Sloth (30-Oct-05)

October 30, 2005

7 Deadly Sins M6 Sloth (reluctance, laziness)

(The sermon can be heard on line at:
http://www.tenth.ca/audio.htm )

In Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener, Bartleby is hired as a copyist of legal papers for a firm on Wall Street.

At first he stands out by his hard work. He does an extraordinary amount of copying, day and night.

Then just a few days into his job Bartleby is asked to do some simple work checking a document and he replies with the words, “I would prefer not to.”

In fact, in response to every request he now answers, mildly but firmly with 5 words, “I would prefer not to.”

His boss is both baffled and furious. Has Bartley gotten another job? Is he mentally ill? Is this some of kind political protest?

Or as Os Gusiness later speculates in his book The Call could it be sloth?

Sloth has been described in times past as the “noonday demon.” As a kind of apathy that sets in during middle age, like the sluggishness many of us feel right after lunch.

But in our day it seems like sloth sets in earlier than middle age.

Peter Senge author of the Fifth Discipline (quoting Bill O’brien, CEO Hanover of Insurance) says that young people in their 20’s begin their career with zest and fire but by the time they are in their 30’s most have lost their passion.

TIME earlier this year ran an article on the Twixsters, i.e., people who are in their mid to late 20s. In that piece the authors argue that these 20 years something year olds won’t or can’t settle down: they take longer than previous generations to finish school, longer to commit to a career and longer to commit to a partner in marriage.

There are many different social factors that may contribute to a lack of passion in a person’s life; one significant factor is sloth.

Sloth is listed to many people’s surprise as a deadly sin.

What is sloth?

Sloth is not the gift to be able to relax alone or in the company of friends.

Being able to relax is a virtue not vice.

W.H. Davies has said, “What is life full of care, if we have no time to stand and stare.”

Peter Kreeft points out that the person who never relaxes in not a saint but a fidget.

Sloth is more than just couch potato laziness, but a sluggishness of spirit…that causes a person to shrink back causes a person or people, to shrink from some difficult task.

We see this sluggish of spirit in people of God in Deuteronomy 1 as they cower from God’s call to enter the promised land of Canaan:

If you have your Bibles, please turn to Deuteronomy 1.

Spies Sent Out
19 Then, as the LORD our God commanded us, we set out from Horeb and went toward the hill country of the Amorites through all that vast and dreadful desert that you have seen, and so we reached Kadesh Barnea. 20 Then I said to you, "You have reached the hill country of the Amorites, which the LORD our God is giving us. 21 See, the LORD your God has given you the land. Go up and take possession of it as the LORD, the God of your fathers, told you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged."
22 Then all of you came to me and said, "Let us send men ahead to spy out the land for us and bring back a report about the route we are to take and the towns we will come to."
23 The idea seemed good to me; so I selected twelve of you, one man from each tribe. 24 They left and went up into the hill country, and came to the Valley of Eshcol and explored it. 25 Taking with them some of the fruit of the land, they brought it down to us and reported, "It is a good land that the LORD our God is giving us."
Rebellion Against the LORD
26 But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. 27 You grumbled in your tents and said, "The LORD hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. 28 Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart. They say, 'The people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.' "
29 Then I said to you, "Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. 30 The LORD your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, 31 and in the desert. There you saw how the LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place."
32 In spite of this, you did not trust in the LORD your God, 33 who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.
34 When the LORD heard what you said, he was angry and solemnly swore: 35 "Not a person of this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your forefathers, 36 except Caleb son of Jephunneh. He will see it, and I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the LORD wholeheartedly."
The Israelites, in this passage shrink back from God’s call upon them to take the promised land of Canaan. They fail to trust the God who has carried them in the past and step up and take the land God has for them.

We tend to see sin as something we do: lying, stealing, adultery, murder are things people do… those are obvious sins a person commits, but sin Biblically speaking can also be defined by what a person does NOT do… there are sins of commission and sins of omission…

When God calls us to do something and we don’t respond because of sloth or fear or whatever… we committing a sin of omission.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. defines sin as the vandalism of shalom (the vandalism of wholeness, peace, well being). Part of the reason sloth is deadly sin is because it leads us to not do what God calls us to and that in turns causes the vandalize the shalom in our lives and the lives of others.

This week I was with a member of our community, who’s earned an Ivy league degree and has an MBA from Cambridge, and has worked in some demanding marketplace jobs…

I said you seem like a very hardworking person, how would you advise someone who was struggling with sloth?

He said if you’re lazy whether in your job or at school, it’s going to hurt you…

If you work hard, you’ll do well at school or your job…

He, I know if you’re gifted you can achieve more with less effort, but I tend to agree with the statement (by Thomas Edison) that success is typically 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.

All of God’s principles are organic. If we honor God’s teaching concerning sloth, we will tend to flourish, in school, in our work, and in our relationships.

The widely read, Harvard trained psychiatrist M Scott Peck, argues that laziness is a primary reason people fail in their relationships.

Peck, in his book the Road Less Traveled says since love is work, the essence of non-love is laziness.

Many couples who are going through difficulties in their relationship are hoping for a flash of insight from a brilliant counselor that will open the hidden door to relationship bliss.

I totally affirm the important role of gifted counselors can play in our lives.

But for many people who are struggling in a relationship, the key may simply putting effort into the relationship.

If the “feelings” of love have gone out of relationship you sense you are being called to stay in by God, why not think about what you might do if you were “in love” and do 2 or 3 of those things a day for that person.

I know in my relationships with family and my close friends have been helped or hindered by simple effort.

I know people who I am relationship with who have said, “I appreciate your making the effort to__________.”

On the hand, I recall relationship have been strained and someone saying, “That was important to me, I wish you had made the effort to ___________.”

Sloth will affect our work lives, our relationships with people, and our relationship with God…

There are many different angles we could use here, let me take one here.

There are people, who from reflect on occasion on their death on and judgment day… they look back over their lives and they feel sheepish about the time when too far sexually someone particular person… or went to a party and got really wasted and ended up puking or maybe didn’t act total integrity in some kind of financial matter…

Now I am not saying those things are not unimportant, but I tend to agree a pastor named James Emory White that I trained with. It’s his hunch that on judgment when we stand before God and give our account for our lives the biggest deal won’t be some indiscretion we made in our youth, but I think that like the Israelites on the border of Canaan, God may be more concerned about the thing we didn’t try… that we lived to live while were alive…

So, how do we overcome sloth?

One of the ways we can overcome sloth is by living in the awareness that God is and that God has a call on our lives.

Do remember in the Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall?

Near the beginning of the movie a mother says to the doctor, “My son Alvy is depressed. All off a sudden, he won’t do anything.” The doctor asks, “Are you depressed?” No answer. His mother says to the doctor, “It's something he read. Alvy says, The universe is expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!” Mother’s says to doctor, “He stopped doing his homework”. Alvy says, “What's the point?”

If we believe as scientists have pointed the earth will one day not be able to support life on earth and if we don’t believe is a God and an after all we might well ask with Alvy, “What’s the point of doing anything?”

But if we believe there is a God and we will exist on eternity and that God has a call upon our lives which will affect how we experience eternity that changes everything.

As a boy and teenager… I believed there was a God, but I lived as if there was no God.

I never studied. I worked for the Vancouver Sun as a paper boy and then as a paper shack manager. One day as a shack manager I had to do a kid’s paper route because he was sick. Tt was raining really hard. I remember riding my bike with the kid’s copies of the Sun looking for a big ditch… I found one and tossed them all in the ditch!

Later as a teen I gave my life to Christ, I started studying harder… I began working quite hard at my job stocking shelves at a drug store, at the cafeteria in college, then later for a multinational corporation Tokyo, as a journalist in Southern Cal, now as a minister…

In every job paid or volunteer, so called secular or sacred, I do it with God and for and so I can do I can do it passion….

Knowing God and working as unto God make us work hard at whatever we put our hand to…

If know our particular work is done before God we can work with passion. If we know that the whole life is live before God we can live with passion. To use Jonathan Edward’s we can truly live while we live.

One best ways we can learn to live our before God is by living by a “rule of life.”

The last thing many of us here would want to be is a monk in monastery, but there are elements of beauty in monastic way of life. Several years Sakiko and I spent some at the Iona a monastery in Scotland. For just over a week we lived under a very structured rule of life. We had set times for worship God, set times to do manual labor, set times to involved in study, set times for recreation, we lived our lives under a rule.

Though, I’m obviously not living in monastery, I am seeking (not very successfully) to live by rule of life, to have certain patterns of sleep and eating, to have set times for focused attention on God, set rhythmus work and recreation, set times to be at home and set to be out with people.

For some of us here, crafting a rule would do 2 things: it keeps us active in a good way, but would keep us from being overactive.

If you’re person that who doesn’t naturally read reach, setting some time in in the week for study and reflection will help you grow. Say you’re time of person who loves to exercise and you could easily work out seven days a week for long periods of time, a rule of life might help you to limit your exercise in light of your priorities.

Eugene Peterson, says busy people are too lazy to take control of things.

A rule of life is not a law, but a guide. As Basil Pennington put it not so much a thing to be lived, as some to be lived out of.

If we asked we really want to do? What is it really want to be? A rule can help us create so that can happen.

3rd a way we can overcome sloth is that we can expose ourselves to need and ask for Spirit of God to shape us…

Leighton Ford is older minister and mentor of mine.

Leighton will often ask young people… what is your vision? Often they say, “uh, I don’t have a vision.” Then, he’ll say, if you had a vision, what would it be?

Vision doesn’t typically take place in when our lives hermetically sealed off to needs.

I remember my when my cousin who’s my age took his first business trip to NYC in his early twenties. We were both working in Tokyo. I remember telling him to get out into the streets to see Times Square, the Empire State building, to ride the subway. But his dad who lives in Hawaii told him that NYC was a very dangerous place if he wasn’t working, he would better off staying in his hotel room. When he got back to Tokyo, I said did you get into the streets of Manhattan? He said, “I, uh, ended up staying stayed in my room.”

Staying in your hotel room is not a way to develop a vision for NY or any other city.

Jane Adams models the way to gain a vision for the city. Jane Adams was a young woman from wealthy family in Illinois who wanted to serve God in Chicago. In the late 1800’s she bought a house in one of the poorest sections of Chicago, inhabited mainly by Italians, Greeks and Polish people. On her first night in the house in this poor and dangerous section of Chicago, she was trying to fall asleep in her bedroom on the second floor. She was so uptight she couldn’t sleep. Then as she was lying there in her room, she heard someone opening up her bedroom window from the outside and someone walked into her bedroom. She was so afraid she pretended to be asleep. She could hear the man going through he drawers and stuffing her clothes and valuables into a bag. Then the man walked to the window he came in from. Jane turned on the lamp and she said, uh, you might want to take the stairs—you might get hurt trying to climb down from the window… and the man sat on the edge of her bed and began weeping… He said, I don’t want to do this, but I have a family I need to feed and I don’t have any work…. Out of the experience, Jane Adams set up a company that would employ the poorest people in Chicago…

Yesterday at the men’s breakfast, I sat beside, Matthew a UBC student who attends Tenth and I asked what he wanted to do when he finished school. He said, I want to get involved in international public health. How did you come to want to do that? He said, “When I was 13 years old, my parents were doing a medical mission in China. I remember seeing poor kids with bloated bellies and I asked my dad, “If these kids are so poor, why are they so fat? My dad explained they weren’t getting enough protein. I remember seeing whole in the back of their pants because they had diarrhea, but had no toilets.”

Those images stayed with me. I want to do something.

Frederick Buechner says The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Exposing yourself to a need and praying that God’s Spirit would shape you will enable you to become a person of vision and passion.
There’s a pastor I know who serves in Los Angeles. One September 11, 2001, all day long like he kept seeing on TV that same scenario of planes crashing into the twin towers.
His wife Kim, said "Erwin, you've got to talk our kids (Aaron and Mariah)." Aaron was 13; Mariah was 9. And I remember sitting down with our kids.
Erwin said, he wanted to tell them, "We're on the other side of the country. It's really, really far away. If you'll just walk with Christ, you don't have anything to worry about."
But he though I have to tell them the truth. And so he told his children that morning we have no control over when we die or even how we die, but what we have control over is how we live.
If we believe God has a call our lives, if learn from a rule that honors God and our design, and if exposing to needs of world, we can become king who really live while as long as we are alive.