August 30, 2009 Sermon

Cardinal Sins and Not so Big Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Lawrence Jackman

There is a memorable exchange between Anne Sullivan (The Miracle Worker) and her boss (Helen Keller’s dad, Captain Keller). Anne is about to be sent along and is asking for another week or so with Helen to accomplish the next task:

Captain Keller: What would another week accomplish? We are more than satisfied. You taught her things to do, how to behave. She's more manageable, cleaner. Annie Sullivan: Cleaner? Captain Keller: Well, we say cleanliness is next to godliness. Annie Sullivan: Cleanliness is next to nothing!

Jesus and his followers were verbally confronted by the scribes and Pharisees. At issue, and it was a critical issue, was the question of cleanliness. The disciples casually ate without washing. They were not washing hands, food from the field, and food from the market. They were just willing to eat.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, practiced a heavy ritual of washing and cleansing. They ceremonially washed hands, food products, and utensils. (Now I need to tell you that either washing or not washing had much to do with sanitation. The water wasn’t clean, the methods were not sanitary and there wasn’t any soap.) It was about being ritually clean.

So the Pharisees come with the complaint about not washing. “Look Jesus”, they say, “Don’t you get it? Cleanliness is right up there with Godliness”. And Jesus replies back to them, “Cleanliness is right up there with nothing.” “It is what is inside of a human that makes that person either clean or not—it is not the outside stuff or the surface. It is what is deep down inside.”

The Christians of the early centuries began to attempt to categorize what Jesus had to say here about what was inside and could “defile” humanity. They came up with a differentiation of two types of sin. One was the garden variety and the other was this internal list that Jesus spoke of—the Cardinal sins/ deadly sins/ mortal sins call them what you will. The Scholastics of the middle ages crystallized thinking about all this. They identified Pride, Envy, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Greed and Laziness as the 7 sins that kill. Now I don’t know where or why we got away from that concept, but it pretty well got lost in the Protestant movement. We got to the point where we focused much more on the surface sins and lost track of the core lesson that Jesus was teaching. “It is what is inside that really matters”.

Now you’ all know that I generally believe that Sin is an overworked term and almost a pointless one in the way Christians talk and think. I am not sure, at all, that it is meaningful. One proof of that I might offer is the fact that we work this into the worship service every week. We say a group prayer of confession and then we dedicate time for us to think about our personal and private needs for forgiveness. I counted the seconds today and we dedicated ……14 seconds to the private prayer time. Now, if we really believed this stuff wouldn’t we need to dedicate more than that?

We talk about this stuff and think about it so much because, if we didn’t spend our time and spiritual energy here, we might be forced to spend it where it would matter.

And we fend off core reality of Jesus’ lesson. You know the mechanism. It is the same one that assures me that my child is assertive while someone else’s kid is a bully. The one that makes us believe that we take care with our physical presentation and another person is vain. It is the mechanism that makes a welfare recipient greedy and someone of my middle class background a person of shrewd business acumen.

We invest energy in the 10 Commandments and even convince ourselves that this is the best expression of obedience to God and also of failure to obey. Fact is, the Commandments are, at least 9 out of 10 times, external. They are not about the really big issue of what is inside. They describe external behaviors. They are terribly important not because they describe morality, but rather because they describe a social code. If they are broken you also break community. The violation of this code assures a ripping apart of the very core fabric or a society. But none of that is about morality or of having a soul that is fit for an intimate relationship with God.

In short, we worry about the exhaust of a dirty engine and ignore the issues inside of the engine itself.

These issues (the ones traditionally called the deadly sins) are deadly for a single reason. They are building blocks in a wall that prevents our souls from being accessible to other souls; including the Ultimate Soul. How that works is incredibly simple. Everyone can understand the mechanism.

Let’s take pride. Jesus names it not as sin, but rather as an “evil”. Further, the word for evil is more like error than it is anything else. Dirty or unsanitary comes to mind as a way to get to the precise meaning. So, back to pride. If I have it I want the world and even God (if I think I can get away with it) to think very well of me. I want that so badly that I will create an image that is better than I am. I will show only my best side and I will polish and varnish that best side till it is just perfect. Then, my sisters and brothers in this life (and maybe even God) will love me.

Of course the problem is pretty clear. They didn’t love me. They loved the painting of myself that I showed to them. That even exacerbates the underlying belief in me that I am indeed not lovable or worthy or cherished. I dig for my own salvation an even deeper hole from which escape seems impossible.

So here is what confession is really all about. It is about taking away, even if only for a moment, the blocks we use to build our walls. If I can but remove pride from my own insides, then someone on the outside can get a better glimpse of the real me. If I am loved at that point, it is the real me that finds comfort in that love. If, at that point, I am a mess that only God can love then at least I will be able to claim God’s love. And it will be me making that claim, not an image I present.

Billy Joel sang about the person behind the wall of evils we call the cardinal sins. That person was “The Stranger”. The contention being that deep inside we are actually fascinated by and in love with the stranger within. Billy provoked us with this lyric line:

You may never understandHow the stranger is inspiredBut he isn't always evilAnd he is not always wrongThough you drown in good intentionsYou will never quench the fireYou'll give in to your desireWhen the stranger comes along.

The deadly sins (if they are sins) are deadly for precisely this reason. They keep the stranger inside and the stranger is my soul. I don’t want that to be locked away or out of view or in a closet. I want it to be right there on the table for you and for God and for anyone else in this world to see.

All I have to do is have courage and remove the blocks. Helen Keller in some sense is a powerful metaphor along with being heroine. For we too are isolated by blindness, by the inability to hear. Just like for Helen the deficits are acquired and not essential reality.

So if we remove the blocks—the stuff from within that defiles—we can claim life, but not until we do that removal.

One last word from Anne Sullivan. When she got through the blocks of blindness and muteness she made this promise to Helen: “there is one more word I need to teach you—EVERYTHING.”

That is the promise beyond the wall for each of us, EVERYTHING. Drop the pretense and claim the prize for the prize is everything.