A Holey Lifestyle
Seven Sins and Solutions
Preached by Chris McCarthy at Northampton Church of Christ (nhcoc.com) on 1.2.11
*** Note to Sermon Centrists: I drew a lot of content for this sermon series from “Seven” by Jeff Cook. Read it for good measure.
Isaiah 6:1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” 4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
• Then, in the intensity of the moment, Isaiah realized he was standing in a powerful light
Reminds me of a scene in CS Lewis’s Great Divorce (explain bus trip from hell to the foothills of heaven)
Hours later there came a change. It began to grow light in the bus. The grayness outside the windows turned from mud-color to mother of pearl, then to faintest blue, then to a bright blueness that stung the eyes. We seemed to be floating in a pure vacancy. There were no lands, no sun, no stars in sight: only the radiant abyss. I glanced round the bus. Though the windows were closed, and soon muffed, the bus was full of light. It was cruel light. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded. One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then-there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus-I caught sight of my own. And still the light grew.
Here’s how Isa. Responded…
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
Contrast this with how Isaiah describes God’s presence later in his book…
Isaiah 60:1-2 (MSG) Wake up. Put your face in the sunlight. God's bright glory has risen for you. The whole earth is wrapped in darkness, all people sunk in deep darkness, But God rises on you, his sunrise glory breaks over you. Nations will come to your light, kings to your sunburst brightness. Look up! Look around! Watch as they gather, watch as they approach you: Your sons coming from great distances, your daughters carried by their nannies. When you see them coming you'll smile—big smiles! Your heart will swell and, yes, burst!
Isn’t it interesting how light can fill us with terror like we talked about in Isaiah 6, and then the next moment we find that same light can comfort us like we talked about in Isaiah 60? I guess the difference is in how comfortable we are in the dark.
Another way to think of this struggle between comfort and concern in God’s presence it by considering our holeyness. (holiness or holeyness? Slide)
BUCKET WITH HOLES and Water (not obvious in beginning until water is poured in)
It feels as though I was once made strong and whole, but something has gone to work on me, hollowing out my insides. It is cliché to say, “I feel empty,” when I have done something wrong, but often that is the effect of my failures.
• It feels as though something is at war with me — within me — that is determined to make my life miserable and it keeps popping holes in soul.
The Bible has a name for this force in us and in our world that is clawing away at what was once solid. It calls the force “sin” and suggests that when early humanity first chose death over life, sin — this active absence — was unleashed and began eroding all that was once good.
• Sin is first and foremost a corrosive power. Augustine wrote that sin “tends to make that which is cease to be.”
• It is a parasitic force, and like all parasites, sin does not exist on its own. It thrives off a host. The unconscious goal of sin is to cut pieces out of the fabric of reality and call the incisions “real life.”
From the earliest days of Christianity, lists were written naming the manifestations of this power. These lists were not assembled for curiosity’s sake. The writers were doing the work of physicians —diagnosing the disease that is killing us. And around the sixth century, one of the lists came to be viewed as definitive. Seven cancers were identified and exposed as the power of sin at work in us, mangling our desires and pointing us toward poisonous delights:
• pride — the natural love for myself magnified and perverted into disdain for others;
• envy — the rejection of the good life God has given me for an obsession with what God gives to someone else;
• sloth — the indifference toward my neighbor, my soul, my world, or my God;
• greed — the desire to possess more than I need because of fear or idolatry;
• lust — the handing of control over my body and mind to illicit cravings;
• wrath — the love for justice perverted into bitterness, revenge, and violence;
• gluttony — the excessive consumption that deprives another human being of a life-giving necessity.
These are seven of the most powerful expressions of sin at work in our world. These are the seven ways we assault ourselves, those around us, and the world as a whole. These are the seven deadly sins.
• There are a lot of bad ideas about the seven deadly sins, but despite the fog, the name is still spot-on. These seven sins are deadly, and if they gain a significant hold in our hearts, they will burrow and burrow and burrow until all that was once beautiful in us is torn away
Above all, the deadly sins are a summons into a dead life, a dysfunctional life. And if you are like me, you have received and embraced their invitation countless times. Yet, there’s always the letdown. (describe fun events to let.)
• But what you and I really want is something more than the temporary. We want something that doesn’t have a let down.
Jesus is pretty clear about the fact that this Christian life is moving toward a bigger end, not a let down. His most explicit statement about this came in the story often called “the parable of the sower”
Mark 4:3 “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”
9 Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”
• This was the first parable Jesus told, and maybe it is the most important.
One clue of this is that ffter telling this parable, Jesus said,
Mark 4:13 “If you can’t understand the meaning of this parable, how will you understand all the other parables?”
• Jesus never again said anything like this.
I think he was giving an invitation to his followers to pull the story apart and look closer. So let’s consider the symbols here.
First, what is going on with this farmer, and why is he so reckless with his seed?
• Jesus seems to be telling a story in which the farmer is deliberately wasteful, scattering seed everywhere, even on the path beneath his own feet. Why would the farmer spread seed everywhere? This doesn’t seem to be a good gardening practice. Rather, it seems as though the farmer is being intentionally gracious to even the worst kind of soil.
Next, consider the location. Where is this farmer throwing his seeds? This is probably happening in a field or garden — a place where you grow stuff — and this is a significant clue.
• Anytime Jesus mentions a “garden,” he is directing our attention back to Eden — and Eden is about how things ought to be. But notice, in this garden there are weeds, thorns, soil wearing Kevlar, and nasty, seed-eating birds. This garden has gone downhill. Anti-seed, anti-crop forces have infiltrated the farmer’s field and are eager to stop anything from growing there.
• Some may even suggest that if the farmer in the story was good, wise, and powerful, he would simply kill the birds, destroy the weeds, and tear out the rocky soil — right? Isn’t that the obvious course of action?
• Possibly, but it seems this farmer knows something we don’t. He knows the quality of the seed in his pockets
This seemingly wasteful farmer, Jesus said, received back “a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.” This by all accounts would have filled the entire garden with the crop, pushing it to capacity.
• The picture Jesus painted for his audience — the picture that should color everything we think about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection — is the fruit filling every emptiness in a world that was made to be Eden but is barren and lifeless.
Jesus revisited this image in many of his other stories.
• In the parable of the tenants, a landowner plants a vineyard in order to bear fruit, but the tenants produce nothing for him. So the landowner takes the vineyard and gives it to others, because the fruit — not the tenant — is what matters.
• In a story called the parable of the workers in the vineyard, a landowner hires laborers all day long — even until the last hour — and pays everyone a full day’s wage to come and bear fruit in his garden. The landowner is reckless with his cash, because he thinks the fruit — not the wage — is what matters.
• In another parable, a tree has been growing without fruit in a man’s field for three years, and the owner decides to give it one more year to yield a harvest, but after that he will cut it down. It may have been a lovely tree, but the man calls it worthless cause the fruit not the tree is what matters
It’s the seed, not the bucket.
The question we’re left with then is this… how can God use those holes that sin has left in you for ultimately his good? He’s that kind of farmer.
• This farmer is doing his work today, not some distant future…
• This parable of the seeds is an announcement of a worldwide revolution in which evil, sin, and death are not purged but totally overrun, as though they were merely empty space needing to be filled again.
• For Jesus, heaven is not something we wait for. Heaven is something to be embraced and spread now. Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
That hole in your bulletin is what sin’s done to you.
• It’s like your life is a bucket with holes in it. What can you do with a bucket full of holes? It can’t hold anything. That’s the point I think.
These scars you have, these holes in your bucket are what God can use to recklessly spread seed, pour out, and shine out your life.
This week, take your holey bulletin and do something holy with it.
• send it to someone with an explanation
• draw a picture of what God needs to fix
• talk to god about the hole in prayer
• write a beatitude under it that you will be working on each day… (What are the beatitudes? You ask. Glad you asked)
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus delivered it from a mountainside. We call the content of this teaching “the Sermon on the Mount,” and for the first year of his public life, this was how Jesus introduced himself and invited his audience to choose the life of heaven.
Through this sermon, Jesus told his audience how God saw things, what God was doing, and what God cared about most. It was much different from what anyone expected.
We often read passages from the Sermon on the Mount — passages about not lusting or not hating others, about going the extra mile, loving our enemies, not judging another, turning the other cheek, bearing fruit with our lives — as good advice or good rules to follow. But that is not what is going on here. Throughout this sermon, Jesus described a new way to be human. The sermon began with what ancient writers have called “the Beatitudes.” The Beatitudes are eight snapshots of eight different lives that Jesus said experience God’s favor. The Beatitudes introduced all that Jesus wanted to say about a new kind of life.
The Beatitudes were, above all else, Jesus’ invitation to see the world as God does — and to love it. As a whole, the Beatitudes are a picture of the voids created by sin being filled in with the life of heaven. They are eight pictures of resurrection.
I’ll just read them this week and we’ll dig into them next week…
Matthew 5:1 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them. He said: 3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5 Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 7 Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. 8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 9 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
These beatitudes are cheers from the farmer to those who work the soil in his garden. They are encouragement to those who feel as though their life is a constant battle with no apparent victories. They are a message of hope to those who anticipate a day when the holes in our world are finally filled with something better and everything is made new.
The Beatitudes and the deadly sins are two sets of invitations. Looking at them in turn, we see two paths available to us. Both call to deep places within us to come and taste. Both present themselves as life as it actually is. Both invite us to take up residence. But only one will make us happy, for one is life, full and awake; the other is the absence, the nothingness.
I pray you chose the former.
