off in our own direction to set up shop outside the divine mercy, outside the divine will.  And there we create an illusory self, a false self, a self in competition with other selves, a sinful self.  And it all comes down in the end to this refusal of ourselves to the tutelage of God, which is more than simple obedience to a few divine laws.  One can be legally righteous and still a false self, projecting righteousness outward over against other people, far from discovering the true self that only God knows. 

For that is the secret: only God knows who we truly are, what he meant for us to become.  Until we find God, we cannot find ourselves.  So the task of our whole life’s journeying is learning to listen to God, learning to be guided by his Spirit, and so, learning who we are.  The Seven Deadly Sins, then, are the chief ways we fool ourselves and escape from reality into falsehood.  They are the chief vices—that is, habitual patterns of behaviour by which we defeat our true selves.  Over against them are the virtues, or habits of character, by which we attain to our true end.  To gain the mastery over sin is not so much to combat temptations head-on, fighting the vices with brute strength, gritting our teeth and taking cold showers or forcing ourselves up from the table, or biting our tongues so that we don’t say bad things to other people.  The trick is to see that as long as we are tied to the false self—what Merton calls our “tenacious need to maintain our separate, egotistical will”—we shall find ourselves being overcome by various forms of sinfulness.  By being tied to this false and outward self, we alienate ourselves from reality and from God. 

The fight against sin and vice, is then a turning towards reality, cultivating habits that root us in reality.  Sin is finally unreality and illusion.  Not that it does not do real damage and have real effects, but that it pursues an impossible project: to be a real person without submission to and reliance on the mercy of God, who alone has reality inherent in Himself. 

So I hope you will think along with me over the next few weeks as we get into Lent and then arrive at Holy Week and the Triduum again.  We are also pursuing a collateral course in our study of Tom Wright’s book, Evil and the Justice of God.  I hope many of you will be able to join this conversation, too.  [All Merton quotes here are from New Seeds of Contemplation.]