Seven New Deadly Sins… Intro
October 1, 2008
In a letter to a group of people in Rome (a community attempting to align themselves with the life, words and teachings of Christ) Paul writes:
“Everyone is under the power of sin”
He quotes the Jewish prophet Isaiah
“No-one is righteous, not one…
they have no idea where to find peace.
They have no idea how big God is at all”
He continues:
“The Jewish law isn’t an exhaustive list of right and wrongs we can keep. Its purpose is to show us how screwed up we are.”
What is sin?
There are only a handful of sins. They rear their heads in different forms.
They mix together like colours so even though there’s nothing new under the sun we are still capable of finding new ways of sinning.
Red and yellow mix to make orange… a touch of blue and we have brown.
As time moves forwards the shades of sin remain constant. I’m pretty sure I haven’t met someone who has not sinned- and even more sure I haven’t met someone who hasn’t seen and felt the effects of sin. It’s all around us. Even within periods of great religious fervour it crouches at our door, sneaking up on us when we least expect it.
Three Definitions of Sin
- Sin is an illegitimate way of meeting a legitimate need
- Sin is that which causes a breaking of relationship with those around us (and more particularly God)
- Sin is anything which does not bring glory to God
The Seven Deadly Sins
Gregory the Great, a chunky monk who became pope, listed seven sins he considered deadly. (He actually edited a list of a previous man.) He was more of a people manager than a theologian/teacher yet this list still permeates through art and history from Bosch’s paintings to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Pinchers “Se7en”
Augustine of Hippo, a fourth definition and nouns as verbs
Augustine, often called an early church father, was a gifted orator whose philosophical affections were sought by many ‘schools’ before he followed his mother’s faith. While pondering the birth narrative of Jesus in the Gospels he concluded sin must transfer through the seed of man.* If this is true we can with modern knowledge put forward the idea sin runs through our DNA…
Sin is what we are.
This kind of talk hurts our pride.
“everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glory”
Let me put it another way… it’s not what we do, but in the fact we are human. We say I am human, but we need to view ourselves more as a verb than a noun. “I am human” becomes “I am being human” In trying to perfect the art of being human we forget we, collectively or singularly, will never be God.
Hair salons and the ugly truth of white light…
I used to go to a really posh hair dressers. I don’t think I’m allowed to call it that… a hair salon… no… a boutique. I used to go not just for the hair styling, but to be surrounded by pretty stylists, good wine and smooth coffee. (It was that kind of place). I’d wake up early and choose my outfit, bathe, wash, dry then style my hair so I could look good before I walked through the doors of said salon. I wanted to look my best when I walked in.
There’s something about the lighting of hair salons. Maybe it’s the way it is reflected in all the mirrors. I don’t know. But when I sat down in the chair every hair, spot and blemish that I had missed or failed to bring under my control could be seen. I wanted to apologise, “honestly, I looked great when I left the house”. Instead I would have to pretend I’d been the victim of another late night party.
‘White light’ is ugly. It is stark, it tells the truth, but it is us. We show up the worst in the people around us and they show up the worst in us. But when we come into relationship with Jesus accepting he isn’t made up of the same stuff as us something in us begins to change.
When we see our humanity in this way Paul’s words suddenly begin to make sense when he says “I am a new creation”. When we come into relationship with Jesus we are more than changed. We’re not mutants; transformed and remoulded, but something completely new.
When God looks at us through the lens of the cross 
of his Son he doesn’t see white light, but the colours refracted into something beautiful. What he sees is his own promises, his own words, his own image. His own glory.
In the ugliness of the cross, maybe we can find something beautiful too.
“God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.”
What deadly sin would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments
*I realise this is a much simplified account of Augustine’s views.
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