Seven deadly sins.

How’s that for a conversation starter? Equally robust topics for family night be Nazi surgical techniques or the best fecal matter for fertilizing roses. How perfect for those post-dinner gatherings on cold winter nights. “Hey kids, gather round. We’re gonna talk about the quickest way to eternal damnation. Oh, and bring me a beer.”

Good friend, colleague, and all-round good egg, Laurie Jackson, just published her first book, “Little White Lies and the Seven Deadly Sins.” It isn’t an ivory tower dive into the pool of hamartiology (look it up, I dare you.) It is something better.

By her own admission, she doesn’t cover any new territory here. Instead, it reads like a conversation with Erma Bombeck while eating overripe watermelon over the sink. It’s sweet, immediate, fun, and some good juice runs down your face while ingesting good stuff. It brings the rather heavy topic of sin into a more amicable place in ways both funny and insightful.

And, it’s got me rethinking the whole topic. Sin isn’t exactly my first choice of hospitable, or even accessible party chat. And, it sucks as a Scrabble word. But the Bible seems to have rather an obsession with the stuff. It pops up like the drunk uncle at a wedding, inserting itself into otherwise polite company with slurry, spitty banter and totally short circuits our drive to the buffet line. It is as ubiquitous as it is exasperating.

Frankly, these days, I’m stuck knowing how to deal with the ramifications of this word and what it represents. The conservative theological pundits have a hard-on for it and can’t stop bemoaning how genuinely rotten is everything and everyone. Sin rules the day they cry through horn-rimmed glasses, shame and potluck on their breath. We just need to “get back” to God’s word and repent, repent, repent, feeling like shit the whole time. The guiltier we feel the better. Their Gospel: I’m shit. God’s not. Jesus took a good beating from his Dad for me. If I’m okay with that, I’m not shit anymore.

The progressive idealogues are, by contrast, tacitly unconcerned with any notion whatsoever that shadows, scraped knees, or even bad smells could possibly exist in so sunny a universe. If we just skip together, prancing hand in hand, hearty choruses of “We Shall Overcome” on our lips, no boogey-man will assert itself. We do not sin. We are sinned against (although I could never figure out who was first to get the ball rolling). I need only speak positively, even about the most heinous cell-blocks, and all will magically heal, rendering us all Pollyanna-happy. Their Gospel: I’m good. God is in question. The conservatives created a mess. Together, we’ll get this shit cleaned up. God’ll get a passing nod by the religious among us.

And, for both camps, the currency of faithfulness is outrage. I’m either pissed off at the sinfulness of everything everywhere, or I’m pissed off at those who are pissed off at everything everywhere. I sin in my self-righteous indignation at sin, forcing others into my thinking on the subject, or I sin in my satisfaction of not believing I’m a sinner in the first place. How’s that for a rabbit-hole conundrum?

Both feel a little insipid frankly, and neither give a particularly satisfying understanding of either sin or, by extension, grace.

As Laurie and others have stated, sin  translates as missing the mark. It’s an archery term. People who shoot arrows are intentionally aiming at something. They’re scrutinizing outcomes. Their desires are set upon something good. But, in our efforts at bull’s eyes, we miss every time. 

Here’s why I love this word. It actually indicates something wonderful about God, and also about us. It tells us that God cares enough to help us in our aim. But it also reveals a universal longing in the heart of humanity, one that takes aim at what it most desires. Augustine once said “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.” We naturally aim at what our hearts most desire: peace, fulfillment, happiness, union with the divine.

Unfortunately, something is askew. Something keeps tugging at our arms as we line up another shot into the great unknown. Sin is the annoying guy making all those rustling and taunting noises right before we take our swing down the fairway. We aim for something because we’re made for God and long to return to God. We miss that something because sin somehow gets in the way and we’re wide of the target every time. We could call sin “aiming for the right thing in all the wrong ways often enough that the wrong thing feels like the right thing.”

That is until God steps in. God intervenes and removes the shackles, weights, magnets, and distractions pulling our arrows asunder. In Christ, the arrow of our longing has finally reached its target.

The destination is Christ himself.

The 7 Deadly Sins are merely the church’s creative means of naming the primary stalls in that effort toward aiming at God’s heart. For those of you following along in Laurie’s book, here’s a quick review of those: Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth.

So then, here goes an armchair theologian’s look at…7.