Sloth
Matthew 25:24-25, 44-45
Frank is 32 years old, lives in his parent’s home and works part time at a restaurant. His parents pay all of his bills and provide all of his meals. Frank doesn’t have lots of friends and he doesn’t go out very much. He spends the majority of his time laying around watching movies, playing video games, or surfing the Internet. Then there is Hank. Hank manages a large business. On a light week Hank averages 12 hours a day at work. He often travels for work on business trips but no matter where he is, Hank is working. He has a little social life, gets enough sleep to get by and then goes back to work. In addition to his job, Hank is in school working on his Masters degree. There are some things Hank would like to do if he had more time but right now all he really does is work, school, and sleep. So the question is which one is a sloth?
This week we’re looking at the Deadly Sin of Sloth. Often when we think of sloth, we think of people who are lazy and aren’t doing anything with their lives. In a word, they’re lazy. When most of us picture the idea of sloth we picture someone like Frank. So what is sloth? Typically we mean two things with sloth. First, it is the failure to do the things that are necessary. It’s the failure to act on the thing you know you should be doing. You know the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” That’s the sin of sloth. It’s intending to do something and never quite getting around to doing it. It is knowing the right thing to do and never doing it. It is seeing a need and failing to act, expecting someone else to meet it. It is faith without works. It is knowing what God wants you to do but then choosing not to do it. What is fascinating is that the devil doesn’t have to get you to commit a sin like lying or cheating. All he has to do is convince you to do nothing. If he can do that, he’s gotten you out of the game of serving God and put you on the sidelines where you commit the sin of sloth.
Second, sloth is not caring. The monastics used the word acedia for sloth which means not to care. The sin of sloth is not just limited to doing nothing, it’s not caring enough to move you to action. So sloth is also a sin of the heart. It’s seeing a homeless person and not being moved by their condition. It’s seeing the pain and brokenness of others and not being affected by it. It’s believing that you can’t make a difference or that you don’t have any responsibility toward others. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Or it’s coming to the place where you say, What does it matter really? When acedia really takes root in your life you begin to think that nothing really matters and you find yourself listless, lethargic, purposeless and in the end you find life meaningless. That’s what happens when sloth takes over which can lead to despair.
So Frank or Hank, which one has a sloth problem? They both do. If sloth is not doing the things that you should do and not caring enough to change that then both were guilty of that. Now there is a time and place for doing nothing. That’s why God created the Sabbath. You see the opposite of sloth is not busyness. Some people who have a sloth problem are actually very busy like Hank. The problem isn’t that they don’t do anything, it’s that they do all sorts of things that they don’t need to do, instead of doing the very things they should be doing.
But that’s none of us right? In a world of PDA’s, cell phones, texting and being overcommitted with little margin in our lives, we have difficulty believing that sloth, or laziness, is a sin that we need to seriously deal with in our lives. We’re willing to admit to being proud, confess to gluttony, and admit to a lustful thought or two, but never laziness. Is it possible for a person who is chronically sleep deprived, and who longs for a moment to put his or her feet up and relax, to be lazy? Should sloth be a concern for those of us who are working longer hours, facing endless commutes, and struggling with diminishing leisure time? The short answer is, “Yes.” In fact, our problem is that we are too busy and some of us need a little down time in our lives. Our busyness can actually keep us from doing the things God wants us to do.
So what does sloth look like in people like you and me? In the case of relationships, we stop doing the things which are necessary to maintain a healthy relationship. It can be any kind of relationship. Take your parents for example. They have a need to be connected to you. If we don’t maintain a connection and conversation, we find that there is a distance which begins to form in the relationship. We didn’t meant to create, it just happened because we weren’t paying attention to the relationship and doing the things we need to do to nurture it. If you want to have a long-term, healthy relationship you have to invest the time, energy and effort regularly.
Or take marriage for example. Sloth is really a reall killer of marriages. It’s here where we stop doing the things we need to do to nurture the love and the marriage. When you first fell in love, you’d talk for hours on end, give gifts and surprises, romanced each other and told each other how much you loved one another. But then you got married and over time you begin to invest yourself in other things and take each other for granted and before long, you say, ‘We just grew apart.’ We tend to forget that we are God’s gift to meet the needs of our spouse. Your spouse has emotional, spiritual and physical needs that you are meant to meet for them. Your wife needs you to tell her how much you love her but not just to say it but show it with your actions. She needs your friendship and for you to be someone she can really talk to and share her feelings, fears and needs. She needs you to share the spiritual journey with her like attending worship together, reading the Bible or going to Bible study together. She needs you to encourage her when she is discouraged, overwhelmed, misunderstood, afraid or when she feels life is out of control. She needs to be romanced, like giving a special gift that comes for no reason at all just because you care. When they don’t get that over time, their heart and soul begins to shrivel and distance grows between you. On the other hand ladies, your husband needs to know you love him unconditionally and that you are proud of him. He needs to know you appreciate what he does and that you notice them. He needs physical intimacy and he needs to feel that you desire him physically. He needs your friendship because many men don’t have any really close friends. We each know that the other needs these but sloth keeps us from doing it. When you do these things, it’s like making a deposit in his/her love bank. You make those deposits because you love them and care for them. But you also know there are times when you have to make withdrawals. When we do these things for each other the relationship and the love grows, but when we stop doing it we become slothful, indifferent and ambivalent to one another and your marriage. This also happens in our jobs with our co-workers, our clients and customers. Sometimes we’re so caught up in the tyranny of the urgent that we fail to do the things we’re supposed to do. As one 28 year old woman put it: “sloth begins as an excuse, continues as a habit and ends as a cage.”
Sloth can also happen when we neglect the least, the last and the lost. God created us to receive His love, reciprocate his love, share his love and do His work in this world. The reason we have wars, bigotry, violence, children starving from hunger and any other number of social ills is because of sloth. God put us on this planet and he’s asked us to take of it and each other. These things don’t happen because God doesn’t care. They happen because we don’t care enough to act. All of these problems could be solved if we cared enough to get up and act to solve them. In fact, it’s our responsibility to do these things. God tells us this over and over again. Proverbs 31: 8-9, “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” And: “Is this not the righteousness I am looking for, that you care for the poor and those in need.” James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” When Jesus spoke of the judgment and the end times in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, he said they would be separated and the one criteria that would be used was, “‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’” The sin that was committed was one of sloth because they answered, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Matt. 25:41-46
Part of the challenge for us is that we live lives which are so overcommitted and busy that we often fail to see the needs of the hungry, homeless, the uninsured and lonely all around us. And yet seeing those needs and acting on them is what makes us human and it’s what makes us faithful and obedient to God. Sloth is continuing to live our lives without ever really seeing the needs of others around us, because we’ve got enough going on in our own lives, right? And then it’s never ever getting around to doing anything about the needs and societal ills all around us because it’s somebody else’s responsibility, right? The Scriptures call us to stand up for the people who can’t speak for themselves and be engaged in the problems of our world. Wendy Wassetstein writes, When you achieve true slothdom, you have no desire for the world to change. True slothes are not revolutionaries but the lazy guardians of the gate of the status quo.” Jesus told us to pray like this: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re not just to pray those words but to work so that our world looks more like the kingdom of God when we’re finished than when we’re started. We’re responsible.
But sloth is also spiritual. Many of us have become slothful in our relationship to God. You see, just coming to worship is not enough. You’ve got to be nurturing that relationship every day and begin to see not just Sunday morning as your worship but every moment, every thought and every act as your worship of God. You’ve got to have regular conversations with God through prayer and to be sure that you’re listening for what God has to say. You’ve got to be deepening your knowledge and understanding of God through both personal Bible study and a weekly small group Bible study with other brothers and sisters in Christ. You’ve got to experience God working through you as you use your spiritual gifts to serve others in Christ’s name. It’s about giving sacrificially to God so that you have to reorder the priorities of your life to fit God’s heart. And it’s about sharing your relationship with Jesus with others and letting them know the blessings of that personal relationship available to them. And yet too often in spite of great Christian friends, inspiring worship, wonderful Bible studies and a mission that excites and reflects the building of heaven here on earth, we can drift away from the church and God. And we begin to wonder whether God notices I’m there anyway. And over time we begin to wonder why we went in the first place. And then one day you find yourself saying, I wonder if there really is a god? I felt close to him but I don’t really feel close to him now.
Which was what happened at the church of Ephesus. Ephesus was the leading church in the second half of the first century. Paul went there and spent more time there than anywhere else, 2 years and 3 months. After Paul’s death, the apostle John came and settled in Ephesus and he pastored and shepherded that congregation and he brought with him the mother of Jesus. John was then exiled to the island of Patmos. But just a few months after that, the congregation began to lose its spiritual vitality. They stopped doing the things they had done before. And they received this letter from John: “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” They had lost their first love for God because they had stopped doing the things they had first done to have a vibrant relationship with God. Three things they were supposed to do. First, remember what it was like before. It’s important when all of the stresses and the distance that may form in a relationship to remember what it was once like and all of the hopes and dream you had then. Remember those times when you felt His presence in your life and it lit your heart on fire. Can you remember when your faith was alive and you were on fire for God? Remember!
Second, repent and recognize where you got off track. To repent of your relationship with someone else means to say, I have neglected you and I am really sorry about that and then make the commitment to reinvest yourself in that person. Maybe we need to repent of our relationship with God and commit to take that next step in re-establishing and growing that relationship. Third, he says to do the things you did at first. Go back and do the things you did with your spouse or your parents or with God and do them again. Too often we only do what we feel like rather than realizing the feelings really come from what we do. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, went through a period where he severely doubted whether he was a Christian. John Wesley began to preach less and less every day because he didn’t know if he was a Christian. He shared his feelings with his close friend from college George Whitfield, who was the Billy Graham of his day. In fact, it was George Whitfield who encouraged Wesley to become an evangelist. And George said, “John, you’ve got to preach until as if you have faith and then you will have the faith to preach.” In other words, go back to do the things you once did and the relationship will be restored.
In the end, overcoming sloth is a just a matter of just doing it. There’s no magic pill. You make yourself do what you know you need to do, even if you don’t feel like it. Because when you go and serve someone else, how do you feel about it? Great, don’t you? You felt the lethargy but then you go and do it and then you feel great about doing it. What does a sloth look like? This is a three toed picture of a sloth. Sloths can spend their entire life in a single tree. Sloths often sleep fifteen or more hours a day. Sloths often ignore the mold and algae that grow in its fur. Sloths often devote what energy they expend to obtaining food. When food is not within its grasps, the sloth starves to death Most species of sloth are now extinct. Is there any wonder? I would rather you not look or live like this, spiritually or relationally. So if you been living like a sloth, it’s time to remember your first love, repent and do the things you first did.
