March 17, 2024 - Pastor Message
04/27/2024SIN AND REPENTANCE (cont.)
“The serpent said to the woman, ‘Truly, did God order you not to eat of any tree in paradise?’ The woman responded, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise; but the fruit of the tree in the middle of paradise God ordered us not to eat or touch it, lest we die.’ The serpent, however, said to the woman, ‘By no means will you die! God knows that on whatever day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ Then the woman saw that the tree would be good for eating, beautiful to the eyes and desirable for understanding, and she took of the fruit and ate it and gave it also to her man with her, and he ate it” (Genesis 3:1-6).
Continuing our Lenten reflection on sin and repentance, we begin our look this week at the seven Deadly or Capital Sins. They are deadly because they cut us off from the life of God's saving grace, and they are capital, from the Latin word, ‘caput’, meaning ‘head’, because they form the head from which the impulse for every other sin flows. While many different lists of such sins have been proposed over the centuries, the commonly accepted list of the seven Deadly Sins today is: pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, sloth, and gluttony. Reflecting on these general sins can increase our understanding of our particular sins and so help us take the steps we need to root them out of our lives.
The first and mother of all the Deadly Sins is Pride. The sin of pride doesn’t mean the rightful joy we feel from a well-earned accomplishment, such as the pride parents feel when their child graduates from high school. Sinful pride refers to hubris, from ancient Greek, meaning the defiant assertion of oneself over and against others, especially the gods. Tragic figures in Greek mythology, like Prometheus, often acted with hubris, to their doom (Prometheus was condemned to eternal torment by Zeus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to human beings). The creation story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis tells the Christian tale of humanity’s hubris. “You will be like God,” the serpent falsely promises Eve, and she and Adam all too readily believe him and eat the fruit of knowledge that God, their all-wise and loving creator, had forbidden them to know, to their doom and that of the entire human race. This original sin gives birth to all other sins because all sins are, in their own way, acts of defiance against God by which we place ourselves above him, rejecting his law and making ourselves the judges of good and evil.
Avarice is the sin of greed, excessively acquiring wealth and worldly possessions. Possessing things is not, in itself, sinful. We have a right as human beings to the good things of creation for our good and the good of others. That is the key, though - for GOOD. Avarice seeks to acquire wealth and possessions, not as a means to do good according to God’s will, but as ends in themselves, even to the harm of ourselves and others: “For those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a trap and many stupid and harmful desires that sink men into total destruction. For the root of all evils is greed, according to which some have erred from the faith and brought on themselves many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:9-10). Those who commit avarice reject God by making the accumulation of worldly things their god.
Envy is the sin of jealousy, the grief and hatred I direct toward others’ well-being when I perceive falsely that it in some way harms or threatens my own. Envy is not to be confused with the certain sadness we feel when someone else obtains or achieves something good that we ourselves desire, such as the sorrow athletes feel when they have been fairly beaten for a championship. This kind of sorrow focuses on the good we desire, which can provide extra motivation to work even harder to achieve that worthy goal in the future. Envy twists this sorrow in on ourselves, grieving, not that we have yet to obtain some good, but that our sinful pride has been wounded by someone else’s goodness, as we see in the second sin ever committed in the Bible when God accepts Abel’s offering but rejects his brother Cain’s: “Cain was vehemently angry, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said to him, ‘Why are you angry? And why did your face fall? If you do well, will you not lift your face? But if you do badly, sin will lie in ambush at the door, and its appetite will be for you, but you may dominate it.’ Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go outside.’ When they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him” (Genesis 4:5-8). When we commit the sin of envy, like Cain, we respond with hatred and ill will toward the good of others and seek to bring them down in some way to elevate ourselves.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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