As we wrap up,
we’re grateful that you all would be a part of this during Lent.
Just personally,
this has been an interesting study looking into these.
It’s been a while
since I have done this,
and so dusting off the Seven Deadly Sin books and kind of digging back
in has been thought-provoking.
I hope there’s been something in it that has challenged you,
that has been informative,
that has given you something to think about.
Tonight,
when we talked about how to structure this in several different ways,
and we thought we
could spread the sins out just a little further,
that certainly could have been a good way to go.
But what we decided to do instead was to spend this last session with kind of a summary and reflection,
and it will be a little bit all over the place.
But we think hopefully there’s some
places in it that might be jumping points for discussion.
And the first conversation that we had,
a little bit throughout this,
we’ve revisited this conversation a couple of times, is
if you were redoing the idea of seven sins,
if you take this list and you make it contemporary,
that is you stamp it on what is right now.
If you were making this list today,
do you end up with the same categories?
And we found ourselves kind of wondering
if there’s anything missing or if there’s something that isn’t as serious as our ancestors
in the faith thought that it was.
For instance,
in an era of communication,
in an era of information overload,
a good case could be made for something like gossip or slander.
That doesn’t really fit
necessarily under any of these,
and yet we live in a place where we can pass on false information very easily.
We can dogpile people very quickly.
We can misuse our access to information in
myriad ways that can be harmful both to others and ultimately to ourselves as we participate in those things.
Clearly, the scripture speaks out about gossip and about the way that we speak of one another,
the way that we communicate.
So I don’t know.
I don’t know if gossip would make
my list.
I don’t know if I’d expand that to aid.
I don’t know if I would back off.
We also talked about originally pride was not on the list because it was understood that every sin was
an expression of pride at some level,
and so there were versions of the seven deadly sins that didn’t include pride specifically.
I sort of like that it’s in there,
and I think it probably has a
fitting place, though I don’t disagree that there’s pride.
I think there’s lots of overlap in these,
but we were kind of curious.
Is there anything that surprises you about the list?
Either you’re surprised it’s on the list or something you’re surprised isn’t on the list.
Is that fair?
Can I just quick fill one thing there?
I was actually going to mention pride,
and specifically,
I think pride’s a good example of what I would call recontextualization.
So one of the things
about pride in particular is there’s a sense in which it has been baptized by our culture,
and what I mean by that is pride has in some ways become celebrated as a form of self-advancement,
sort of this idea that if one is proud of oneself that as the ultimate personal psychological achievement,
and if that is the case,
then I think Christians would maybe want to find new vocabulary,
not reaching into new ground per se,
but find maybe new words from our tradition to describe it,
because I do think those who truly do have an experience of the sin of pride,
it will ultimately become self-destructive.
It’s not just Christian judgmentalism or legalism.
It’s not us being party poopers and wanting people to be down on themselves.
It’s that if we
do let that incurvata say what Martin Luther called that inward turn,
if we let that rule our life,
ultimately it will sever relationships.
It will sever the good.
It will sever the beauty.
It will sever the things that God has put there because we’ll turn it into ourselves.
So just as an example, I think maybe you would say,
yeah, I think that should be on the list,
but maybe we would find a new way to talk about it,
or maybe we would find a new metaphor to describe it,
because maybe that would help us in our own cultural moment.
That may be an option as well.
I think culturally speaking,
we’re probably so comfortable with pride that we
use the word narcissism and typically mean what our ancestors did when they say pride.
I mean, we’ve had entire movements that have celebrated the word pride in lots of different ways.
There’s a great book called The Narcissism Epidemic,
a woman named Jean Twenge,
and she points out that the sort of self-affirmation era,
probably shortly after my
childhood, which I wish we would have gotten it, but we didn’t.
The idea that everybody was special
and everybody got medals and one of the lines,
and this isn’t an exact quote,
but it’s along these lines.
It’s pretty close.
We spent years telling everybody they were special and not wrong
and then she says,
and they believed us.
We worked so hard to fix self-esteem that we essentially created narcissists.
There is something to be said for that,
and I think the language may be
but certainly pride continues to be a stumbling block in the Christian life and in our culture.
So yeah, if you’re listening by the podcast,
Stan mentioned this idea of self-worth,
and I think to
address the issue of self-worth as a Christian requires a return to the idea of creation,
and of course, theologically, we have this image of what theologians called the imago dei or the
thing that kind of gets me riled up is because culturally,
we like to have some of the historic
Christian movements of thought,
but we don’t like to attach it anymore to the actual theological
idea.
So the idea that everyone has worth and everyone is special and everyone should be treated
nicely is the dominant story in the school.
It’s like one of those pillars of what we do,
but then when you ask a kid,
well, why should we do that?
There’s absolutely no particular reason
other than it’s kind of a nice thing to do,
like you’re a mean person if you don’t do it.
And as Christians,
I mean, that is firmly rooted on the rock bed of our belief of because God
instilled an identity within you that reflects a divine good for the world.
You’re a small part
of a majestic God who’s far bigger than we can imagine,
and each one of us carries a sliver of
that image.
So therefore,
you do have worth,
regardless of what your body looks like,
regardless of your mental capability or acuity,
regardless of your talent or charisma, right?
Christians can say,
we believe that you have worth.
But then in culture,
we want to say,
treat people nice and people are special.
And that’s a good thing to do.
And I think for me,
Christians actually have
deep theological intellectual high ground there.
But we often have spent so much time and maybe
this is a, I don’t want to take over the conversation,
push it somewhere else too quickly.
I do think that this is where we are implicated as Christians for doing a series like the virtues and vices,
and we fixate too much on the vices,
and we become known for our judgmentalism and
hypocrisy, instead of those who actually care about the wholeness and goodness and the image
of God, the worthfulness of others.
And that I think is a great hindrance to what we’ve been called to do.
Yeah, I think I would only add that you have two sentiments that sound the same.
People have value.
But on one hand,
you have Christians who say that value comes from outside
of us.
That value is in the nature of God and the love of God that God has for all of God’s children.
And on the other hand,
you say, no, that’s something that I own.
It’s something internal that belongs to me personally and uniquely.
And you come to a similar place,
all people should be valued and treasured,
but you get there in very different ways.
And
there’s two very different paths.
And I think I would like to argue that ours has
a little more depth to it,
but I’m clearly biased.
So maybe that’s not as easy an argument,
though I think I could win it.
There’s no doubt.
There’s no doubt.
I think one of the benefits just across the board,
Phyllis, and whether it be in sloth or really any
of those areas is that the Christian narrative historically pushes back against just the way I am.
I just lose my temper.
I just fly off the handle.
I yell at people.
And then later I tell
them, I didn’t mean, you know,
or whatever.
Whatever it is that we justify as somehow
personality trait.
I think something like the seven deadly sins helps us to push back and say,
it’s not how you’re supposed to be.
It’s not how you’re intended to be.
And you should be working
if you recognize being a way that isn’t in keeping with the bigger narrative of what you’re called to be,
we need to look for ways that we’re pursuing something different, something better.
And whether that’s, again, whether that’s sloth or whether that’s pride or whatever it is,
I think that the idea of sinfulness helps us in that
it reminds us that we don’t get to just say,
well,
it’s just me,
you know,
which I think we do sometimes.
I know.
I mean, I know I’m tempted to do that.
Yeah.
So the question is how does sloth ultimately manifest itself?
And what is a battle with sin?
And what is something that may be medical, psychological?
And I don’t think those two are unrelated.
I mean, I think there is an overlap.
Certainly.
Sometimes we need
help to get out of any of our ruts.
And I think as to what it feels like,
I think it,
you know, apathy is the word that comes to mind.
And Michael and I’ve even had conversations.
I wonder if
if I were writing the list today,
I’m not sure I use the word acedia or sloth.
I might use the
word apathy, the idea that I just don’t care.
I just can’t engage.
I think it feels like being overwhelmed.
I think it feels like being numb.
I think it feels like being listless,
this have no energy,
all of which can be signs of something medical,
something physiological.
And so
I don’t, I don’t think, I don’t think they’re necessarily dealt with spirit differently.
In other words, I think historically when Christians have said,
we have spiritual answers
to medical problems, we’ve been dangerous.
When we tell people,
no, you don’t need psychological
help.
You just need to pray more.
We have it wrong.
I mean,
and we,
you know, portions of the church have done that with serious illnesses.
They’ve done that with cancer.
They’ve done that.
And I would say that when we do that with our mental health,
we’re guilty of the same thing.
I mean, if we’re in a position where we’re struggling consistently,
yes, there is a spiritual
reality to that because everything has a spiritual reality,
but get some help.
See if somebody can
help you go talk to somebody,
get these things out there.
Maybe there’s, you know, maybe there’s something going on that isn’t helping you be healthy.
And I think that’s important.
You know,
this is a tough area for that.
I think, I mean, there’s stubbornness everywhere,
but what midwesterners, we love this mythology of grab your bootstraps.
And a lot of people have suffered for a long time.
I don’t know if you’ve seen recently,
there’s some wonderful commercials that have come out.
There’s a guy whose parachutes don’t
open and he’s fallen through the air.
And there’s another person who says,
grab on my parachute
works.
And he says,
no, no, I don’t want to bother you.
And there’s another one with a guy.
He’s got a ton of weight.
He’s doing the bench press and he’s got weight crushing him.
And the guy says,
you can let me help you.
It’s not, it’s, it’s not embarrassing.
And the guy says,
you don’t know my family.
And he’s just sitting there under the weight.
And I thought whoever,
whoever came up with those commercials,
uh, has had some life experience because there’s,
there is truth to that,
that we are reluctant to admit that we might need a little help.
And that’s true spiritually and medically.
And I don’t know if that answers your question at all, but I,
I don’t think they’re exclusive,
nor do I think we should think of them exclusively.
If we’re going through weeks of not being able to get out of bed,
not get anything done,
not come up with any passion towards anything,
it’s time to explore what’s happening spiritually and medically.
I would, I would argue.
Yeah.
So I would also point out,
remember a CD was called the noon day demon and
you know, it had this idea of the thing that comes up at the height of the day.
It wasn’t this, it wasn’t the idea that it dominated one’s entire moment in the day.
Now, now we did talk about it
as there are seasons of spiritual acedia there,
there are seasons, maybe even in life where we
could use that as a frame.
But if that is your constant experience,
then, then that’s moving it
in a place where it’s time to, to get help.
But to Phyllis’s point as well,
I think some of us
have acedia very close to our personal,
either our personality or our coping in the world,
the ways that we’ve learned to deal with things.
Others of us, I think,
experience it in particular moments of life.
There are certain chapter seasons in which it gets introduced because,
you know, maybe that’s a busy season for work,
or maybe that’s a particular moment in the
seasonal calendar, maybe that’s January, maybe you’re one of those folks where January comes
and you just sort of feel your skin crawling, you know.
I just think it’s wise to look at it
from, I think, many advantages.
If you don’t see it in you or if you look at another and you say,
“Wow, that seems like a scary extreme version,” I suspect that you’ve had some experience of it
to a more limited sort of frame.
I think it’s a lens to look at ourselves with.
It’s not a be-all-end-all.
This is not a Christian claim to some higher personal knowledge.
It’s a lens to evaluate,
“Is this season one in which I’m struggling to find agency,
or is that a part
of my personality that might need corrected?” You know,
I think it could be helpful in a lot of different settings.
We didn’t go into it a lot last week,
but this Rebecca DeYoung,
whose book we’ve both been reading,
in the Acedia chapter,
she referenced marriage a lot,
and essentially one of the things she said is that Acedia is the moment that marriages struggle,
and a husband and wife know something of what they need to do to fix it, but they’re unwilling.
They know what would make it better,
but they can’t bring themselves to do that, and the same,
you know,
we’ve seen that play out a lot.
Again, not just the Midwest,
but that’s a Midwest
pattern.
I mean,
you know, your marriage and your mental health,
you keep those away from everybody,
and so getting people to reach out for help,
but I think that description is helpful in
that if I find myself in the grips of Acedia,
I know what I should do.
I should get up,
I should go to work, I should whatever that is,
but I’m unwilling to do it,
and I think that’s a tell-tale
sign that something’s going on worth exploring.
What is the benefit of having an idea like deadly
sins of things to watch out for?
Because typically in the modern church,
we think of sin
as the action that we end up committing.
So we think of the whatever is prior to that action
as sort of the temptation,
and the action itself as the sin,
and I think the ancient tradition
saw that a little differently.
They saw sin as the thing working in us that ultimately leads us
to act upon it,
to do those things,
and I think they were probably a little more comfortable with
some of that in the larger,
you know,
remember we who grew up Presbyterian,
I mean, we’re steeped in sin.
Sin is our home base.
We like it a lot,
and we’ve lived with this idea that we are not
sinful because we sin.
We are inherently sinful.
It is a part of our nature.
It is who we are,
and I think that does make some of this conversation difficult as we wrestle with, you know,
those kind of seasonal,
probably a seedia being the most,
a seedia probably being the most troubling because it does share some of these other
aspects in a way that that lust and anger, greed probably don’t.
But yeah, a part of what we thought we discussed tonight is just the very nature of having a list
like this and whether for modern Protestants it’s helpful or not.
Okay.
Michael will tell us.
Now I get to offer my hot take.
I think this is where we need to be very honest and hopefully
very clear about the danger of the task that we’ve set ourselves out on because whether we
as a church believe that this is accurate or not,
I think it is undeniable that we live in a culture
that conceives of the church’s majority message to be judgmentalism and hypocrisy.
We live in a
world that believes that the church is most interested in shining the light of sinfulness on others.
Now we would like to,
I think, maybe nuance that and say that we talk about grace and
we talk about salvation.
But if you look at a culture of,
they’re never on Saturday Night Live
making jokes about how gracious and generous Christians are,
right?
So at some point we need
to recognize the danger of having this conversation and maybe potentially,
I don’t want to put this on
your comment, but potentially part of that comment raises this question,
do we want to be the people
who start defining medical problems as sinfulness,
which would have a pejorative sense?
And I want to be very clear here.
As a modern church,
we should be very aware of the number
of times we’ve used the idea of sinfulness as ammunition.
But at some point we have to
recognize that we have been tempted and whether it’s been us personally or us as a larger family,
we’ve been tempted to take these ideas and to use them as a tool against culture or against enemy
or against other, whoever it might be.
And in doing so,
we have fundamentally missed the
purpose of the tool.
This was never designed to describe an opportunity for Christians to call
out the world and say,
“Gotcha.” If you read Paul in the New Testament,
he consistently says that
the world will be the world.
He’s not surprised when the world sins.
How could you not when you
live in darkness, right?
For him, it’s the fact that that is living in our church community.
That’s what gets Paul up in arms.
He’s talking about,
“Hey, Corinthians, you need to expel this
guy.
He needs to be expelled for the sake that he might be brought back into fellowship.”
Or we’re going through Timothy together in the Bible study right now, right?
To Timothy, “Hey, there are false teachers.
They need to be censured.
That teaching needs to stop.”
That’s where Paul gets really fired up.
I don’t want to go too long here,
but I do want to make the case.
That said,
this is an unbelievable tool if held rightly and used rightly.
A scalpel can kill and it can save,
right?
Realistically, if you’re willing to learn and to lean into and
to humbly receive this gift,
I think the ancient church has given us.
Friends,
this has been, at least for me,
as thinking and processing what we might share,
unbelievably helpful in my own spiritual reflection this Lenten season,
to turn this inward and to see envy hit pretty deep.
That’s a place of prayer for me right now.
Then that grows into a sense of,
“Well, yeah, but what about some of these other sins that
I didn’t even realize were operating around that center?” Then that suddenly becomes another place
of prayer and growth.
It becomes an opportunity to become, as people,
more fixated on wholeness
than brokenness, because the scalpel can root out the thing that was cancerous,
and it can enable us as Christians,
to use Augustine’s words,
to allow that centering
and stabilizing work of God to fill the gap that we finally got that false thing out of.
I understand the danger,
especially with Acedia, maybe in particular, because it could feel like
a modern person that we are instilling guilt in a place where there should be hopefulness.
My point is that’s not what we’re doing.
Fundamentally, we’re saying that medicine and
faith and spirituality, that these things are not opponents,
that they are fundamentally all
God’s good gifts, but that, when a tool is used rightly,
it can identify places that we have
allowed ourselves to convince ourselves of our self-sufficiency,
and we’ve allowed that
to short-circuit the life that God intends for us,
and if you believe that,
then you’re capable of a Christian of saying that that will then enable you to take real agency by the grace of God by
the power of the Holy Spirit to become the kind of whole person that you were intended to be.
Let me summarize all of that long tirade into a very short sentence.
What I’m suggesting is that,
fundamentally, this series is not about sin and judgmentalism.
This is fundamentally a series about grace and agency by the power of Jesus Christ,
and if it is received that way,
then I think we receive the wisdom of the ancient church.
I think it’s helpful,
too, to remember that the word vice, it means habit.
It’s something we repeat.
It’s something that we live into.
It’s something that we live under,
and the more often we return to it,
the stronger hold it has on us.
There’s a wonderful quote.
I think it’s Samuel Johnson.
“The chains of habit are too light to feel until they are too
strong to break.” And the idea that if we return to these vices or these virtues repeatedly,
we grow them in our lives for better or for worse.
And when we grow vices in our life,
when we practice things not in keeping with who God calls us to be,
then we move away from this
concept Michael has voiced,
wholeness in both the Hebrew and Greek.
In Hebrew, the word is shalom,
and we translate it peace,
but it’s peace, it’s kindness,
it’s wholeness, it’s centeredness, it’s forgiveness.
It is a huge word.
We don’t have an equivalent for that.
In Greek,
the word that we use for saved,
when we hear the word saved,
we think heaven.
In the way that we’ve
used the word as Christians,
we hear Jesus saves us and we think Jesus lets us go to heaven,
which is part of the word,
but the actual word has to do with, again,
this sense of comfort,
this sense of confidence,
this sense of wholeness,
this sense of settledness,
of genuineness.
And when we talk about salvation,
we talk not just about something that happens in the future,
but something that happens in the moment.
And part of what happens in the moment is that we,
through the grace of Christ,
move toward virtue and away from vice.
In other words, we change our habits.
And I think,
you know, in that sense, I do think this is a helpful framework.
Obviously, it has some hurdles.
We have to navigate.
We have to be careful how we use it because it’s not a club.
It’s a mirror.
The idea isn’t to go find other people’s sin.
The idea is to look through
this lens and see if there’s any of this in my own soul.
And I think if we do that carefully,
I do think this can be a tool,
though,
as with all tools,
you can break stuff.
Imagine for a moment that we,
as the body of Christ,
continues to focus on creating these
habits or pathways that Clint mentions and the things that we cultivate in our spiritual garden,
both as individuals and as a body of Christ.
Imagine if that was humility,
kindness,
patience,
diligence,
charity,
temperance, and chastity.
You don’t even need
90 percent of that for our community to be compelling.
Unbelievably inviting.
I was struck by,
just to give an example here,
we talked Lust and Chastity.
I heard a sort of
an expose kind of documentary with a manager for an international hotel chain.
He worked in multiple
different hotels of different sort of prices,
both from your common hotel to to some of your very elite.
And he described times when when some folks with some substantial financial means
would rent out an entire hotel and would have evenings that would be embarrassing to anyone
to hear of just lavish,
sort of lust gone wild type situations.
And it struck me while hearing
this expose that we live in a world in which the most compelling thing is I might feel something
if I give into debaseness,
right, that I might find some meaning if I just take lust to the furthest
reach that it could possibly take me.
Right.
We have people who have more money individually than entire countries,
which I have no comment good or bad.
It’s just we live in a world with extremes.
Right. And in the midst of those extremes,
the church has something to say
about how wholeness will not be found there.
That is not a thing the world is going to talk about.
They’re not going to say that that at the end of that road is brokenness.
They’re going to say,
well, yeah, see what you find there.
Let us know.
You know,
what the church has to say is you don’t
need to get to that to find what you’re looking for.
And I think that’s the amazing gift of a series like this.
But but herein is the problem is that it is far easier to look for the actions of
others like, oh, look at that sin than it is to practice who who wants to practice patience when
you could just tell them exactly what you think that would feel a lot better and it would destroy
the relationship and it would not reflect the grace of Jesus Christ.
Right.
So I understand
to some extent I’m a young guy being naive and I’ll admit that too.
There’s a sense of sort of
optimism in that because I think our Reformed tradition does it does offer corrective and say
this is hard because of our brokenness because of this turn.
It’s going to require dedication and
commitment and planning if we’re going to actually grow in these virtues.
But once again, the strength of our tradition is good news is you don’t have to do it yourself.
That God is at work enabling to
do what you couldn’t have done by yourself.
So let’s become grace people even more.
And that’s the news.
That’s the promise that lies ahead of us.
Yeah. And I want to try and be clear about this.
I think again that the vice virtue thing,
it’s easy to concentrate on the vice.
In some ways, they’re more interesting.
In some ways, they’re racier.
But those of you that boat,
if you boat around the lakes, you see buoys floating out with don’t go here.
It’s shallow.
It’s rocky.
That’s essentially what our mothers and fathers in the faith have left us.
They’ve left us markers
that say, hey, if you find yourself in these waters,
you need to change your course.
And
I think the vices help us identify those things in our life.
The virtues then become the opportunity,
the invitation to focus on something else.
They are the way through.
They are the map that helps
us chart that territory that we get lost in.
And maybe we haven’t done a great job because we’ve
tended to focus on the vices to try and explain them.
But the purpose of the vices is not condemnation.
And it’s not judgment.
It’s information to drive you back to the idea
of the virtue that guides you to the place God would have us go.
And again,
I think if we treat
them as that, I do think they’re helpful.
These are weird for Protestants.
These are strange for
Presbyterians.
I get that.
The whole concept of sins that are better or worse,
the idea that there
are sins that aren’t really sins.
They’re kind of temptations.
This is a strange place for us.
And it’s not where we have lived historically.
But I do think it’s helpful as a navigational tool.
And I do think it’s helpful as a framework to help us do just that,
navigate our own spiritual journey.
Yeah, agape is the word that’s always used for the way that God loves us.
It’s other centered love.
It’s servant love.
It’s relational love.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is the goal of the Christian life.
When the Bible says love each other,
it says agape each other.
So unlike English, where you can love the soup we had tonight,
that’s a different word in Greek.
And it doesn’t use that word for the way we treat one another.
It uses the word it uses of God’s love.
We, in the way that we love others,
are to reflect the way that God loves us.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, maybe to take that down the road a little bit,
I think that’s a helpful
slice of the pie.
Because what it does is it points us to the higher order,
which is Jesus Christ.
Fundamentally,
the only kind of God love that can be fully understood is the kind of God love who is
Jesus Christ, God incarnate.
And, you know,
we as a church can continually find deep that this is
sacramental.
This is communion, right?
This is coming back to the body and blood of Jesus Christ
and finding in it,
there was more nourishment there than we knew to start.
It’s always deeper than we think.
And it’s amazing.
If you look at Jesus’s life,
you want to talk about love,
you look at Jesus life,
look at the people who he spent the most time textually loving.
The people whose lives and choices and the consequences of those choices were the hardest, right?
He’s the one in John standing between the stoning and the woman.
He’s the one writing
in the sand.
He’s the one who’s eating dinner with the tax collectors.
He’s the one who’s calling one of those guys as his disciple, right?
I mean, if you read the story of Jesus,
I think what we discover is he seems to,
in the way that he lived,
be completely not fixated on the act sin kind of quotient that we use so naturally, right?
Like, how many checks can we put on your sin tally?
You must be feeling pretty guilty today.
Or if not,
we’ll help you with that.
We’ll help you feel more guilty, right?
That’s not to say sin doesn’t
matter.
And it doesn’t, right?
That’s not necessarily what I’m saying,
but it is to say,
I think what makes an understanding of the love of Jesus Christ so radical is he not only understood
the severity of our situation,
he was actually willing to bear it for us.
And if we then are
going to live into the goods of this conversation,
we’re going to live into the virtues,
then what it would look like is clearly love.
But I think you would add to that all of Paul’s fruits of the
spirit.
I mean, you know, patience and kindness and gentleness,
like we would, we would discover in all of these that we were reflecting a deeper image,
which is the very image of God to go back to that conversation.
That is the image of God,
which we know supremely in the image of Jesus Christ.
So this can either be,
I’m sorry if I am now sounds like I’m just repeating myself,
this can either be a massive toolset that you can walk out with a diploma in sin judgmentalism
tallying,
right?
Like now I can accurately tally the sin I see in my friends.
That seems envious.
I see some pride over there, right?
It could be that,
but it could also be somewhat of like
we were talking earlier today,
somewhat like, you know, when they navigated by the stars, right?
It could be,
well,
when that star is there,
it suggests that maybe we should be
pointed in this direction.
So if you see that your ship has envy or wrath or,
or lust in that
position, then that gives you maybe the exact data that you need to come to prayer and say,
God, here’s my confession.
It’s probably, if we discover our sinfulness is generally more painful than that,
here’s the honest truth.
And then we hear the words of forgiveness.
We hear you are forgiven.
And then suddenly that directional information actually becomes
empowerment by the power of the spirit for you to live the kind of wholeness that you’ve always been looking for.
And that gets me excited just talking about it.
So, so we could have our
checklist and tallies, which is, I think built into human nature.
And maybe for better or worse, Wilhelmin says this,
you know, the church is maybe the church people that you and me,
people who, who really care about this,
we may be the most tempted towards that list taking because we care.
Right.
But as the people who also stand in the absolute
grace of Jesus Christ,
our best calling is to live into that reality,
that agape, that, that, that kind of charity,
that kind of temperance,
that kind of gentleness.
You know, I think if we live into that,
then, then this will become not just a tool for where we are,
but it’ll become an invitation to become
who we’re called to be.
From the Reformed perspective,
in regards to sin,
we sometimes
confront sin.
We are called to always struggle with it internally,
but it is God who convicts.
It is God who moves in individual hearts to show them sinfulness and a better path.
Now, hopefully we’re a part of that.
I mean, that’s the idea of the church,
right?
Is that we’re a place
where people come and say,
I sense something different here that is appealing to me and and yeah,
and again, I don’t want to end up repeating myself,
but that’s where I think a
word like vice that means habit is so helpful because,
you know, getting it right one time
is good, but it’s incomplete, you know?
And when we, when we face some of those sins,
when we look internally and say,
man, that, that anger thing,
I go there a lot.
That tells me I’ve got a significant mountain to climb to get a new pattern established.
And, you know,
we have,
Michael and I have talked about one last session to this.
It won’t be a live session,
but we think we’re going to record a conversation.
Two years ago, we were about halfway
through the Enneagram discussions when COVID hit and we recorded the rest of them and those remain,
people are still watching some of those.
And we have found that as we have these conversations,
Enneagram stuff comes up.
And so I don’t know if it’ll be of interest to anybody,
but the next conversation we’re going to record just because we think it’ll be interesting for us is to sort of superimpose
the seven deadly sins on the nine Enneagram numbers.
And to,
as, as people with no
particular expertise think about if you’re this number,
which of these habits might be most familiar,
might be most accessible and might be most tempting,
which in other words,
is it possible that by personality,
we have certain weaknesses in regard to sinfulness?
And I, I think that probably makes some sense.
And so we’re going to play with that a little bit.
I don’t know if it’ll be helpful,
but we at least,
well, we’re going to do it.
If it’s not helpful, skip
it.
We want to try it.
So we’re going to.
We won’t know that you didn’t watch.
You can tell us.
Two quick things there,
because I find that really generative.
I think that the church has always,
it has always struggled to,
to marry the core calling of,
of the gospel as in by the Jesus
Christ, to be the inviter to a new way of life.
And then to recognize that there are some folks
who are deep in our fellowship,
who are trapped in a kind of destructive behavior that also
is destructive to the community in which they’re in.
And we’ve always struggled with that.
I think there’s two quick things there.
One is,
if you allow me to return to the, the scalpel metaphor,
the, the motivation matters deeply.
And I think that you see in the new Testament,
even Paul, when he calls the Corinthian church to expel a person,
he names the reason why the motivation,
he says, this is for the sake of their return.
Do this.
And, and I think there
does come moments where the church must call a thing what the church believes it is.
This is sin.
And it has to do that
prayerfully.
And it has to do that with some sense of wisdom and judgment.
And, and when it does so,
it must be as certain as we can humanly be certain that it’s motivated by the right reasoning.
But I think we as a modern Protestant church,
and once again, this is, you’re getting a lot of Michael’s
hot takes here tonight.
I think we have unfortunately flattened that to individual opinion.
Our Reformed forebears made everything some form of communal discussion,
either at the session or the presbytery,
or that they believed that it was the joint witness of the gathered body who should make these determinations.
And it’s when people like me start putting stickers,
there’s lust,
got some anger over here.
Oh, you seem like you’re having a very,
right?
When we, when I take that upon myself,
my stickering,
that is I think fundamentally where we’re now in very tenuous territory.
Because our tradition has always said,
we hedge for our individual sinfulness by trying
to get as many people to follow Christ at the same time in the same room.
And we believed in that fellowship,
we would have some discernment to call.
And that’s why we would say this is less
the case in some of our own certainly presbytery and outliving.
But, you know, that that’s why we
would say it would be the session who would make this determination about censuring a member or
right, because we invested some meaning in that in that communal conversation.
And, you know, I think the age of social media,
just to make this very practical,
how many times a day do people go on social media and say,
this person is fill in the blank,
as if that statement helps?
Like, how do you know you’re right,
number one, and number two, even if you are right,
who cares that you think that, right?
It the church,
the church kind of needs to preserve this idea that there is some authority found in the gathered
group of the body.
And, you know, we’ve lost some of that,
I think, in our discourse.
Yeah, I want to be careful.
So hear this entire sentence.
The church has generally
not had a problem with sin.
The church has had a problem with refusal to repent of sin.
The church has always assumed there’s sin in us.
The church has always assumed that that dark side
of who we are crops up,
even in the midst of gathering in the name of Jesus Christ,
where the church has had to draw lines and make decisions is when something that is sin
doesn’t get treated as or called sin.
And that’s when the church has had to do hard things.
The church has always known their sin.
So the church has never internally gotten too wrapped up with
your sinner, your sinner, your sinner.
Yeah,
we know that.
It’s when I say,
I don’t think so.
It’s when I say, I’m not sorry.
I’m not changing.
Those are the moments the church has said that
look, that’s not going to fly.
And I think that’s helpful.
At least that helps me
think through our mission in that regard.