SAINT GEORGE’S CATHEDRAL

Perth, Western Australia

Sermon preached by

The Reverend Christine Simes

9 January 2000

Why are the seven deadly sins deadly? Well it’s not because God is keeping a tally on each of us, taking marks off when we trip up on one of the seven deadly sins and giving us marks when we manage to exercise one of the seven gifts of the Spirit. The seven deadly sins are deadly because they kill us. They kill the real me, the real you.

All sin is idolatry. It’s the worshipping a false god, a god that can’t deliver, a god of stone. Sin is listening to the serpent’s silvery voice, “Eat the fruit and you will become like gods.” Sin is about being deceived into believing that something can offer life which can’t. Sin is whoring after false gods. We are driven. Our energy, our passion, our desire is all spent on a lover who doesn’t love us.

So is life about climbing up the ladders and avoiding sliding down the snakes? Is it just a matter of here is a list of sins. Just don’t do it and you’ll be OK? I think a great number of people are disenchanted with the church because it sends out these sorts of messages. It’s the high price of heaven message.

Sin is part of our reality. It can’t be avoided. The good news is that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. The good news is that God brings good out of evil, life out of death and our wounds become the places from which we grow.

My particular sin is envy.

And like all the other sins it is basically idolatry and like all the other sins we are probably going to fall for it. I don’t want to look at the way we might envy someone their gorgeous body or fabulous house, or problem free kids. I think these are all pretty minor things that we can get over. The kind of envy that really kills us, is the envying that makes us want to be like someone, in reality to be someone else.

People often join groups to give themselves an identity. Political groups, social activists groups, religious groups, cultural and social groups can tell people who they are. “This is what we think, this is the way we see the world, this is where I find the answers to my questions. This is who I am.”

We all need other people and structures to form us but there comes a time when, as the Buddhists say, we have to kill of our parents, our teachers, and even God. We have to stop living our life through other people’s ideas and expectations and find out who we are. Even our images of God needs to become our own and not second hand information.

When envy is the sin, the false god whom we worship is the person we idolise. These are often people for whom we are particularly grateful, people who have influenced our lives, lit us up, taught us, inspired us, been our mentors. The danger is that we ourselves become lost. We want to be like this person. I consider myself to something of an expert in this particular sin.

When I was at theological college I had a lecturer who was a great teacher for me. He opened my eyes to a theological world that I had been yearning for. I used to think if only I could think the way he thinks, if only I had read all the books that he has read, what I really need here is a brain transplant!

Later on in my journey toward priesthood I met another priest. I had never heard preaching like his and I had never seen anyone preside with such beauty over the liturgy. I thought that I would never be able to pray with this gentleness, and passion and loveliness. I just needed to be made over in his image and then I would be a great priest!

As time passes we either see that our idols have feet of clay or are just as flawed and fragile as ourselves or we find that we simply can’t bear the strain of trying to be someone else. There is something missing at our centre, there is something just a bit false, something not quite the right fit about our imitation. We feel constantly that we are not measuring up. Learning and being inspired is fine but creating idols isn’t. We have to find our own voice and hear our own name.

God has made me to be me and not someone else. I am the only one who can be me. You are the only one who can be you. When we envy who someone else is, we are really saying to ourselves, “I am not much good. What God has created here is really fairly second class. I need to be like someone else. Then my life will have meaning. Then I will be loveable.”

We need to take to heart words in the Hebrew Scriptures:

I have called you by name you are mine (Isaiah 43:1)

You are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you (Isaiah 43:4)

See I have engraved your name on the palms of my hand (Isaiah 49:16)

It is very hard to know that we are loved by God if we don’t feel loved by other people. Maybe one of the most urgent tasks the church has is to love people. And not out of some legalistic sort of obligation, but to really get to know the people who come to us and those we meet in our daily life and love them for who they are, who they are made to be. We have to look at each other with God’s eyes and know that we are all precious, that we are all unique and gifted. We are all human becomings. We need to greet people with this basic faith in them. What might this person be to me? What might I be for them?

Love one another as I have loved you..so that your joy may be complete. (Jn 15:11&12)

As one writer says, No human soul is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any human soul is infinite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need in God.

God delights in what God has made and we too can delight in each other. If we refuse to be ourselves, we deny each other the gift of ourselves. Irenaeus, one of the early teachers in the church said, The glory of God is a human being fully alive. That is the path that we tread, the path to becoming fully alive. That is the glory that will come to birth out of this earth, the new heavens and the new earth, eternity, heaven whatever we want to call it, is being born now, and birth is never an easy task.

My own idols have fallen over time and with a fair amount of pain, but in each case the outcome was a taking hold of my own life, a new freedom and confidence, a coming closer to finding my own voice and hearing my own name. God is in this with us. We will be seduced by all sorts of serpents, we will go a-whoring after false gods but God’s good Spirit will not rest, will not forsake us.

One of the things that has recently saved me has been the discovery of the work of two women priests, both living in New York, who are theologians and writers. Not everyone will need to read their work, but I did. Because I have come to priesthood late in life, or in the middle of my life, I have lived with this niggling sort of envy (!) of men my own age who have been priests for twenty years, feeling that this is not quite fair and wouldn’t I be a much better priest if I had had all that experience. I tended to undervalue my previous working life and my ten years at home with my children and feel like a lot of what has gone on in my life has been something of a side track.

The two women I discovered are Barbara Crafton and Margaret Guenther. They are both older that me, grandmothers now and both have been priests longer that me, having been ordained in the US. Barbara Crafton writes deep and beautiful theology and wraps it around the stories of her every day life, everything from her sewing machine, to making bread to the death of her mother and the remarriage of her father.

Margaret Guenther is an academic and a spiritual director. She describes herself as a midwife of the soul. She finds in her own experience of childbirth and mothering the raw materials for metaphors of the spiritual life. She writes about becoming a priest and believing that she was shedding the skin of her previous life only to find that all her previous years had prepared her for her new life. As she says nothing was lost, all was gathered up .

In the past I have read women theologians, and often been disappointed. It takes a while for the gems to start to emerge. And I didn’t go looking for these books they were both given to me this year. So this discovery has all the marks of the Spirit who comes to us in the daily events of our lives. These books changed me, altered my perspective, turned me around to face a new direction. That’s the meaning of repentance. I saw that all of my past life has fed into my present life, that the life I have lived is the raw material of my ministry now and that being a woman was all at once an asset, part of who I am.

I don’t think this story of mine is very different in process from anyone else’s story. The details are different but we are all on the way, all becoming who we are, finding our own voice and hearing our own names called. As another female theologian says, God is the magnet drawing each of us further and further into fullness of life.

Sin is all part of the game. We will choose false gods, false securities. We will lose our nerve and our faith in God and ourselves and replace it with something else, but God will not leave us alone. God calls us by name, searches the deep places of our hearts, and whispers to us, “It’s all right to be yourself, that’s who I love. That’s your gift to all the others and my gift to you.” Amen

Michael Mayne Pray, Love, Remember Darton Longman & Todd London 1998 p7 Barbara Cawthorne Crafton The Sewing Room: Uncommon Reflection on Life, Love and Work Morehouse Publishing Harrisburg 1997 Margaret Guenther Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction Cowley Publications 1992 p43 Joan D Chittester Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men Novalis Saint paul University Ottowa 998 p10