THE DEADLIEST SIN OF ALL

I have a book on my shelf about the seven deadly sins. I even read it. It was, well, deadly. Even for someone who is in the sin business, reading about sin can soon put you to sleep. It would have been helpful, I suspect, if the book was a bit juicier; you know, filled with examples of people breaking each of those deadly deeds. But that would be tabloid theology and as such has no place on a proper theologian’s bookshelf – in his hidden drawer, maybe.

At any rate, I did plow through the book. It was written by a Jewish theologian whose Old Testament theology is ripe with sin and punishment. When one sinned in Old Testament times, one was in deep trouble. Each sin had its assigned punishment. Sin was truly deadly both to the individual and to society. Today theologians wonder, as a not-too-recent book wondered, what ever happened to sin?

Well, nothing, really. We may try to sugar-coat it, down-play it, pass it off as some psychological or genetic deficiency. But it is still there and still very really and still has some disastrous, if not deadly, consequences both to the sinner and the sinnee.

It does not take a theologian to realize that pride, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, greed and sloth -- the seven deadly sins -- are sinful, and that, taken to the extreme, can be very, very deadly. Too much of anything, especially anything bad, is simply not good for one's health -- physical, spiritual, mental. Sin destroys body, mind and spirit. As deadly as those sins may be, and they are -- you can read the book -- there is one sin that is the deadliest sin of all, at least to my way of thinking. That is the sin of unforgivingness.

I know: the word in not found in any dictionary nor is it found on my spell check on the computer. But that does not mean that it is a non-word. I would maintain that it is very much a word for our dictionaries, and, unfortunately, a word for all seasons and all persons. Unforgivingness prevents us from moving ahead, from eliminating any other sin(s) from our lives.

When we are stuck on unforgivingness, we are simply stuck. We must not only be able to forgive others who have sinned against us, but, more importantly, we must be able to accept forgiveness for our own sins. As dull and as boring as that book was as I read it, I was also aware in the process of reading about those seven deadly sins that I stand accused and guilty of each one of them to one degree or another.

It would be easy to become overwhelmed by one's sinfulness, to wonder how one could ever be forgiven, to believe that one could never be forgiven. It could be easy to fall into the deadliest sin of all: unforgivingness. My suspicion is that we live on the edge of forgiving or not, of accepting forgiveness or not. It’s a life-long tension, a life-long struggle that ebbs and flows throughout our lives.

The saving grace in all this is that deep down we know God forgives us and as God forgives us, we must also forgive, both others and ourselves.