7UP

Text: Romans 13:8-14
Theme: “7UP” (1st in a series)
12th Sunday After Pentecost
September 4, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,”[a] and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[b] 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
11 And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. 12 The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. 14 Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.

Here’s a quintessential American story just in time for Labor Day weekend. For over eighty two years, Americans have enjoyed a particular kind of liquid refreshment known as 7UP. The effervescent soft drink with the lemon-lime flavor – and a little less sweet tasting than, say, Sprite – was invented by a gentleman by the name of Charles Leiper Grigg. Ten years before 7UP was born, Mr. Grigg invented an orange flavored soft drink called Whistle. But he had a falling out with the company he worked for. Thus, he started his own business and produced another orange-flavored beverage called Howdy. The record shows that Howdy was well-received by the soft drink drinking public. But it was no match for the ever-popular Orange Crush. So Mr. Grigg set about, as an American entrepreneur in the bottling business, to come up with something to challenge Orange Crush. As it goes, many other bottlers were doing something with the lemon-lime flavor, but nothing held a candle to Orange Crush. Grigg saw an opening, and 7UP was born. The beverage was initially called “Bib-label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.” The “bib” bit was for the paper label that slid down a generic bottle. The “lithiated” was for the traces of lithium, a mood-altering substance found in spring waters, that was included in the concoction.

The name was a bit too long, and it soon morphed to 7UP Lithiated Lemon Soda. Even that was too much verbiage, so, in 1936, the soda was officially and finally re-dubbed as 7UP, and the Howdy Corporation became the 7UP Company.

Why was it called 7UP? Mr. Grigg never explained why. We don’t have an answer to the question. Lacking an answer, theories often fill the void – and there are several of them which I won’t get into now.

The name of the beverage has the number 7 in it. So does the list of sins that have been handed down to us through the centuries. I speak of “The 7 Deadly Sins.” Why there are seven of them, I do not know. Why they are deadly, is another good question. In any case, the seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, sloth, wrath, greed, gluttony, and lust.

During the next few Sundays, I propose to take what I’m going to call a “refreshing” look at these seven deadly sins. We’ll touch on their history and highlight stories from the Bible – and from our current age – that illustrate them.

Note, I did not say that the sins were refreshing. The sins themselves are patently stale and most certainly corrosive – damaging to body, mind, and soul -- if engaged in over any period of time. Even a patently atheist or agnostic psychiatrist or psychologist can tell you that. But my aim will be to bring them up (7UP!), haul them out of the darkness and into the light, expose them, name them, and then, with the resources of the Gospel and Sacraments of Christ, outline and celebrate what God has done – and is still doing – about them! If this happens (and I hope it does!), that will be refreshing for us.

In today’s New Testament reading, the apostle Paul urges the Christians at Rome to “…clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.” What exactly are those “desires of the flesh” that we aren’t to think about gratifying? As we shall see, many of them can be spotted in the seven deadly sins.

Now, let me be the first to say that God loves you, God forgives you, God knows the plans He has for you – plans to prosper you and to give you hope, and all of that. Certainly, we’ve come to praise God, thank God for His benefits to us, enjoy the company of his people. The inconvenient truth, though, is that we can do all this and yet be in total and profound denial about sin. Sin is a word – and a reality – that we either joke about publicly or murmur about under our breath as we point the finger at someone else. Why is it that someone else’s sins – perceived or otherwise – are so plainly obvious to us, while our own are shrouded in mystery?

A pastor once asked a young man, a recovering alcoholic, why he stopped coming to church. He replied: “I’ll tell you. After you have been t o AA, and taken the cure, and had to stare your demons in the face, and had to stand up naked in front of twenty other drunks and tell every bad thing you have done or thought, and had to ask God and them to forgive you for being you, well, church just seems like such a trivial waste of time.” Reflecting on the exchange, the pastor wrote: “Church is about more than sin, but, but by the grace of God, it ought not to be less than this.”

He reflected further:
It is odd that we have made even Jesus into such a quivering mass of affirmation and oozing graciousness, considering how frequently, unguardedly, and gleefully Jesus told us that we were sinners. Anyone who thinks that Jesus was into inclusiveness, self-affirmation, and open-minded, heart-happy acceptance has then got to figure out why we responded to him by nailing him on a cross. He got there not for urging us to ‘consider the lilies’ but for calling us ‘whitewashed tombs’ and even worse. Yet it is perhaps not such a mystery that we have attempted to produce a promiscuously permissive, user-friendly Jesus. After all, we are the folk who, having just lived through history’s most bloody century, kicked off a new one on a September morn by witnessing the killing of scores of innocent civilians, then excusing another Bush war that slaughtered even more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, all for the very best of democratic, national motives. Let’s simply say that we are not off to a particularly good start at presenting ourselves as good, kind, loving, and enlightened folk who have at last put all that primitive sin behind us. (William H. Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins)

Earlier, I mentioned the original name of 7UP: “Bib-label Lithiated Lemon-Lime soda.” “Lithiated” means that there are traces – only traces – of the mood-stabilizing drug, lithium, in it. With that in mind, there are those who would like worship to include traces of spiritual lithium, if you will, to stabilize moods. With the world being what it is, our moods can be off the charts. A little stabilization might be a good thing. Some would say that it’s called for. Church should be “Happy Hour”, no?

Jesus Christ, who dealt with moods both off the charts and stabilized, loved people and spoke the truth to them. No matter the mood, He loved them – which included calling them out on their stuff; He “truthed” them.

Church, at its best, is not for attitude adjustment. It is for finding ourselves on the receiving end of heaven-sent love and truth. It is for clothing ourselves with Christ, so that we do not gratify the desires of the flesh.

And this morning, in our world where the seven deadly sins – and so many more! -- are having a bull run, the Lord sets a table. He has not left us to our own devices. Rather, He enjoys fellowship with us. That, my friends, is refreshing.
Amen.