Purgatory featured large in last week’s launch of our newest Gathering series The Seven Deadly Sins. We let 14th century poet Dante Alighierie be our tour guide as we “worked our way up through Purgatory”. According to popular Christian spirituality in the middle ages one was never sure about going directly to heaven after death. You could avoid hell through the ordinance of last rights. But there was never complete assurance that among the following mortal sins, a worshiper would be free enough on the occasion of his death to ascend to heaven without first purging his soul:

1. Lust
2. Gluttony
3. Greed (avarice)
4. Sloth (acedia, discouragement)
5. Wrath
6. Envy
7. Pride

So to advance to heaven-worthiness, one would have to complete a circuit of purifying exercises that may take up to hundreds of years to complete.

Pictured above is the penalty for the lowest level of purgatory (pride). In order to sufficiently humiliate the proud soul one must ascend this phase of purgatory with a large boulder on his head. You can only imagine the other 6 levels and their corresponding penalties.

IF you had the good fortune of thoughtful relatives who survive you, though, you could have your time in purgatory cut short. Thousands of years could be shaved from your sentence for the mere price of an indulgence.

Dante’s depictions are gripping! Especially if you can get a hold of some Gustav Dore art! Sin is indeed dangerous and graphic in damning effects. There’s only one slight problem. Theologians of the middle ages allowed church praxis to slide into an entirely unbiblical and ineffective mentality of payment for sin.

Come join us this week as we try to set the Seven Deadly sins straight with some biblical insight. Sin is toxic. But the cure is more potent still. Make your way to Gathering and catch Week Two as we invite pastor Walt Hooker to join us and help us see WHY all sin (not just the seven deadly ones) is bad and what the cure really points us toward.

It’s a question that haunts everyone somehow. Whether or not someone reading this would ever even dream about doing something as horrific as murder or terrorism, we all seem to share a collective hunch that some things are just beyond human dignity. We keep those awful things way over in the margins of our experience – maybe only now and then watching a gritty movie like Se7en. I certainly hope that a movie is as close as I get to some forms of darkness.

But what is at the root of this thing we call sin? Just because we can name 7 things we’d never intentionally plunge ourselves into are we off the hook? Turns out all sin is deadly regardless the degree of damage it does or the social stigma it costs the offender. Sin could be something we’d better stop pretending we don’t all have a problem with or we’ll be in big trouble.

Come join us for the next few weeks at Gathering where we’ll talk about the Seven Deadly Sins, where that list came from and more importantly, why we’d better have a bigger view of sin than that! Here are a few questions we’ll take aim at throughout the series:

1. Why did the early church gravitate to this list of seven?
2. Has the church ever distorted the bible’s message about mankind’s moral need?
3. What happens when people try to help God decide who and how he’ll forgive a repentant soul?
4. Is there in fact a mortal sin? Where does the bible mention it? Exactly what is it?
5. How are people supposed to live with the tension of being forgiven by God, but still prone to screw up?
6. How does God finally settle the question of what sin is and what punishment it deserves?
7. What do Christians mean by grace and forgiveness and why do we struggle to live it out?

I’ll be starting the series this Sunday with our first talk on the history behind “The Seven Deadly Sins”. Come on out and bring your thoughts, questions and doubts. Gathering is a great place to catch a great $5 lunch, meet other spiritually interested minds and have a stimulating conversation about stuff that matters.

Gathering:

Sunday’s at 12:30

Christ Community Church Student Center

In last night’s Jesus Class, more than one participant remarked at the way Jesus is introduced by John the Baptist. In the fist place John the Baptist is not marketed well for a successful ministry. He’s not in the temple being video cast to multi-sites all over Palestine. Let’s just say… he’s not in Jerusalem (the center of Jewish spiritual life) he’s not in the temple (the center of the center). He’s in the wilderness.

He’s preaching repentance! Not grace! And people are coming to him from everywhere. It would be like Mark Ashton deciding he’d like to go to a corn field outside Wahoo and deliver his Sunday messages… and people would actually flock to be there! And in response to such a message, people would actually be cut to the heart, repent and be living in expectation of Jesus’ arrival.

Could it be we actually need to clean up our life BEFORE meeting Jesus makes any sense? John can’t be telling us that we have to get rid of all our sins before we encounter Jesus! Got any thoughts?