Mk 13:24-37
30 November 2008
1st Sunday of Advent
“Acedia, the Enemy of Advent”
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” That’s the unforgettable line Kevin Spacey utters in the movie The Usual Suspects. In the movie, he’s referring to the notorious criminal, Keyser Soze, but it’s clear that he means more than that particular villain. The quote ends, “And like that…he’s gone.”
I thought of that line when I started Kathleen Norris’ new book, Acedia and Me.[1] I haven’t yet finished reading it, but it verifies something that I’ve long suspected: of the so-called “seven deadly sins,” sloth is easily the worst of the lot.
I’ve mentioned this list before. Besides sloth, we have envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and wrath. Compared with those others, some feel like sloth wouldn’t be such a bad thing! But that would be a mistaken notion.
The original word for that specific deadly sin, which appears in the title of Norris’s book, was “acedia.” Over time, it became lost in the term “sloth.” Most of us think of that as laziness. (Plus we have the image of those cute critters hanging from trees!) It is laziness, but not the kind that means you’re a couch potato. (Though I suppose that could figure into it as well!)
Acedia literally means a “lack of care.” In early monasticism, it was called the “noonday demon.” It’s a state of spiritual apathy, a condition of sluggishness, in which the person afflicted is unwilling or unable to care about much of anything at all—at least, it ends up that way.
In our worship bulletin, I’ve included the definition that the well-known preacher Fred Craddock gives it. Instead of mere laziness, he says it’s “the ability to look at a starving child…with a swollen stomach and say, ‘Well it’s not my kid.’…Or to see an old man sitting alone among the pigeons in the park and say, ‘Well…that’s not my dad.’ It is that capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don’t care.”[2] I don’t care.
But that’s not what reminded me of Kevin Spacey’s line in the movie, about the Devil convincing the world he didn’t exist. It was this passage in Norris’ book:[3]
“I am intrigued,” she says, “that over the course of the last sixteen hundred years we managed to lose the word acedia. Maybe that’s one reason why, as we languish from spiritual drought, we are often unaware of what ails us. We spend greater sums of money on leisure but are more tense than ever, and hire lifestyle coaches to ease the stress…
“We are tempted to regard with reverence those dedicated souls who make themselves available ‘twenty-four/seven’ and regard silence as unproductive, solitude as irresponsible. But when distraction becomes the norm, we are in danger of becoming immunized from feeling itself…Is it possible that in twenty-first-century America, acedia has come into its own? How can that be, when so few know its name?”
Obviously, we don’t need to know the name of something for it to control us. Are we too “slothful” to identify and resist acedia? If we are, then we’ll miss the point of our gospel reading in Mark.
Mark 13 is parallel with Matthew 24. Here, as there, Jesus makes some odd statements about his return, and his disciples ask him what he’s talking about. He mentions false messiahs and false prophets showing up on the scene. A couple of weeks ago, when my text was the parable of the talents, I identified that as the lead-in to the story.
Today in verse 34, Jesus describes “a man going on a journey, [leaving] home and [putting] his slaves in charge, each with his work, and [commanding] the doorkeeper to be on the watch.” That’s a rough parallel with the parable of the talents in Matthew. What they have in common is the cautionary word from Jesus to “keep alert,” “keep awake” (vv. 35, 37).
Unfortunately, for acedia—for sloth—keeping awake is very low on its agenda. If there’s one thing that Mr. and Mrs. Sloth do not raise their kids to be, it’s bright eyed and bushy tailed! And going along with my sermon title (“Acedia, the Enemy of Advent”), the Sloth family routinely ignores Advent. I’m not just talking about the season of Advent; I’m also talking about the concept of Advent.
This may be hard to believe, but an Advent spirituality doesn’t involve calculating the number of shopping days until Christmas. Advent involves looking for the One who comes. As we see in our gospel reading in Mark, Advent is all about living with awareness, living with expectation. It’s hard to do that if our hearts are weighed down with petty desires and distractions.
I say that, understanding that our current economic difficulties make that more of a challenge than usual. As one writer reminds us, if we identify “God with consumerism and prosperity, economic scarcity may appear to be a sign of God’s judgment [and] withdrawal.” However, “the experience of divine absence, painful as it is, can inspire a quest for new and more authentic experiences of God.”[4]
A quest for new and more authentic experiences of God: as Banu and I face the prospect of being pastors who are “unchurched,” that takes on added meaning.
If there’s one word that describes our American attitude to Advent, and also to Christmas, acedia might be it. That slothful devil may creep around unnoticed, but in no way does that limit its power.
Our friend Kathleen has an interesting take on this. She says, “We have come to ‘treat economic laws of supply and demand’ as though they were ‘the laws of the universe.’ If there is a religion that encompasses all the world, it is the pursuit of wealth. But Christians must recognize that in slothfully acquiescing to its petty gods, we deny Christ a place on earth even more effectively than do the loud atheists…of our time.”[5]
How crazy is that? Denying Christ a place on earth—the heart of Advent and Christmas—because we put idols in his place. Acedia actually does call us to care—it’s just about stuff that doesn’t matter.
Here’s an example. Do you remember, from years ago, when Pepsi Cola asked us to “take the Pepsi challenge”? It was a blind taste test with Coke. (I’m amazed that I still remember this incident!) There was a display at the grocery store near our house in Tennessee, and the woman behind the table asked me if I wanted to take the challenge.
So I tried both sodas, and I picked the one I liked better. The woman was visibly dejected. “Oh, you picked Coke.” I had made the wrong choice! But apparently I could still repent, because she offered the rest of the cup to me. That is, the rest of the Pepsi—not the one I chose as my preference!
One of my heroes, Thomas Merton, had an experience like this many years earlier. While in a store in Louisville, a clerk asked him what brand of toothpaste he wanted. When he responded, “I don’t care,” Merton said the man “almost dropped dead…I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or Crest or something with five colors. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient.”[6]
As I look back on my life, I can think of many foolish and trivial things about which, in my own way, I have cared deeply—and while doing that, paying little attention to things that really matter. That’s a big part of what Jesus means in verse 35. “Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.”
Perhaps the greatest sin of sloth, the worst assault of acedia, is the effect on the imagination. Its biggest crime is what it does to creativity. As Norris says, “Acedia can flatten any place into a stark desert landscape and make hope a mirage.” It can make our world “obscenely small.”[7] If we believe the lie that we have nothing to offer—that we aren’t creative—then the problems in life will start to feel too overwhelming. We will lose our ability to care.
Something similar to that is the feeling that life itself is absurd. It’s the feeling that there’s no meaning to what we do anyway, so what’s the point? Acedia mocks the repetition of daily life. It says, “You get out of bed, eat food, do whatever you busy yourself with, go to bed, and do the whole thing again tomorrow. To what end?”
There have been times when I’ve been tempted by that dreary outlook. I’ve sometimes noticed it when I’m watching someone perform a job with repetitive motions, especially if I’m at a distance. I can’t hear them; I can only see them, maybe shuffling things around. And that outlook can be expanded to the entire world. People everywhere: being born, doing whatever with their lives, and then going back to the earth.
Giving in to that kind of outlook sucks the life out of you. It sucks the hope out of you. But for Christians, hope is not an option. Hope is a command; it’s a command to resist acedia—to say “no” to sloth. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for someone without hope to expect “the Son of Man,” as our scripture says.
When it seems like everything is falling apart, when as verses 24 and 25 say, “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken,” hope can seem like a scarce commodity.
It’s been said that scriptures like these “join hope and fear in a world turned upside down, spiritually, economically, and cosmically. When the familiar world is collapsing, we are tempted to circle the wagons [and] narrow the scope of our ethical consideration.”[8] In other words, we’re tempted to compromise ourselves, to sell out, to give up. Acedia laughs at those who bank on hope, instead of on cynicism and despair.
To those who suggest otherwise, I offer you the advice of Martin Luther, someone noted for his feisty temperament:
“You must be resolute, bid yourself defiance, and say to yourself wrathfully…‘No matter how unwilling you are to live, you are going to live and like it! This is what God wants…Begone, you thoughts of the devil! To hell with dying and death!’…Grit your teeth in the face of your thoughts, and for God’s sake be more obstinate, headstrong, and willful than the most stubborn peasant.”[9]
You know, he’s the kind of guy I want playing on my team! And I think that’s an apt image. The next time that acedia whispers to you that life is a spectator sport, remember Martin Luther!
Advent calls us to shake off sloth and slumber. It calls us, as Bruce Epperly puts it, to “[e]mbrace the moment, not as an opportunity to get the best sale price, but to experience God’s vision for your life today, and for your role in healing the world.”[10] Advent calls us to welcome the One who comes—the One who, instead of letting us slothfully dream life away, gives us the grace to live the dream.
[1] Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).
[2] in Norris, 115.
[3] Norris, 45-46.
[4] www.processandfaith.org/lectionary/YearB/2008-2009/2008-11-30%20Advent1.shtml
[5] Norris, 128.
[6] in Norris, 125.
[7] Norris, 39, 85.
[8] www.processandfaith.org/lectionary/YearB/2008-2009/2008-11-30%20Advent1.shtml
[9] in Norris, 165.
[10] www.processandfaith.org/lectionary/YearB/2008-2009/2008-11-30%20Advent1.shtml