particulars. We are able to recognize and parse sin through these seven categories not so that we might wallow in them, but to learn what it might mean to turn from them.


These categories are ancient but never outdated, as sin never becomes more sophisticated or more complex than it has always been. Pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth are still the primal forces that drive us away into hid- ing from God. To allow them to remain unnamed and unidentified is to empower them with an undue level of mystery and power. To name them is to expose them, to maim them. The fact that these sins are universal to all human experience does not speak of their great power, but rather their utter lack of originality. We need to speak the common language of sin, mun- dane but precise, because it is the route through which we might learn to speak new languages of grace and truth. These are exotic, creative words that call us out of the fundamental lack of imagination at the heart of all sin and into the wild of new creation.


how people relate sexually, this is where culture goes.


“Sin Is Our Only Hope”


Since sin is never private, the Church can’t be reluctant to speak of sin in public and get about the business of learning how to repent together. In her concise but potent Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor suggests:


We do wrong, but we do not do wrong alone. We live in a web of creation that binds us together with all other living beings. If we want to be saved, then we had better figure out how to do it together, since none of us can resign from this web of relationship. . . . Meanwhile, sin is our


only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again. There is no help for those who admit no need of help. There is no repair for those who insist that nothing is bro- ken, and there is no hope of transfor- mation for a world whose inhabitants accept that is sadly but irreversibly wrecked.


I love Taylor’s phrase that “sin is our only hope”—not committing sins, but naming them, identifying them. Not for the sake of judging others, but so that through the language of sin we can redis- cover the language of repentance. The seven deadly sins give us the language to take sin out of the abstract and into the


When we speak the language of the seven deadly sins, we open the door to the most underutilized and underappreciated practice of the Church: confession. At the risk of seeming crass, confession is the fiber of the soul. It is the discipline given in order for us to dispose of the toxins brought by the seven deadly sins with regularity. Confession gives us the capac- ity to deal with sin in a way that is healthy before ordinary vices give way to extraor- dinary bondage. Without confession, the toxins of sin will be released in ways that are destructive. Confession is the place where it is necessary for us to be articulate in the language of the seven deadly sins, so that we might become articulate in new tongues of freedom and liberation.


Jonathan Martin pastors the Renovatus Church of God in Charlotte, NC.


EVANGEL | October 2010 9


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