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WEDDINGS

Today we continue our series on the seven deadly sins, and we focus on sloth. You can see the epitome of slothfulness on your order of service cover.

"Sloths spend their entire existence hanging suspended from the boughs of trees. They move by advancing one limb at a time in a slow, deliberate fashion. Sloths descend only about once a week in order to [relieve] themselves. When placed on the ground they lie on their backs or crawl with the greatest difficulty.

"The sloth sleeps all day. An incrustation of a green algae forms in the hair of some species, making them indistinguishable from the surrounding foliage and moss.

"The animal is habitually silent but sometimes utters a low, plaintive call. It feeds chiefly on foliage and shoots, which are pulled within reach of the mouth with typical slow movements." Microsoft ® Encarta ® Reference Library 2005. © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

How could any normal person turn into a sloth?

Most days when I drive home from church, I head north and turn off just before the corner of Lindbergh and Manchester. On that corner, there is a car dealership– you've probably seen it. And one day a while back, I noticed this beautiful old 1959 Buick LeSabre– bright yellow– you could see it a mile away.

As I was waiting to turn left, I noticed that it looked like a sign said: $300. I was intrigued. That couldn't be right. So, I turned off my blinkers and kept going straight and turned into the dealership, parked, and got out and looked at the car. It was beautiful. Cream puff. Perfect condition. Not a dent on it, no rust. I was surprised no salesman came running out. I had to go find one. I said: what's wrong with it? I pointed to the "as is" sticker.

"Oh not much really," he said. Does it have an engine?, I asked. "Oh yeah, engine runs fine." Well, what's the $300 all about. Is that a mis-print? "No, it's $300."

How come it's priced so low? I asked. "We've had a hard time selling it." No! You gotta be kidding! Does it drive? Is it stuck in 3^rd gear? What's wrong with it?

"No, it's not stuck in 3^rd gear, it's a beautiful car, isn't it?" Yes, but what's going on? It can't be $300!

"It's $300, really. You want to buy it?"

Well, maybe. I can't believe this beautiful car here is selling for $300. Really, you gotta tell me why this car is so cheap. I mean it, you have to tell me the truth. I'm a minister.

"Uh huh. Well you see, there's a curious thing about that car. You see, it drives just fine, but it doesn't take you where you want to go, it takes you where you need to go."

So I said: no thanks. I mean who needs a car like that? (Adapted from a story by Fred Craddock).

When we begin to steer clear of where we need to go, we can yield to the temptations of sloth.

As Solomon Schimmel puts it in his book, The Seven Deadly Sins:

“Loss of meaning, purpose, and hope, coupled with indifference to the welfare of others, have been known for centuries in religious communities as the deadly sin of sloth.

It has two components: acedia, which means a lack of caring, and tristitia, meaning sadness and sorrow.

In its final stages sloth becomes despair at the possibility of salvation. It can culminate in suicide.” (193).

Pretty serious business. In a Parabola essay, acedia is described as the noonday demon because it affected Egyptian monks at about that time of day. The monks were trying to keep their attention on God and the eternal, but

"Around noon, a monk might notice that something had insinuated itself into his stifling cell. Something was making him impatient, restless, cynical, bored. Something was making the sun stand still in the middle of the sky. The day seemed intolerably long. Life seemed intolerably long. Something had opened a hole in the bottom of his heart. Enthusiasm for his own undertaking was draining away. He began to wonder if there was any point in it– if there was any point in human life at all." (Martha Heyneman in Parabola, X:4, 18).

T.S. Eliot in his poem, The Wasteland puts it like this: "Numb. Blank. Nothing. I run every morning, cook, work, smile, make money. Inside there is nothing. Bankrupt."

Sloth is the most explicitly religious of the 7 deadly sins. You can be greedy or gluttonous or lustful without reference to God or religion. But sloth is about shunning the golden rule. It is about pretending that you are god and that the universe ought to bow down before you– in a sort of passive-aggressive way.

"A person who is primarily concerned with satisfying his own physical desires and in achieving wealth or power will often find that care and concern for others are obstacles in his path. In extreme cases such individuals may commit the most heinous crimes." (199).

We can think of a guy named Scott Peterson who killed his pregnant wife because he didn't want to be married to her anymore and because he wanted people to feel sorry for him. Instead of divorce, he murdered her. Instead of freedom he's in prison for life, maybe headed for death row in California.

The St Louis Post-Dispatch this week reported on a man who gunned down his wife in front of his 3 children. They also said that

"On average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in this country every day, according to figures gathered in 2000 by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Research also shows that homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women, with most of those murders involving an intimate partner. " Retrieved from STL Toady article on March 3, 2005.

So, sloth isn't just about laziness. It isn't just about being uninvolved. In it's extreme form, it turns to anger, anger that the world doesn't bow at your feet. When poor white males feel the world is unfair, some of them become skin head racists.

Fortunately, this extremism is rare. A more common path to sloth is the mid-life crisis. As Carl Jung put it:

“Among all my patients in the 2^nd half of life– that is to say over thirty-five– there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

What does Jung mean by that? Can a UU world view fit in? I think so. I would submit to you that even the atheists among us have a religious outlook on life. A religious outlook on life means that we have a system of meaning about life’s big questions. It means that we figure out the parameters of that outlook and that we test out our outlook regularly and that we try and live by the religious principles which resonate and move us toward a fuller life.

But this religious call to greatness gets drowned out in the public square by those who want to sell us something.

This tension– between self-satisfaction and service to others is a compelling one in Unitarian Universalism. A percentage of Eliot folk grew up with a more fundamentalist world view which stressed sacrifice. So, some folks arrive at UU-ism escaping the bondage of religious fundamentalism. They are hyper-aware of any potential encumbrances or calls to obligation that a UU minister or church might send out to them.

There are people who have fallen away from a religious tradition, and so they eschew all religion. There are people who had a not very satisfying experience giving to charity and so they forgo all charity. There are people who were involved with a community, and got into an argument, and gave up outside community.

Others of you grew up without much religion at all, or something that was dispensed with pretty quickly after junior high school age. You may have thought you had no religion, but all those advertising messages, all the TV and radio commercials, all the suggestions in movies, in the news, in magazines, these communications media are all eager to get in your head and motivate your behavior toward something that will enrich the message senders.

When I think about sloth in my own life, I am reminded of being a teenager– a century ago. It was pretty easy– as a teenager– to talk about the poor Cambodians, or the latest African drought and famine. We could feel for those people. We could complain about the injustice of our own political system.

And then we'd change the subject. Talk about cars or girls or something else. And I suppose I thought that when I "grew up," I would become a more powerful person. I would have the capacity to interact with others to bring about social change. But you know, you don't become a grown up all at once. The years glide slowly by– at first– then they speed up.

When you're a kid, you might think that when you grew up, if someone gave you $100,000 every year, you'd have no problem giving away $5,000 to your church. That's only 5% right? After all, you'd be getting the princely sum of $100,000 every year, what's $5k? Chump change.

But that's not the way it works. You don't go from an allowance of $5 a week to $100,000 a year overnight. It happens gradually, and so when you get there, you think– hey! I can't afford that much! Most Americans donate about 1% to charity. But almost all of us could donate 5% if we really wanted to.

And when you're a kid, you think you'll be powerful when you grow up, and especially as a teenager, you may wonder why the adults– people like your parents– don't do more to make the world a better place. And then when you get to that age, you realize you have so many other things to do, that seem more immediate, and your instinct to be generous gets thwarted. To cover your guilt, you can slouch toward sloth.

Sloth can come about because we feel like moral weaklings, we claim we are powerless, we begin to believe it. We say we can’t change the world or truly love our neighbor, or live up to the standards we espouse. But virtue (like vice) has a level of depth. It isn’t all or nothing.

So we can slouch toward sloth because we grow up and lose our youthful convictions. Or because we feel like moral weaklings. Or even because we get burned out. Maybe we become real social crusaders, but then we might get frustrated that the world hasn't changed more due to our efforts.

And so there comes a spiritual vacuum. And it has to be filled with something. We'll get bored, resentful, and lazy. Or we can feel suicidal. We begin to lose our humanity and start behaving like sloths.

A rabbinic midrash tells the story of a slothful man's excuses when he is offered the opportunity to study the Torah with a scholar:

They tell the sluggard 'Your teacher is in a nearby city, go and learn Torah from him.' He responds 'I fear a lion on the highway.' 'Your teacher is in your own city.' 'I fear a lion in the streets.' 'Your teacher is near your home.' ' I am afraid a lion is outside.' ' Your teacher is in a room inside your home.' ' I am afraid that if I rise from bed the door will be locked.' ' But the door is open.' 'I need a little more sleep.' (203).

We can have a remarkable ability to tune out what we do not want to hear. We can overlook the homeless in our own city, while exclaiming at the homeless elsewhere. We can believe what is convenient. We can blame "society" or an ethnic group or the government or our parents or our children or anyone but ourselves for our woes, for the responsibility to do something about the problems of the world.

I used to say– hey! I'm not responsible for the state of the world. I take no responsibility for stuff that’s not my fault. Or I'll say I am powerless or I am too busy or the problems are too big, or all three, and hey– why are you picking on me? What about everybody else?

But I say there is something in you– that cares. I say there is something in you– that wants to leave the world a better place.

There is something in you– that wants to do the right thing. It may be a small flicker or it may be a giant beacon that leads you and others on a path toward the good. I don’t know.

But I do know that there are competing world views all vying for your internal vote. But daily demands on our hope and courage can whittle us down. Every day, every hour of every day, we get the opportunity to make choices– choices between saving the world or savoring the world.

We choose over and over again. Should you play with your kids? Or read that great book? Should you shop for another blazer? Or donate to the March of Dimes?

Everyday we choose between "what's in it for me?" and "what could I do to be helpful?" As President Kennedy put it 42 years ago, we can ask: "What can my country do for me?" Or we can ask: "What can I do for my country?"(Inaugural address, January 20, 1961).

One question looks inward, the other looks outward. One looks to temporary satisfaction, the other looks to transformation, to tikkun: to heal the world.

Am I willing to make a sacrifice? Am I willing to donate time and money to church and other charities, when it means I won't be able to do something else that might give me greater pleasure?

In the end, I know this "stretching" of myself– the choice to give up reading for an hour to listen to the hurts of my spouse– the forgoing of a personal interest to respond to a 5 year old who says– Daddy, I'm bored, and I have no one to play with. Doing these things are not only good for others, they're good for me. It builds my character, even– and sometimes especially– if it comes at an inopportune time.

The last and perhaps greatest temptation toward sloth is always the nagging doubt at the back of our minds. A whiny voice that is not loud but it is insistent. It is the voice of Satan. It is the voice of the shadow. And the voice says: "What is the sense of our small effort?"

Jesus said the poor are always with us. If the poor are always with us, then why bother? And this becomes the excuse we were searching for– in order to get out of caring for the poor. This becomes the universal key to open the door of sloth.

A reading in our hymnal entitled Commitment by Dorothy Day (#560) says:

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.

What is the sense of our small effort? Ask the boy throwing starfish. You remember the story.

An old man walking on the beach at dawn noticed a boy picking up a starfish and throwing it into the sea. When asked why, the boy explained that the stranded starfish would die if left to lie in the morning sun. ‘But there are millions of starfish on this beach,’ said the old man. ‘What is the sense of your small effort?’ The boy picked up another starfish and placed it in the waves. ‘It makes a difference to this one,’ he said. Retrieved from http://www.bris.ac.uk/davidbaumappeal/starfish.html on March 4, 2005

This is what we are called to do– to care about people one at a time. We UUs don't do good works to get into heaven. UUs are good for nothing.

Being charitable is a way to be "remembered kindly after our death." As my intern supervisor put it: "to live in hearts that love is not to die." It is a good thing to be remembered fondly. It can be the cause of more charity.

The great Jewish mystic and scholar, Maimonides tells us that it is

"preferable to give alms to the poor repeatedly, even if in small sums, than to give a large sum once. Although the total amount given is the same in the two cases, we acquire the virtue of generosity by repeating generous acts until they become second nature." (206).

This is your spiritual homework: repeat generous acts until they become second nature.

Acts of charity and generosity are easier when we are together in community. We have covenant groups here at Eliot. There are a dozen or so of them with 6 to 10 people each in them. They meet to question & discuss their spiritual journeys– the intimacy and ultimacy involved.

These covenant groups– working together, have washed dishes for fund-raisers; cooked for Room at the Inn; done book fair sorting & carrying; started an online auction project; and have worked at South Side Day Nursery Volunteer day. They undoubtedly found it easier to do this kind of charitable work by working alongside one another than by trying to do it alone.

This work, this anti-sloth, is central to the work we do. We say the work we do here matters. Here at Eliot we work & play at transforming ourselves and the world.

May you work on your own spiritual journey by finding gratitude and practicing charity, bestowing random acts of kindness to your family, to strangers, to yourself. Amen.

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