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SIN AND THE HUMAN CONDITION JOHN ". BUCHANAN

-SLOTH- BETHANY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
EXODUS 4:10-20 SEPTEMBER 24, 1972
EPHESIANS 4:25 - 5:2

Poor Moses. I can emphathize with him: things had been going rather well for a
change. He had killed one of Pharoh's men and barely escaped from Egypt with his life.
But now he was quite content, living with his wife in Midian, tending the flocks of
Jethro, his father-in-law. But then he had that disturbing experience with a burning
bush, and now God was ordering him to go back into Egypt - where he was wanted for
murder - and there organize the people of Israel for an escape. Moses didn't want to be
a revolutionary: he had had a taste of trouble and compared to that had now found the
life of a sheep -herder much more to his liking. He didn't want to be anything more than
he was; and in the 4th chapter of Exodus we find him back-pedalling as fast as he could,
trying desparately te squirm out from under the heavy weight of responsibility that was
beckoning him, "Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person”, he said: and the only
help he got was Aaron, who would do the talking. Moses was pushed by God into becoming
something more than he was - someone bigger that he ever thought he could be. Moses, the
decile sheep herder, dragging his feat all the way, became Moses the liparator, the
George Washington of Israel,

This iS a sermon on sin ~ a different definition of sin. Moses - who was content
with the status quo - is my first illustration. But before we proceed, allow me briefly
te review the understandings of our topic which we established last week.

We established, first that sin is mot a very popular pulpit topic for two reasons:
one, experience has taught us that most pulpit attacks on sin are irrelevant; two, we
don't like to be called sinners, and in fact, don't often feel like sinners. |

We established, second, that evil is a reality in the world; that most of it derives
from man's inability to live in brotherhood with his fellowman; and that it won't go
away regardless of our attempts to look at the world through rose tinted spectacles.

We thought about sin in classical Biblical terms: i.e. the pride of Adam and Eve
which motivated then to break the garden rules. We saw how pride motivates us to play
the game of "Mine is better than yours" on the inter-personal Jevel: and how it gets

amplified into racism and militant nationalism on a corporate Tevel.

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Our sin, we concluded, is in wanting to be more than we were created to be; our
craving for power; our incessant demand to be the center of our own little world. This
morning I would like to suggest that the classical definition of sin as pride is just
nalf the story; that there is another, and equally important way of understanding the
fall of man and the human condition,

For Adam and Eve essentially soldout, abdicated from their responsibilities,
reneged on their exalted position tn the created order. God, in the Genesis stcry, had
given them the world as an abundant paradise: he had given them dominion - power and
authority over the rest of creation. And the first thing they did was allow a snake to
tell them what to do. Given their dignity and personhood by God, they allowed a snake
to determine who and what they would be. And so it's not just pride operating here:
it's something elsc - moral laziness, refusal to be what they were created to be: the
word for it is sloth. In the Biblical setting it continues to define man's predicament -:
men refuse to be fully men, right up to Moses who tried very hard to get out of being
all of the man God wanted him to be.

The early theologians recognized that pride and sloth work in tandem to create
man's predicament. Sloth was one of the seven deadly sins in the early Church's catalog.
But then two things happened to Christianity which caused man's condition to be defined
almost entirely in terms of pride. First, Christianity confronted Greek philosophy. Now,
the Greeks were pretty certain that if there was anything wrong with man it was physical:
that the natural impulses of the body were highly Susvect: that the highest level of
manhood was achieved by repressing physical needs and desires, and living in the realm
of ideas. Under that kind of influence Christian thinkers began to see pride as man's
only problem: pride motivated men to be gluttons, pride motivated men to satisfy their |
bodily needs, pride made men want sex, food, drink and good times. And Christianity
turned a corner at that point that has been terribly difficult to un-turn. The Christian
model became the monk ~ celibate, poor, hungry, pious: the Christian ideal became life-
denying rather than life affirming. God had made a mistake in creating men as he had:
the corrective was in doing everything possible te deny it all.

The second influence was political. The Roman Emperors, beginning with Constantine,

saw in Christianity a common cause that might be the cement to hold together their
crumbling empire. Christian leaders appreciated the respite from persecution, the freedom
ta function openly and their new prestige. And so they cooperated by defining a good
Christian as a good citizen. The model, in this context, became the compliant, loyal

man who obeys alt the rules: who is interested - not in accepting responsibility for the
body politic, but is very content to leave the decisions and the responsibility to the
rulers - who, it was believed, were crdained by God in the first place.

Those two factors - centuries old - combined to create a style and self understand-
ing among Christians that still is belittling and denigrating to human dignity: together
they implanted guilt in every human heart for simply fecling like a man,and encouraged -
because of all this negative self-perception - the abdiction of individual responsibility.

Fifteen hundred years later, this is where we stid] are. We still insist that
you've got to feed bad about yourself before you can feel good. We still insist on
clubbing people over the head with their total depravity, until all they can .feel about
themselves is guilty. We're stil] not sure that it's alright to have fun - to enjoy
life: we are still unconvinced that God knew what he was doing when he made us sexual
and gave uS a healthy sense of Tust and desire. There are no Protestant monasteries,
of course, but the Christian model for an astounding number of people still seems to be
the monk who spends his years escaping from his humaness. Politically, the Rowan Empire
is long gone, but the equation of the good Christian with the good citizen is still
one of the most potent myths alive: under its guise we don't have te face the frightening
moral questions posed by My Lai, or a General Lavelle, or the continuing bombing in S. E.
Asia. Qur role is simply to be loyal citizens.

Sin as sloth means being Tess than, not more than man. Harvey Cox puts it in these
terms: "Sloth means the determined or lackadaisical refusal to live up te ane's essential
humanity." That was what happened in the Garden of Eden - the fall of man is not just
the expression of primordial arrogance: it's also a moral cop-out, a refusal to be.

And for my money, it is this understanding of the human condition that needs to be held

up before us with relentless integrity. For I have come to believe that while pride and

sloth may walk hand-in-hand in our lives, it is our refusal to be men - to become more

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than we are - to bear responsibility for creation - that today endangers the very fabric
of our civilization.

On a personal level, sloth is reflected in a general lack of self-esteem and self-
confidence. In practical terms we have learned to have very little regard for our
own abilities and our own worth. And we pass it on to our children. In the accepted
jargon of the day, we teach our children that they are "not Q K"; and that their young
lives must become a contest to prove te us that they are "OK". On the level of inter-
personal relations sloth is expressed in cur willingness to allow others to determine
who and what we shall be. When the anger of another man causes me to be angry, I have
been less than my cwn man, I have given up my identity and allowed him to determine who
Tam. When I'm in a group and the conversation turns to something that I find offensive
and wrong, and I compliantly smite, I have been less than a man.

Articulate Black militants have been trying ta demonstrate how a whole race of
peopie in our land has reneged by allowing white stereotypes to determine black identity.
If you're nervous about Black power - Black identity - try to put it in the framework of a
whole race of people discovering their God-given right to be themselves, and not wnat
uthers want them toa be.

The raal problem with sloth, you see, - as it is with pride - is that on the corpor-
ate level it beccmes deadly and destructive. Books written about Mazi Germany kecp
returning to the fact that it all became possible, not because all Garmans in the 1930's
were fascists: but because the vast majority of Germans simply rofused to foel and to
bear personal responsibility for what was going on in their very midst. One modern
commentator took a long lock at Adoiph Eichmann and concluded that he was not the devil
incarnate, but rather an overpoweringly ordinary man, and that most of us are capable of
commiting genocide just by getting to work on time and keeping cur noses clean.

Now, whenever analogies are drawn with Nazi Germany, we bristie a bit, mostly -

I think - with good cause. And yet, Tet me tell you about an experiment conducted at
Yale University in 1967.
A cross section of more than 2,000 mates from Bridgeport, Conn., participated.

Divided into groups of learners and teachers, the learners were stranped into electric

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cnairs ~ the teachers seated at a table in the next room. Through an inter-com the
teachers asked questions and were instructed to administer a shock by pushing a button
for each wrong answer. There was no shock of course. But into the sound system was fed
screams and cries of pain. The teachers wore carefully told that the shocks would
Increase in velocity. The objcct was to discover at what point individuals would refuse
to obey instructions in a rather authoritarian atmosphere because of conscience or
compassion. The result - 62% went all the way - administering all the current they could.
Tne researcher observed: "With numbing regutarity guod people were seen to knuckle under
the demands of authority and perform actions tha’ were callous and severe. Men who in
everyday life are responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority.

Tne results are.... disturbing "(Harris "I'm OK - You're OK" P. 249-250) .

In theological terms the 62% were invelved in the sin of sToth: they allowed someone
else - somathing else, in the case of symbcls of authority and scientific neutrality;
to determine who they would be.

Is it really sc far from Eichmann to that? I don't think sc. Harvey Cox has said
that “sloth is the spiritual paraplegia of the modern metropolis. "That is to say, sloth -
wnich, by the way, comes from the Greak "not caring" - allows us to refuse to be respon-
sible politically, to remain uninvolved, to stay at home on election day and let the
other guy do the deciding. Sloth allows us to Jock at a slum and feel nothing, to walk by
someone in trouble and do nothing, to watch public officials spend money and feel
absolutely no responsibility for the policies on the basis wh i?e the money is spent.

Sloth is dangerous because it is essentially a despising of one's self ~ and the
next logical step is a dé@spising of everyone alse,

In Jesus Christ, however, we believe we have seen man as God created pin to be. His
sinlessness is h his refusal to be motivate! either by pride or slothfulness. He was
fully aman. The first Adam sold aut: but in desus Christ a new possibility was intro-
duced to humanity: full anf free and total manhood. That man taugnt that people are
valuable: that human beings are creatures of great worth because of their creator, and
that every man is called to realize the full extent of his manhood.

That man ~ Jesus Christ - taught that it's great to be me: that I have worth = not

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on the basis of my accomplishments, but because God made me: that IT am given - by God -
responsibility for my own life, and a measure oF responsibility for the life of the whole
world. Someone has said that"to be a Christian is te decide to be fully a man” as God
intended.

The antidote to sin as Sloth, then, is not guilt and guilt and more quilt. Rather
it is to acknowledce our individual worth: te: celebrate who we are: to affirm our faith
and trust in God simply by becoming everything we are able to be.

All of that has been summarized hy Dick Williams in his book "God Talk", -under the
title “What made that, made ma". I'd like te share a part of it with you in conclusion:

"i am proud of my creator, because He has created So much,

And because of that I have a sense af my own value anc dignity as a human being.
Save me from being big-headed, Lord.

Save me, too, from losing this sense of my funcamental value.

Because if you mado me, I'm valuable.

Like a little pencil sketch by an old master, nothing in compartson with his
great masterpieces.

But precious to the one whe knows, and understands .

I am just a fragment of God's creation - but valuable because of my creator. AHEL

Father, the status quo is comfortable, and it's not easy to become more than we are.
Give US a new sense of our worth. And hélp us to see that because we matter -.all men

matter. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN