Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

The Sin of Gilligan and David

by Dave Wilkinson

Revelation 3:14-22, 2 Samuel 11:1-4

May 20, 2001

The Seven Deadly Themes Theme

Tune: Gilligan’s Island Words: James Mitchell

Why are there seven of them and why are they called deadly?

They aren't listed as a group in the Bible. But in the early Middle Ages, as men and women in the monastic movement studied the scriptures, it became clear that while there are virtues that draw us close to God, there are also habits of the mind and heart that draw us away from God. So our Medieval brothers and sisters looked into their own lives and developed a list of what they called "the deadly sins" pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. They recognized these sins as particularly deadly because they are originating sins -- kind of the mother ships for the lesser sins. All other sins flow out of these seven.

Today, and on and on through the summer, we are going to talk about these seven deadly sins. We are not talking only about the people who aren't here. We are talking about ourselves. I am talking about myself. We are going to explore ourselves, our inner natures, the parts of our lives that we stuff down and ignore that hunger for redemption and new life.

Now medieval monastics had their ways of teaching that suited their time in history. They had illuminated manuscripts. But we have television. So great modern minds have portrayed these seven deadly sins through a great religious show filled with eternal themes. I'm speaking, of course, of Gilligan's Island. The technology has changed but the seven deadlies stay the same.

I'm not making this up. There are whole web sites devoted to the study of what has come to be known as Gilliganology. According to the scholars, each character on that uncharted tropic isle is an archetype of one of the 7 deadly sins.

Now I've done my research for this sermon. But I will warn you. Make sure it's research. Life in front of the television with Nick at Nite might be a sign that you are not so much a scholar and seeker after truth as I am but a dyed in the wool participant in the sin of Gilligan himself -- the sin of sloth.

Now I've approached this in a light-hearted way in order to get you past the "He's gonna talk about sin and I'm gonna tune out" stage. We even had a theme song. Thank you, James Mitchell. But there is nothing light- hearted about it. Sloth is not just a joke. It is one of the Seven deadlies. It heads the list for a reason.

What is sloth? The Greek word is "acedia" -- a word which literally means "no care." The other English translation is "Hakuna Matata."

Frederick Buechner writes: "Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A lazy man, a man who sits around and watches the grass grow, may be a man at peace. His sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting.

"A slothful man, on the other hand, may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell. He knows something's wrong with him, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life."

Before Easter I preached a sermon on the need for rhythm in our lives -- the need for down time -- the need to spend agenda free time with God. This is not the same as sloth. I was talking about the need for creative flow for one who cares. The slothful person doesn't care.

Where does sloth lead?

It leads us to David.

It's strange to think of David and sloth in the same sentence. I mean, look at David -- Mr. dancer before the lord, giant killer, king, poet -- champion of truth, justice and the Hebrew way.

David was all those things. Unlike Gilligan, David could be very energetic. But it doesn't take a steady diet of any of the deadly seven. It just takes a dose at the wrong time.

Sloth pops up over and over in David's life. It appears whenever David decides that he is tired of caring and doing the right thing. It shows up in his parenting. We'll see the consequences later in this series when we look at the sin of Ginger and Amnon and the sin of The Professor and Absalom. But sloth also shows up in David's choices, with drastic consequences for his walk with God.

2 Samuel 11 tells us pointedly, "In the time of the year when kings go out to war, David stayed in Jerusalem." He not only stayed in Jerusalem. For much of the day he stayed in bed. And the more he did nothing, the less he cared about anything, including his own honor.

As evening comes, David finally gets up off his couch and strolls to the edge of the roof to lean on the wall. He just walks across to take the air, and break the monotony, and wonder how his army is doing across the Jordan in that battle with the Ammonites.

His thoughts are interrupted. Down in the lower part of the city he can see a beautiful woman, also on her roof in the late afternoon, but she is having a bath.

Now David already has six wives. But they are boring because he's never really invested himself in any of them. Life is boring. And here at least is something new and different--something with a hint of danger about it.

The story is about a man who doesn't care -- he doesn't care about his God or his nation. He's cared in the past but he doesn't care now. He certainly doesn't care about Bathsheba. The story starts with sex for physical pleasure and sex because David is bored. But it soon moves on from there. It leads to betrayal, murder, and the eventual downfall of David's family. All because David stopped caring about what he did.

M. Scott Peck, who has written some of the most popular books in the field of psychotherapy, says that sloth is a major cause of evil, a primary cause of psychological illness, and the main reason that Americans are increasingly failing at human relations.

First of all, Peck points out that laziness is what prevents us from being loving, and we all know that failure to be loving has horrendous consequences in our world. Love requires commitment and work, and those who are lazy are seldom willing to expend that kind of energy, or see no reason to get involved. As a result, they move further and further away from life.

We need to understand that sloth is not a physical condition. It is a condition of the heart. It is the sin of the spectator. It is the sin of the professionally uninvolved.

The essence of sloth is a word that is found much too often and too soon on the lips of many young Americans the deadly word "Whatever." "Whatever" is the passive battle cry of a whole generation: People are suffering: "Whatever." Jesus died for you! "Whatever." You'll flunk out if you don't study. "Whatever." Your girlfriend is pregnant. "Whatever." When a U.C. student a few years ago allowed a friend to stalk and kill a young girl in a Nevada Casino, you could almost see the "Whatever" on his lips. Last year a U.S.C. student sold ecstasy at a rave to teenagers who were then killed in a car crash. His response was the predictable same --"Whatever."

That "Whatever" attitude is the essence of sloth. And it is deadly to our own lives and the lives of others.

In Elie Wiesel's largely autobiographical novel, Michael, a young Jewish man who survived the Holocaust, traveled at great personal risk behind the Iron Curtain to his Hungarian hometown. Though his memory burned with images of the soldiers and police who brutalized him, and those he loved who were now gone, Michael returned, not out of revenge, but to satisfy his curiosity. He went back to see what kind of people lived in his town, to try to understand them. You see, in a strange way he understood the brutality of the Nazis who executed his friends, and the prison guards. He understood the hate of the brown-shirted police who dragged his neighbors from their homes, screaming. What he didn't understand was the man who lived across from the synagogue, who peered through his window day after day as Jews were herded into death trains. Michael remembered, "The man reflected no pity, no pleasure, no shock, no anger, no interest. He was impassive, cold, impersonal."

There is a bond, Michael thought, between the brutalizers and the victims. They have something to do with each other. "They, at least, belong in the same universe. But not so the spectator. The spectator is entirely beyond us, seeing without being seen, present but unnoticed." He concludes, "to be indifferent, for whatever reason, is to deny not only the validity of existence, but also its beauty. Betray, and you are a man, torture your neighbor, and you are still a man. Evil is human. Weakness is human. Indifference is not."

This is why God hates sloth more than any other sin.

Look at God's response to the people of Laodicea. In this passage from Revelation, seven churches are addressed by the risen Christ. Only Laodicea has the grim distinction of being totally rebuked, totally chastised. Jesus says that He feels like throwing up when He thinks of the people of that church. They are neither bubbling over with energy for God nor are they totally chilly towards God. God can understand warm hearts. God can do something about cold hearts. But these luke warm, in between, sort of caring but sort of not people made God sick. The hot are human. The cold are human. The lukewarm are something other.

What's so bad about being somewhat interested in God, a little concerned about growing in the faith? Isn't it better to be neutral towards God rather than outright opposing God? Amazingly enough, no. Because God can break down the heart that is opposing Him. Anger and love are opposite emotions, but they are at least opposites on the same emotional scale. You have to care about somebody to either love them or hate them. You are in a relationship with a person when you either love them or hate them. But indifference puts you in a whole different place. It leaves you with no relationship at all, nothing to build upon. No emotional investment at all.

Don't tell me sloth isn't a deadly sin. Sloth allows people to be killed. Sloth allows souls to be lost. Sloth kills off some loving, caring, human part of you and me. As Helen Keller once observed: "Life is either a daring experience or nothing at all."

Of all the deadly sins, sloth is the hardest to break out of because the tendency to be controlled by sloth kills the desire to change for the better.

As Tony Campolo writes in The Seven Deadly Sins: "I know of a young woman who lacked any semblance of joy in her life, even though she had accepted Christ as her Savior. She lived a life of relative piety and went to church on Sundays with fair regularity. Nevertheless, life was depressing for her and she seemed bored with it. She went to a Christian psychotherapist for help, but after several sessions with him, felt that the effort was futile. Then one day she came into her therapist's office with her face radiant with excitement "I've had the most wonderful day," she said. "This morning I could not get my car started, so I called the pastor and asked him if he could drive me to my appointment with you. He said he would, but on the way he had to stop by the hospital and make a few calls. I went with him and while I was in the hospital, I visited some elderly people in one of the wards. I read from the Bible and prayed with them. By the time the morning was over, I was higher than a kite. I haven't felt this good in years."

The psychotherapist quickly responded, "Now we know how to make you happy! Our problem is solved! Now we know how to keep you out of the doldrums!"

Much to his surprise, the young woman answered, "You don't expect me to do this sort of thing every day, do you?"

Here is a very specific case in which the person knew what she had to do to experience joy. But sloth is a condition of the heart that works against doing what is necessary to find joy in life or to experience salvation.

Campolo writes: "Most people know they need to be saved sometime and think that they may get around to putting things right with God some day, but they lack motivation to get moving on it now. Sloth takes a terrible toll ... It is impossible to estimate the number of people who intended to become Christians at some later time, but who were not willing to make the decisions when they were confronted with the Gospel. Those who are lazy can always find some reason for delaying action, hoping that if they delay long enough, they will not have to act at all. Usually, they procrastinate until it is too late to act."

If you have given way to sloth -- to not caring -- if you are here this morning only because it is easier than fighting with your spouse or parents about not being here -- what can you do? I can't just say "snap out of it" because slothful people don't snap. All I can do is open the door to the danger of your path -- as I have done -- and urge you to ask God to help you change. And even if we don't care, we should take it as a sign of health if we can at least care that we don't care -- or begin to care that we don't care. God can take that much room -- that much of an opening -- to heal our lives.

For the way to be rid of sloth is to become subject to the Holy Spirit to prayerfully open yourself to God's energizing, engaging power -- even if you only want that about ten percent. As Paul writes in Romans 8:11: "If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through the Spirit which dwells in you."

The Holy Spirit gives us a sense of direction as to what we should do. God provides a purpose for life. He convinces those who surrender to the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives that they are called to be on mission in His name. When we become aware of a divine calling, sloth finds no room.

And when the Holy Spirit fills us, we begin to feel what Jesus feels for His fallen creation. The work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is intended not only to perfect us so that we will be fit for heaven when we die, but to equip us to be God's agents for change in this present age.

To be filled with the Spirit is to have our hearts broken by the things that break the heart of Jesus. To be alive in the Spirit is to view people through the eyes of Christ. Being filled with the Spirit creates within us a hunger for justice and a craving for the salvation of the lost. With such an orientation to the world, it is impossible to maintain a slothful attitude.

In the words of Tony Campolo, "sloth deadens, but the Spirit gives life. Sloth thrives on feelings of inferiority, but the Spirit gives us the assurance that we are the children of God. Sloth is self-centered, but the Spirit creates a burning desire to change the world. Sloth leaves us bored and empty, but in the Spirit we find the fullness of God's joy."