Busy is As Busy Does

9-27-09 Sloth: Busy is As Busy Does

We’re up to “sin of the week” #4 with Sloth. Do you have a favorite yet? (Pride, Anger, Gluttony, Sloth….)

It seems as though whenever “sloth” comes up, conversation turns to those much-maligned South and Central American tree-hangers whose incredibly efficient systems make them appear lazy.

If you can get past the critters, sloth talk tends to turn next to the worst possible thing you can accuse a protestant work ethic trained American of: laziness.

If the conversation is sensitive, it will acknowledge that there is a difference between laziness and depression, a treatable medical condition. But let’s leave those boxes behind and steer toward another, causal, alternative this morning.

I really appreciate the way sloth follows gluttony in this fall’s series. Because I am increasingly convinced that sloth is the direct result of being too full.

John Wesley knew this. In fact it’s likely that Wesley would have ranked sloth at the top of his hit sins list. "And when sloth and luxury are joined together, will they not provide an abundant offspring?" (See “The Late Work of God in North America.”)

You see, Wesley’s England was in a period of economic stratification: as industrialization told hold, a new class of mill and mine owners expanded the pool of wealth enjoyed by royals while urban slums developed to house working families who lost the “unfunded” benefits of a farm economy.

Wesley’s sermon addresses those who have plenty, who are “full.”

Proverbs 24: I went by the field of the slothful and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding; and lo, it was all grown over with thorns and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. (NIV)

Having too much “good” decreases room for “essential,” squeezes it out. The article I referred to a few weeks ago asked why disasters can feel strangely like paradise. In the wake of a disaster we become utterly focused on what is truly life giving.

You don’t hear people lamenting lost bread machines, you see people offering one another bread.

Those early Christian monk’s whose “8 bad thoughts” developed into the modern seven deadly sins considered sloth to be one of the worst, right up there with pride.

In her new book, “Acedia”, Kathleen Norris points out that sloth is not just a “personal problem.” It is a cumulative public problem. [It is] my suspicion that much of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plague us today are the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress. When we look at acedias’ root meaning-not caring-we can see it as a social problem and perceive that the sloth it engenders is anything but an insignificant physical laziness. It may even manifest as hyperactivity, but it is more like the activity of a hamster on a treadmill than the action what will enhance the common good.”

The Rev. Jorge Acevedo will receive the 2009 Distinguished Evangelist of the United Methodist Church award later this month from the Foundation for Evangelism. [Acevedo is] lead pastor at Grace Church, a multi-site United Methodist congregation in Cape Coral, Fla. (UM Portal 9-25-09):

When I came here in 1996, the church was averaging about 400 in attendance on Sundays, and had been in a five-year decline. My first Sunday here, they told me we had $29.16 in our checking account and owed $1.2 million on a building. The church was filled with wonderful people who had just kind of lost their way; they were good people who had just been lulled to sleep. Yet there were 30 people who had been on the Walk to Emmaus who were praying for renewal. They are the unsung heroes of this story: that group of people prayed that God would do a new thing in their church. [Church attendance has grown to more than 2,600 in weekly worship.]

God has given me a passion for reaching the un-churched, the once-churched and the over-churched.

The “over-churched” person is the second son in the prodigal son story, who never left home. The over-churched have lived a good life. … The intimacy of their relationship with Jesus is but a faint memory. There are a lot of over-churched people who are United Methodist in name, but not Christian by their own testimony.

Converting the convinced is really hard! They are convinced that everything is OK, and yet they don’t bear the fruit of a faithful follower of Christ. … The best way is for them to see these un-churched people who come into our church and see the vitality of a fresh new relationship with Jesus. It’s pretty contagious.

In other words, the over churched person is so full, stuffed with good things, that we need to intentionally make room for the fresh and new, but are unlikely to go looking for it..

(Acevedo continues) God has given the local church the primary responsibility of doling out the grace of God a broken and hurting world. But we’ve forgotten that.

We have also forgotten our historical tradition as Wesleyans. We were a movement begun among the working class; we’ve become a movement primarily among the white collar. We’ve forgotten our roots of personal piety and social holiness. We have part of our church that is passionately committed to saving souls and another part that’s passionately committed to meeting human need. The genius of the Wesleyan movement, to quote [Good to Great author] Jim Collins, was the “genius of the and, not the tyranny of the or.” Churches that God seems to be working in and through are those that seek to live out the Wesleyan vision of the spiritual life. Churches that forget that, die; churches that live into that, live.

(He remembers) One of my dearest friends, Jim, was a fifth-of-vodka-a-day drinker, two six packs of beer and a handful-of-Vicodin taker, a womanizer, who, when his wife came to see me and I told her to “Run, don’t walk, get in recovery.” Her husband got into treatment, came back to our church and got busy walking the walk as a disciple of Jesus. Today he and his wife, Kim, lead our marriage ministry. …. There are thousands of Jims out there with stories like that.

Our job is to set the table. God’s job is to serve the meal. What we try to do every day is set the table so God can come and serve the meal. And when He serves the meal, people don’t leave hungry. They leave transformed.

It takes courage for someone who needs recovery to say so out loud, to reach out for help, to witness to their healing.

In the traditional list of seven deadly sins and their counteracting virtues, courage is the antidote to sloth.

Courage grounded in her faith and supported by Christian fellowship is what helped Leymah Gbowee, one of the subjects in the film (Pray the Devil Back to Hell) and a Profile in Courage winner, stand up with other Christian and Muslim women of Liberia to combat the violent warlords and the corrupt Charles Taylor regime.

Armed with white t-shirts, the power of prayer, and their Bibles and Qurans, these women won a long-awaited peace that led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female head of state and Liberia’s first elected female president. In one scene that had the audience cheering, these women barricaded the site of the stalled peace talks in Ghana. The men could not leave the room even to eat until they drafted a workable peace plan. When the guards tried to arrest these women, they evoked the most powerful nonviolent weapon in their arsenal by threatening to remove their clothes. This strategy worked, as the guards chose not to bring shame upon themselves by forcing the women to expose their naked bodies. The women kept their clothes on but they also kept their promise that if need be, “they’ll be back.” (How Women of Faith Fought a Dictator with Nonviolence by Becky Garrison 09-23-2009, sojo.net)

The question underlying sloth is, “what does it matter,” “why bother?” If Gbowee, who we’d expect to be full of fear instead of faith, can find courage in the vacuum of power, how can we, whose lives are full with so much good, fail to realize how much it matters that we act courageously, with faith as our foundation? With God’ help, let us live as though it matters.