March 19thSin Personified
To my dear TFMC family,
Something you may have noticed from the last two weeks is that I’m talking about the Seven Deadly Sins as if they were living entities. I’ve chosen to personify our Seven Deadly Sins deliberately. I believe that they’re not just concepts or ideas, or actions that we commit or omit, but that they are forces at work in our world, or as the Apostle Paul would write, they’re Powers and Principalities.
I think that it’s important to recognize how pervasive these Seven Deadly Sins are. And at the same time, I think it’s also important to recognize how sneaky, subtle and subversive they are insofar as they’ve been able to creep into our lives and to masquerade as virtues; wolves in sheep’s clothing.
C.S. Lewis played around with this briefly in his book The Screwtape Letters. In this book, a young demon asks for help from their uncle “Screwtape” and what follows is a series of correspondence between the young demon and their uncle as the elder tries to educate the younger on how to corrupt, subtly, and ‘win’ souls over to their side. It’s a curious thought experiment, and, I think it also speaks to how these Seven Deadly Sins can slowly, unnoticed, creep into our lives.
I name them as Powers because I believe, we then, have an opportunity to confront them in our own lives. The Powers only have power in our lives when they are unnamed and unnoticed. It’s in the shadows where they can bare their teeth. To name is to defang them. It’s been a delight to hear us laugh and joke a bit when talking about Pride and Envy these last weeks, and I attribute this to them being defanged by us naming and recognizing them in our lives. Naming the Seven Deadly Sins gives us the upper hand in trying to tackle and cultivate the opposing virtues.
In scripture, names are important. Names are a form of power and a way to control. To name something; to speak its name; is to exert power over it. Jesus does this when confronting demons. We do this when we name these Sins in our lives; when we name where our love has been distorted. And in this naming, we open a door for us to attend to redirecting our love back to its proper form.
A key theme for me; and undercurrent to our worship for the season of Lent is that of transformation. How are we being transformed into better reflections of God’s love? Naming the way these Powers; these Sins exist and influence our lives is the first step in this transformation. The next step in our journey of transformation is to attend to the Holy Virtues which we highlight.
Yours,
Craig Janzen Neufeld, Pastor