During the season of Lent, at my local church we’re looking at the ‘seven deadly sins’ and the corresponding ‘seven heavenly virtues.’ As part of it I was tasked on Sunday to preach on sloth, lust, diligence and purity with a focus on our internal nature.
I went into my sermon prep assuming that lust was by far the more horrible of the two ‘deadly sins’. What I found (with a helpful first thought from my friend, Brett) was something other than what I had assumed.
Sloth is often understood as doing nothing, which hardly seems really bad, but the Church saw fit to include it as a ‘deadly sin’ because it’s actually something deeper than that. Sloth is a cold sin in that it’s passive. At its heart, sloth is apathy – not doing what we are supposed to do, what we’re ‘designed’ for in the image of God. It’s important to note that with this understanding we can busy ourselves with useless activity (and some of it may seem really good at first glance) but still be caught in the sin of sloth. Sloth is an apathetic rejection of the life that God is calling us into.
This is different from doing ‘nothing’ where doing nothing could be an intentional downtime and intentional relaxation. These are the things that rejuvenate us – Sabbath rest.
We see this sloth in the story of David with Bathsheba (2 Sam 11) – the story begins with his idleness where he has rejected doing what kings are supposed to do in Spring (whether we like what they were supposed to do or not). He has been in bed, he gets up and wanders. He’s idle. It left him open to something and it leaves us open to something.
Our own base desires. In steps lust. I’ll use a fascinating statistic to highlight this soon.
Check out Proverbs 21:25-26
Lust could be defined as intense desire disconnected from God’s intentions. Desire isn’t bad, but lust is an intensification of it that strips it of any of its legitimate reasons for being. Desiring food isn’t bad, but lusting after food removes its reason for being and our actual need for it. Wanting to have some sort of influence over a situation isn’t bad but an intense desire for power causes us to want the world to be in submission to us. Sexual desire isn’t bad but lust disconnects it from its goals of intimacy, procreation and/or unification and further, when it comes to sexual lust it objectifies the person or persons who are the object of it, it reduces them to mere tools to gratify our desire, the sad thing is that they can never be fully satisfied.
See Proverbs 13:4
Sloth naturally opens the door for lust because it rejects God and leaves only us. A person and world that rejects God can only have distorted desires that can never truly be satisfied – lust. Food, power, sex, money – our slothful distortions of desire for these things will consume us and others. If you look at most of the issues in the world you can find this at the core.
In David’s story Bathsheba was simply an object of desire – his desire for sex was distorted and it dehumanised another. That then played out in a distortion of influence leading to his killing of her husband, Uriah.
Let me give you a real world example where this plays out intensely. My work with TEAR Fund at the moment involves examining what drives the demand for sex trafficking – innocent women and girls being sold into sexual exploitation. It’s a huge issue we’re combating in partnership with some amazing organisations and you can give to that work. I’m convinced that the normalisation of commercial sex is a significant part of the problem and through research it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that modern pornography is intrinsically linked in many ways. We don’t need to go into detail except to say that sex trafficking is the evil face of human lust at its worst.
Where it links to sloth is that the highest proportion of porn viewing happens on Sunday – people are idle with no intentional sense of using that time to relax and rejuvenate. The slothful idleness lets lust set in – a distorted craving. Porn consumption is the result… and it’s an expression of lust that is rampant. You can justify the consumption of pornography all you like, but it’s blatantly obvious that idleness and its consumption go hand in hand.
In response to all of this diligence is the recognition that God has done all he needs to do for our redemption and that we need to open our lives to his saving grace. We need to actively step forward not so that we can be saved but as an acceptance of what he has already done and because we want that to shape us. We want to put the distorted false self aside in order to allow for the true self God wishes to create within us.
Diligence in my own life is a web that is woven together through a number of different disciplines – silence/contemplative prayer and reading/how I use money/exercise/sleep. These things keep my life open to God’s shaping. I’m no saint with any of them, but when I am engaging them well, my life flows better – when they fall over and my base cravings are allowed to begin to take root again, my life looks a bit darker.
Diligence and intentional living opens our lives to be shaped by God, for God’s desires to become our desires and for those desires to serve his purposes – food to act as nutrition for the human body he created, for influence to direct the world around us towards his redemption, and for sex to truly unify.
The result is purification, sanctification, cleansing, holiness. Purity is not something we can bestow upon ourselves it’s something God does to us and for us. Our diligence opens our doors to allow him to do it.
Lent is an act of diligence, the opposite of sloth. It’s a time to examine our desires and where those things have become distorted and had the space to take control. We actively put those things down and in diligence we pick up things that open the door to God, allowing him to purify us and recreate us.
In the traditions of the Church, there are practices we engage as acts of diligence, they open us up to be shaped by God – collective worship (giving God his rightful place), discussion of scripture (renewing our minds), prayer together (entering into union with the Divine), mutual confession (humbling expressing our vulnerability to one another), baptisms and weddings experienced together – and as often as possible, coming to the Holy Communion table is one of them and even here, Paul challenged approaching this meal with a lust for food or as an expression of power, so even here our desires can be distorted.
Our desire in Holy Communion is to participate in the body and blood of Christ, to put ourselves aside for a moment and to open ourselves up to the activity of God. To allow him to shape and transform us through the crucifixion of Jesus and the new life of his resurrection. Through our lives, his purification extends into His world through our activities – lived with his desires front and center in our desires. Our desires purified by Him.
Before we enter into Holy Communion the Church has a tradition of repentance. Psalm 51 is David’s engagement of this after being confronted about what he had done with Bathsheba and Uriah. Repentance is our chance to recognise where our desires have been disconnected from God’s desires and run rampant – where they have eaten away at us and become corrosive to ourselves, others and our relationship with him. It’s our chance to ask for forgiveness and to actively lay those things down – ridding ourselves of the false self to take on the new life that he offers. From this position of repentance we take Holy Communion – participating in his body and blood and accepting the new life he gives to us.
None of this should lead us to feel guilt and shame, but to recognise that there is more to life and something better for us to take hold of. C.S Lewis captured it well in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses –
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased….Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
