Replacing the god of Greed with the God of Mercy

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ”Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, ”Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

“Zacchaeus is one of my favorite Jesus encounters to preach on.  He is a vivid picture of how – in the words of Tim Keller -“Jesus had replaced money as Zacchaeus’ God and Savior, so money could go back to being just what it is: a tool for serving people.”  (Keller has a chapter on Greed in his book Counterfeit Gods)

Acedia – The Disease of ‘Whatever!’

Like the Greek word Paraclete is hard to translate as a title of the Holy Spirit (John 14-16), and can mean ‘Helper’, ‘Comforter,’ ‘Counselor,’ etc. – so Acedia [uh-SEED-ia] is the deadly sin that defies simple words like ’sloth’ or ‘apathy.’  So we’ll call this third deadly sin by its new/old name!  It literally means ‘the absence of care’ or ’spiritual indifference.’  And it is dangerous! (Click here to hear or view the sermon from this teaching series.)

I’ve quoted Alexander Schmemann – worth reading again:

The basic disease is sloth (acedia). It is that strange laziness and passivity of our entire being which always pushes us “down” rather than “up” — which constantly convinces us that no change is possible and therefore desirable. It is in fact a deeply rooted cynicism which to every spiritual challenge responds “what for?” and makes our life one tremendous spiritual waste. It is the root of all sin because it poisons the spiritual energy at its very source. (From The Lenten Prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian)

For those who want to explore Acedia in depth, I highly recommend Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life. If you or a loved on are ’stuck’ or stagnated or like C.S. Lewis’ illustration of “an instrument unstrung” – then this book will take you into some deep waters of scripture, history and Norris’ own compelling story.   You can listen to an interview with PBS’s Bob Abernathy.  Finally here’s an excerpt that explores how the Psalms can be God’s tools for getting through the darkness.

A Prayer Against Envy

We closed our worship service yesterday with a prayer against the green monster sin of envy.  Some have asked for the words.  And it may be good to pray more than once!

O Lord,  let Your Holy Spirit so rule my life
that I may love You with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength
and my neighbor as myself.
Take from me a spirit of comparing and analyzing.
Help me instead to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.
Move me from resentment to contentment;
from restlessness to peace,
that I might know the joy of communion with You
and with Your people,
to the glory of Your name.    Amen.

N.T. Wright on Genesis 1-3

Those of you who have followed the discussion on Genesis 1-3 and how it is best interpreted, may find this 4 minute video clip on the website Biologos helpful.  Wright makes the point better than I on why the literary interpretation that is the most faithful to the text may be the one that doesn’t get caught up in contemporary debates.  See it here.

Screwtape – on Pride and Humility

In our series on the Seven Deadly Sins, we’ll have occasion to see what ‘Uncle Screwtape’ has to say to his junior devil ‘Wormwood’ about the develish strategy for influencing his Christian ‘patient!’ Here’s the opening paragraph from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters – #14 on Pride to whet your appetite. You can read the whole letter below.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD, The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of “grace” for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad. (1) I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed. But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man’s attention away from self to Him, and to the man’s neighbors. All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting-point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty. (2) You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self- forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character.

Read the rest of Letter 14.

“Deadly Sins” – C.S. Lewis Poem and Commentary

For those who love poetry and C. S. Lewis, you’ll be happy to know he was a poet as well as a master of most other genres! Being a medieval scholar he was very familiar with the historical development of the Seven Deadly Sins (our current ‘mini-series’ at Christ Church),  and more importantly the biblical meaning of each.  He wrote a poem called Deadly Sins. It is available on the internet and I’m  linking to an article by Lewis scholar, Paul Ford.  Read the poem and the great notes that are beside it.

Ford ends with this summary.
…Lewis is saying here that, if the sinner would look along, or perhaps better look through, the sin and see what was really the object desired, the temptation process would become an opportunity for deeper growth in the Spirit.

It’s another way of saying that the Tempter can only take the good passions and get us to misuse them in some way.  Or, as we have been saying, to get us to live sub-human lives.    link to the poem.

[One other article of interest is from the fantastic Into the Wardrobe website where the author conjectures that Lewis may have consciously or unconsciously  weaved one of the sins into each of the Chronicles of Narnia!  Check it out here.]

‘Shalom Vandalized’ -or- What’s So Deadly About Sin?

“Fully Human, Fully Alive!”  That’s the goal.  Union with Christ is what we were made for!  It’s the new way of being human.  We need the new way because of the “infection of sin” or as Cornelius Plantiga has called it – “The Vandalism of Shalom”  (in Not The Way It’s Supposed To Be: A Breviary of Sin.)

In our Jan-Feb ‘10 teaching mini-series we want to take a close look at the problem of sin and evil and how it works in our lives and in our world.  We will look at what the church has historically seen as ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ and the corresponding virtues as taught by Jesus in the Beatitudes.  We will trust God to give us a new sensitivity to our own sin and these “ways we assault ourselves, those around us, and the world as a whole.”  Jesus wants us to be restored and energized as the Good News of the Kingdom breaks into a world infected by sin!  I don’t know about you, but I want to live passionately without being controlled by my passions! (i.e. disordered desires)

One resource that will be helpful to have is a book by Jeff Cook, Seven: The Deadly Sins and the Beatitudes. It comes highly recommended by Scot McKnight and Peter Kreeft (and I concur!)  The author reminds us that “these deadly sins often seem pleasing and good for gaining what we desire, but they are thoroughly poisonous.” We want to see “How Sin Dishonors God and De-humanizes People” - including ourselves!

Oh yes, the seven?  Pride, envy, sloth (or spiritual apathy), greed, lust, wrath, and gluttony.  Go to  our website for a schedule of teachings.

Wendell Berry on the “Myth of Limitlessness”

Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors, especially his Sabbath and “Mad Farmer” poems.  He is up in years though it seems he has always been at the marvelous place of not caring -in a good way- about the ‘popular’ critique of his work.   He speaks his convictions about a Christian world-view and the perils of consumerism in multiple genres of poetry, essay, and novel.  A friend sent this link to a May ‘08 Harpers article that is brutally relevant to our current world.  It is also wonderfully insightful for our current series on what it means to be human.  You may not agree with Berry on everything here but being provoked to think and re-think is vital. Here’s the link.

Listen to a 4th Century Nativity Hymn

If you want a deeply spiritual treat this Christmas season, listen to Frederica Mathewes-Green reading the Kontakion of the Nativity here. I have listened to this many times and referenced some of the verses at Christ Church.

The written version can be downloaded in pdf form here.  It is in dialog form involving Mary and the Magi. This text document has all the biblical references and background to the hymn.

I love this sermonic and poetic hymn because it is filled with rich biblical imagery and ties the themes of the whole Bible together.

Enjoy!

the Snowy Night with C.S. Lewis video

Here us a video I did on a snowy Saturday night before Christmas week for those who missed it on the Christ Church website 12.20.09.