Sloth

 Friends, we’re now in the 4th week of this Lenten sermon series about the seven deadly sins. So far we’ve talked about pride, greed, and envy. Now this week we’re talking about sloth! Notice how I didn’t pick “gluttony” for a week when we’re having a potluck after church?

Sloth stands out for me among the seven deadly sins for a few reasons, the first and primary among them being that we don’t have a great understanding of what “the sin of sloth” is. And that became even more clear to me when I researched it in depth. Five, and arguably six, of the words we use to describe the other deadly sins–pride, greed, envy, lust, wrath, and even gluttony–are words that might sound old-timey, but that we still use in common parlance. But we don’t tend to describe any behavior or thoughts as “slothful.” If anything, “sloth” isn’t a sin to us, it’s a really, really cute animal that moves so notoriously slowly that moss starts to grow on its fur. So if “sloth” is a sin, then it’s the sin of being an adorable slowpoke?

Not exactly. If any of y’all have a working image of “the sin of sloth” in your minds, the image looks something like a person couch rotting all day in their snuggie, eating pork rinds straight out of the bag while binge watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. And even then, you’d only be about half right.

We think of “sloth” as some kind of synonym for “lazy”, and, on the surface, that checks out…sort of. But the thing about sloth isn’t the What, it’s the Why. The ancient Church used the Latin word “acedia” to describe the sin of sloth, and the earliest generations of monks who theorized acedia as a sin applied the word to fellow monks who weren’t keeping up with their duties of prayer and service. But, obviously, those Seventh Century monks weren’t blowing off their work because they were curled up with their phones binge watching TikToks. The Why was deep, and tragic.

Saint Thomas Aquinas broke these concepts down in his Summa Theologia, one of my favorite books that you’ll never read. You’re welcome. And in the Summa, Aquinas defined sloth as sorrow, specifically “sorrow about spiritual good.” Remember a few weeks ago, when I mentioned that those early monks believed in eight deadly sins, not seven, and one of those was sadness? Aquinas believed sloth was sadness incognito. Aquinas wrote that sloth was “facetiousness of the mind which neglects to being good... [it] is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses men as to draw him away entirely from good deeds.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church warns that sloth “goes so far as to refuse joy from God and is repelled by goodness.”

So, a person who’s elbow-deep in cookie dough ice cream, neglecting to shower, hours long into their binge marathon of The Young and the Restless might be slothful (and possibly gluttonous), but not because they’ve neglected to pry their keester off the couch. If you went to visit a good friend, and you found them that way, you wouldn’t feel compelled to give them a lecture on the dangers of sloth, and you wouldn’t be worried about laziness. That would be the least of your concerns. If you were their doctor, in fact, my guess is your first move would be to screen them for depression. A Christian and psychologist by the name of Dr. William Backus has drawn a very strong parallel between how depression affects the brain and how sloth affects the spirit, writing, 

“Depression involves aversion to effort, and the moral danger of sloth lies in this characteristic. The work involved in exercising one's will to make moral and spiritual decisions seems particularly undesirable and demanding. Thus the slothful person drifts along in habits of sin, convinced that he has no willpower and aided in this claim by those who persist in seeking only biological and environmental causes and medical remedies for sloth.”

But, we’re getting into risky territory here, so let’s be very, very clear: depression, whether clinical or spiritual, is not a sin. It’s a treatable condition that millions of people live with, not by choice, but because of a combination of circumstances and biology. Remember what I’ve been saying the last few weeks: the sin is not the feeling. The sin is more about the bad things that got you here, and the risks of what can come next.

Aquinas described sloth, not as “couch potato syndrome”, but as a state where a person feels so hopeless about the state of the world and life that they give up, and refuse to try anymore. Those Seventh Century monks began to buckle, losing hope that any prayer, that any act of service, that any work, was making any real difference in the world. The 21st Century version of that feeling is one many of us know well. We lay down in bed after a long day, and even though we know that looking at a screen right before you go to sleep is actually bad for your brain, we can’t help it, we do it anyway, and we start “doom scrolling” through social media reels. One angry person after another, your algorithm feeding you more and more of the same because that’s what it does, telling you that the world is burning, the country is going up in flames, and it’s all the fault of whichever political party you didn’t support in the last election (and yes, your phone knows who you voted for). We’re consumed with stories of violence and warfare, we’re buried in both personal and national debt, the light is being suffocated out by the smoke of racism, sexism, xenophobia and plain old fashioned contempt…now here’s an ad for yogurt. I mean, you may as well eat that yogurt because you can’t help any of the rest of it, right?

The sins of the world put us here. We’ve benefitted from a few of them. And there’s a whole lot that, indeed, we can’t control, or fix. But we are not powerless. And it would be a sin to give up.

Let’s pivot to our New Testament reading, a story from the Gospel of John. Jesus is in a heavily visited part of Jerusalem, near a fountain where many disabled folks gather. They come there to seek help from the greater community, but also to be each other’s community. There’s a man there who we know very little about, not even his name. But we do know that he’s been ill for 38 years. Holy moly. Staying near the water, when he’s so vulnerable, has been a good plan for him so far. He’ll stay hydrated and clean, and he’ll have a lot of company. But he gets Jesus’ attention while he happens to be passing through. I picked this specific story because I’m so struck that Jesus doesn’t go straight to healing the man. He asks him if that’s what he wants first. Does he want to be made well? Is that his desire? And it’s a good thing Jesus asked, because that isn’t the man’s desire. He wants to be able to get into the water. Other people keep cutting ahead of him, and he can’t do much to stop that because of his poor health. “Well, get up and walk,” Jesus says, and the man grabs his mat and walks perfectly for the first time in many years.

Stories where Jesus heals someone of a health issue can be tricky to preach on, because, if we’re not careful, we can draw the conclusion that being disabled, being sick, needing long term care, are negatives that we need to be freed from, and even that faith is a “cure”. That’s not it. This man that Jesus healed could have caved under the weight of a world that doesn’t care about his well-being. He has nowhere else to go, it doesn’t sound like he has resources or family, John doesn’t bother to document his name, and he can’t even hold his place in line at the fountain because others step over him. So, even within the disabled community, he’s marginalized. He doesn’t want a magical fix, he doesn’t even want his health back. He has a clear, realistic, achievable goal: to get to the fountain that’s right in front of him. Instead of unraveling into sloth, as he so easily could have, this man hasn’t given up. That is his healing.

Aquinas argued that every deadly sin has a corresponding virtue, one that is our path to healing. The antidote for sloth is diligence. That’s what this man in John had. Staying diligent doesn’t mean this man has to make miracles happen. He doesn’t have to solve the systemic poverty that disproportionately affects the disabled. He doesn’t have to find a cure for his illness. He doesn’t have to get up and train for a 5K. He just has to try. He has to care. He has to keep from curling up into apathy. He did that. We can, too.

Our healing from sloth, from deciding the world is in such a rotten place we shouldn’t even try to change it, comes from trying. From doing what we can today. And that might not be much, but sometimes, what starts as a relatively small gesture can have huge results.

I read a story this week that I wanted to share with y’all as I close this sermon. It was May of 1993 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The community was reeling from a wave of increased gun violence. Folks were weary, and felt hopeless. The clergy in town knew they had to do something to respond to the harm, and try to make peace, and came up with a plan to gather at locations where shootings had happened, pray for all involved, and pour water on the site, representing God’s cleansing. At first, only small numbers of folks were willing to join this ritual, but those numbers quickly grew when folks realized how much better it felt to do something than to do nothing. After a grievous night, when a street fight broke out and one young man took the life of another young man, this clergy group invited the mother of the young man who died to pray with them, and cleanse the place where her son died with water. The mother of the shooter lived just four doors down the street, and saw the people gathering. She came out onto her porch to listen from afar, and slowly and timidly inched closer. One of the pastors spotted her, went to her porch, extended his hand, and invited her to come join them. They prayed, they poured the water, and they sang together. And the mother of the shooter hugged the mother of the slain, and they cried in each other’s arms.

Sloth, when we lean too far into it, holds us down. It snuffs out our hope, throws a shroud over our view of God at work, and inhibits healing. But diligence is the shroud slipping off of the Divine, allowing us to see again. Diligence is the tight fist slowly opening. And while diligence lives in reality, and doesn’t tell us that everything will be perfect, it whispers “it gets better.” That’s the still small voice of God. Listen to it.

Amen.