Scripture: Judges 19: 1-10 and Hebrews 12: 1-3

Sermon: The Seven Deadly Sins: SLOTH (Or Vocational Amnesia)

Topics: knighthood, sloth,

Preached: October 15, 2000

Rev. Mike Abma

In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a certain Levite, residing in the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah. ²But his concubine became angry with him, and she went away from him to her father’s house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there for some four months. ³Then her husband set out after her, to speak tenderly to her and bring her back. He had with him his servant and a couple of donkeys. When he reached her father’s house, the girl’s father saw him and came with joy to meet him.⁴His father-in-law, the girl’s father, made him stay, and he remained with him for three days; so they ate and drank, and he stayed there. ⁵On the fourth day they got up early in the morning, and he prepared to go; but the girl’s father said to his son-in-law, ‘Fortify yourself with a bit of food, and after that you may go.’ ⁶So the two men sat and ate and drank together; and the girl’s father said to the man, ‘Why not spend the night and enjoy yourself?’ ⁷When the man got up to go, his father-in-law kept urging him until he spent the night there again. ⁸On the fifth day he got up early in the morning to leave; and the girl’s father said, ‘Fortify yourself.’ So they lingered until the day declined, and the two of them ate and drank. ⁹When the man with his concubine and his servant got up to leave, his father-in-law, the girl’s father, said to him, ‘Look, the day has worn on until it is almost evening. Spend the night. See, the day has drawn to a close. Spend the night here and enjoy yourself. Tomorrow you can get up early in the morning for your journey, and go home.’

10 But the man would not spend the night; he got up and departed, and arrived opposite Jebus (that is, Jerusalem). He had with him a couple of saddled donkeys, and his concubine was with him.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

SIR GWAIN and the GREEN KNIGHT

Someone asked me, “What’s the sin of the week?”

“Well, the sin this week is SLOTH” I answered.

SLOTH — now truthfully, when is the last time you actually used that word in a sentence? When is the last time you heard anyone use that word in a sentence – except maybe your mother?

What is sloth and what is there about it that is deadly?

The word “sloth” sounds rather old-fashioned, doesn’t it? Even medieval. So, I thought, perhaps it would be helpful to go back to the middle ages to begin to understand what it means. Let’s go back to the great medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” This poem is set during the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Sir Gawain is the most valiant and most virtuous knight of the realm. One day King Arthur’s court in invaded by a mysterious knight all dressed in green – the Green Knight. This Green Knight issues a challenge. He challenges any knight of the Round Table to take a swing at him with an ax on the condition that within one year he would get to take a swing at them. Sir Gawain rises to the challenge. He swings at the Green Knight, but the Green Knight does not die. The Green Knight then reminds Gawain that within a year he must fulfill his part of the challenge.

Soon the year is almost over and Gawain is slowly making his way towards the Green Knight. It is in the middle of winter and he is feeling pretty sorry for himself for getting into such a mess. Suddenly, up from the mists Gawain finds a magnificent castle. The Lord and the Lady of the castle are wonderfully hospitable. They welcome him in. The Lord of the castle is engaging to converse with. The Lady of the castle is stunning to look at. They give him lots to eat, lots to drink, and a wonderful bed to sleep in. Each day the Lord of the castle gets up early to go hunting. Each day Gawain thinks he should get going to meet the Green Knight, but it feels so good to sleep in, to flirt with the lady of the castle, and to eat and drink to his heart’s content.

Finally the last day of the year arrives and Gawain must ride out to meet the Green Knight. Lo and behold, the mysterious Green Knight ends up being the Lord of the castle Gawain has been staying in. Gawain is supposed to be the most virtuous and most valiant knight of the realm. But the Green Knight knows better. He knows how Gawain’s conduct over the last number of days is totally “unbecoming a knight.” And Gawain is fully humbled .

Gawain is humbled not only because he had eaten too much, drank too much, slept too much, or flirted with the lady of the castle too much. Gawain is humbled because he has sinned – and his main sin is the sin of sloth. He had forgotten who he was. He had forgotten that he was a knight of the Round Table. He had forgotten to conduct himself in a way worthy of a knight, worthy of the most virtuous and valiant knight of the realm.^[1]

SLOTH and the LEVITE

That is what sloth is, really. It is a sin of omission. It is a sin of neglect. It is the sin of “forgetting.” I like to call it “vocational amnesia.” It is having duties yet wanting to be distracted.

It is having responsibilities, yet seeking revelry.

It is knowing something should be done, but either procrastinating or simply assuming someone else will do it.

Sloth is not a sin against productivity or against the economy or against the GNP.

Sloth is a sin against God because God calls us to live a certain way, and when we are slothful we simply refuse to listen or don’t care to listen.

This is the sin of the Levite in Judges 19 and in a real way the sin of the whole nation of Israel at the end of Judges: “For in those days Israel had no king, and everyone did as they saw fit in their own eyes.”

The Levite in Judges 19 is a person who forgets what it means to be a Levite, to be a person dedicated to the service of the holy God. The story starts with his marriage being in trouble. I favor the NRSV that translates vs. 2 as “and his wife became angry with him” rather than the NIV’s rendering “she was unfaithful to him.” A number of commentators believe she was a battered wife, an abused woman. I think this best fits the overall flow of this story. The wife is the victim, from start to finish. So the Levite’s wife leaves him and returns home. After being gone for 4 months, this Levite finally gets around to seeing if she will come back … not exactly Mr. Speedy is he? Anyway, this Levite arrives at his wife’s parental home with the goal of being a good husband. When verse 3 says he went “to persuade her to return”, it literally says in Hebrew he went to refresh or please “her heart.”

But notice that once he arrives, she hardly enters the picture. It is all father-in-law and this Levite having a good time. They eat, they drink, they sleep in. Whenever we hear the father-in-law say, “Refresh yourself” literally it means “refresh your heart or please your heart. And the Levite always does. In other words, what this Levite was supposed to be doing for his wife – to please her heart — he ends up doing only for himself.

This Levite doesn’t know what it means to be a good husband.

He neglects his wife.

This Levite doesn’t know what it means to be a good servant of God.

He forgets that God is in the picture. In fact, notice that God is never mentioned.

Now we may say, “So what? So someone has a more relaxed, easy-going view of life, what’s the big deal? Sloth may be a sin that is distracting or dull, but you can hardly call it deadly, can you?

THE GRUESOME END

I stopped reading this story at verse 10. But this story goes on for another 93 verses to the very end of Judges. It is one of the most gruesome stories in all of Scripture. Because of this Levite’s sloth, he, his wife, and their servant leave late, too late. They get caught in the city of Gibeah in the dark. A kindly old man takes them into his house, but then the unthinkable happens. A gang of awful men surround the house with the intention of assaulting them.

Does this Levite pray to God? No.

Does he do the courageous thing and step out to face the mob and protect his family? No.

What does this Levite do? This Levite pushes his poor neglected wife out the door, where she is brutally assaulted, and left to die.

“In those days Israel had no king, and everyone did as they saw fit in their own eyes” – sloth leads to chaos. In this case, sloth eventually leads to the chaos of a civil war in Israel. The book of Judges ends with this chaos.

SLIDING INTO SLOTH

Sloth is a deadly sin – for when we forget who we are, how we are supposed to live, what our duties in life are, and when we don’t even seem to care that we have forgotten them, that is when chaos occurs.

It is no wonder that in the middle ages the main image used for sloth was a pack of wild dogs – a pack of dogs with nothing to do but run around wildly creating chaos in their wake.

Sloth creates a vacuum, a spiritual vacuum. The vacuum comes because we have forgotten what God expects from us and, worse than that, we don’t even care what God expects from us. In fact, when sloth gets deep in our bones, we don’t even care about what we expect from ourselves.

But the devil loves a spiritual vacuum because a spiritual vacuum, void of virtue, will always attract every vice imaginable.

Sloth isn’t simply something from the time of the Judges.

Sloth isn’t a medieval word to describe a strictly medieval condition.

Sloth is a clear and present danger.

There are a number of you here who are students. God is calling you to study, to be eager to learn – which is what the word student (from the Latin studeo) means.

But it’s easy to forget that, isn’t it? It’s easy to have a good time til late, very late; to sleep late, very late; to yawn through classes. Eventually it will be easy to wonder why you are even taking these classes. Eventually you may wonder why do laundry, why take showers, why do anything? Eventually, when Sunday morning rolls around, the closest thing to a religious experience you will have is to roll over in bed and think “well, Sundays are for rest, aren’t they?”

Beware. Sloth can infect the bones, deaden the spirit, and before you know it, it will be hard to find a reason to get out bed at all.

There are people here who are married. As husbands and wives, God is calling us to love our spouse with a love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. But now we’ve hit the doldrums. At one time we couldn’t bear to be apart. Now we can hardly stand to be together. And we are tired, drained. It is hard being patient. It is hard being forgiving. We wonder, “Is this marriage really worth the effort?”

There are people here who are parents. God is calling us to raise children to know him, to love him, to serve him. To be a parent takes work, diligence, energy. But by the time we get home from work, the last thing we want to be bothered with is the fact that Steve needs to get his homework done or that Stacy still isn’t home for supper. Setting rules and keeping boundaries is tough. Making demands is demanding. At some point we tire of asking our daughter to clean her room and we simply say, “Never mind, I’ll do it myself.”

We are here this morning because God has called us to be a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation of people belonging to him.

But for some, these words don’t excite us anymore. The church can get along fine without me, we think. And when we are asked to contribute in a specific way, excuses are given:

“Hey, I put in my time.”

“I’m taking care of Me right now.”

“I need some time for myself.”

Even whole churches can be seduced into this mindset – we are a church of few demands, we are user-friendly, we are a low commitment church.

Because sloth is a sin of omission, of neglect, of the things we fail to do, sloth builds up resentment to any type of correction. How many times haven’t we heard someone snap:

“Don’t tell me how to live!”

“I’m going to live my life the way I want to live my life”

Sloth detests any sort of discipline, any sort of accountability, any sort of demand or command.

COMBATTING SLOTH

How do we combat sloth?

We combat sloth by remembering that God is near and the Holy Spirit is busily at work.

We combat sloth by accepting the fact that the life of faithfulness God calls us to is a life of service, a life of sacrifice, a life of struggle.

We fight against sloth by continually asking ourselves, “What kind of life is God calling me to live in my work, in my marriage, in my family, in my church, in my neighborhood, in my world?”

Is asking these questions tiring? Yes.

Does it take courage? Yes.

Will we at times be discouraged at how many naked there are to clothe,

how many hungry there are to feed,

how many sick there are to visit,

how many grieving there are to comfort,

how much garbage there is to recycle,

and how much misery there is in this world to help heal?

Yes, at times we will be discouraged.

But the Christian path is the narrow, rugged road, not the easy escalator ride.

When we get tired, when we get discouraged, when we get down, even when we at times forget what we are called to do, we are to keep our eyes on our champion knight.

OUR CHAMPION KNIGHT

For our champion knight came down from heaven to duel with death.

In that duel, he lived virtuously, he fought valiantly, he persevered to the end.

Jesus Christ triumphed, and by grace, we live in the wake of his victory.

In baptism he touches us with his grace

then bids us rise as knights of his kingdom

so that we may run the good race with perseverance,

fight the good fight for his kingdom.

We run the good race and fight the good fight by having passion –

passion to obey Christ in the small things of life;

passion to obey Christ over the long haul of life.

And as we fight, as we run, perhaps we should heed the words of Phillips Brooks:

Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger people.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.

Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle; but you…you shall be a miracle.

And everyday you shall wonder at yourself and at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.

Amen

Prayer:

Lord God, arm us for the battle and strengthen us for the fight. Give us a belt of truth, a breastplate of righteousness, and feet ready to run wherever you call us to go. Give us a shield of faith, a helmet of salvation, and the sword of your Spirit, so that in the words we speak and the deeds we do we may fearlessly make known the mystery and majesty of the grace of Jesus. Amen.

1. Note that the 2021 movie, The Green Knight, also focuses on Gawain’s sloth – his failure to live up to his knightly ideals. ↑