A few years ago I had occasion to go back to Pittsburgh to the first church that I served as a minister. During the visit I encountered a woman who has been in the choir forever. I asked her how choir was going. She said she was quitting.

"Quitting?" I asked her why.

She said, "I sat up there in the choir last Sunday during the service and I looked around at everybody – the congregation, the ministers, the ushers, everything – and I finally just said to myself what I’ve been thinking for a long time."

I said, "What’s that?"

She said, "Who cares?"

I said, "You feel bad. You’ll be alright."

"No, I mean it, who cares? Who really cares?"

Well, that was a heavy indictment, a very heavy indictment. It was just as much as to say we are not a church because if we don’t care for her – no matter how tall the steeple or how many programs and concerts we have – if we don’t care for each other, we are not a church.

Way back in the Middle Ages the church made lists of sins: light-weight, middle-weight and heavy-weight sins. At the very top – the most serious sins - were called the 7 Deadly Sins. One of these Deadly sins was named "acedia." Now, acedia is the Latin word. Somewhere along the way it was translated to one of the good, old, long-lost, Anglo-Saxon words that carried a punch – "sloth." But sloth doesn’t carry much of a punch anymore. In fact, it is no longer a very good translation because sloth to us in the 21st century just seems like being a couch potato or lying too long in the bathwater or something like that. Rather than sloth, acedia might better be translated as apathy or laziness or indifference or inertia or lethargy. At its core acedia means basically and simply, "I don’t care."

A while back Sports Illustrated quoted Frank Layden, who at the time was head coach of the Utah Jazz, talking about a former player, "I told him, ‘Son, what is it with you. Is it ignorance or apathy?’" The player responded, "Coach, I don’t know and I don’t care."

"I don’t care" - what the writer of Revelation in our New Testament lesson describes as being neither hot nor cold. It registers the condition that can creep up on you, that will cause you in the final analysis to reduce your life to a shrug of the shoulders and to hurl one final insult to the world, "I don’t care." To be able to look upon a hallowed-eyed child in a refugee camp on the evening news and say, "Well, he’s not my child." To hear the reports of the latest Iraqi casualties and say, "They’re just Arabs." Or, to see the old man sitting alone among the pigeons in the park and say, "Well, he is not my father." Acedia.

In the 20th century we came to think of Acedia as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920s and ‘30s being perhaps acedia’s finest hour. As someone has said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."

On the other hand, one of the most hopeful signs of 2008 has been to see what Anna Quindlen in the latest Newsweek calls The End of Apathy in our political process. The surprising turnout in the primaries so far tells the tale – American apathy of seasons past has given way to civic engagement. More than 70 percent of voters told pollsters recently that they were following the election closely. So far voters have chosen, as Gandhi said, "To be the change they want to see." They care.

I asked this woman in my old church’s choir what would the church have to do to prove to her that it cared. She had an interesting answer. She said, "Take me seriously." A very interesting answer considering the kind of person she is. She is a peppery little woman: kind of a stick of peppermint - very charming but also mischievous.

She used to put risqué cartoons on the pulpit sometimes before worship so that when the minister came up to do the sermon it would just sort of blow him out of the water. She would pin the tails of choir robes together. She would come to church early on a Sunday morning and tie knots in the laces of those funny looking shoes the organist wears while playing the organ. She is the kind of person that when she arrives at an occasion folks say, "Well, now the party can start. She’s here!"

Yet, she said to me, "I want my church to take me seriously, not always be serious, but to take me seriously." It is as good a definition of caring as I’ve heard.

I hope by now you’ve read M. Scott Peck’s perennial best selling book The Road Less Traveled. I quote it on the front of today’s bulletin. Peck says that acedia or laziness or indifference or apathy – he uses the word "entropy" – is a major cause of evil – a primary cause of psychological illness, and the main reason that Americans are increasingly failing in human relations. He even calls it "original sin." Peck points out that our laziness is what prevents us from being loving, from being Christ-like. Love is something you do, he says. Love requires commitment and work, and those who are lazy are seldom willing to expend that kind of energy.

For the lazy of the world, love is something that is just supposed to happen. As the song suggests, "Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger…and somehow you’ll know…." Most popular songs make love seem like an accident. Our culture promotes a view of love that makes this most important characteristic of being human and of being Christ-like seem to be a spontaneous emotion that can be neither controlled nor created.

I agree with Peck – love is more than a feeling. It is an art requiring discipline and hard work. Our failure to recognize this is largely responsible for the absence of love in so many of our relationships. Love is what one wills to do to make the other person happy and fulfilled. Fred Speakman was on to something when he titled one of his books: Love is Something You Do.

Let’s face it. Life is difficult. It’s hard to set the right priorities. But if we let acedia take over, if we are too apathetic to do what we know should be done, there will result a deadness to the heart and soul that no minister or counselor or doctor or psychiatrist can cure.

You see, acedia – is the deadly tendency to remain where we are when we ought to be moving on to do those things which we know will provide deliverance from the pain of our existence. I am sure the sins of omission loom larger in the eyes of God than the sins of commission.

Teenagers today have a different way of describing acedia – they use the word "boring." It’s the greatest indictment they can imagine. "That class is so boring!" They forget that you can be bored by virtually anything if you put your mind to it, or choose not to. You can yawn your way through a trip to the Grand Canyon or an afternoon with your best friend or a beautiful sunset. Fred Buechner says, "To be bored is to turn down cold whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment. To be bored to death is a form of suicide."

My mentor at Candler Seminary in Atlanta, Dr. Fred Craddock, tells a story about his father. Fred’s father wasn’t a churchgoer. On Sundays when he was a boy Fred’s mother would take the five children to church. His father would stay at home fussing about lunch not being ready on time.

Sometimes the minister would come and talk to him. And his father would say, "The church doesn’t care about me. They just want another name on the roll. They want another financial pledge. I know what churches want – another pledge. ‘Come on, join us. Make a pledge.’ You don’t really care – I know what you’re after."

His wife would say, "Won’t you go with us to church?"

"I know what they are after down there - numbers. Another name and another pledge." Fred heard him say it a thousand times.

One time he didn’t say it. He was in the hospital. They detected the cancer too late. The throat was taken out. A tube was put in, but it was temporary. His father was wasting away. Fred had flown home to see him. He walked into the hospital room and on every window sill there were flowers. Everywhere he looked, flowers – even on that tray that they swing out over the bed. His father couldn’t eat so he had flowers beside his bed and a stack of cards, probably twenty inches high.

Cards were sprinkled in the flowers. Fred looked at the cards. He read the names. Every one of the cards, every vase of flowers was from a group or person in the church: Men’s Bible Class, Women’s Missionary Group, Choir Director, Youth Group, Minister, Church Secretary. His father saw him reading the cards. Since his father could not speak he took a Kleenex box and wrote something on the side. He was an English teacher and he wrote a line from Hamlet: "In this harsh world draw your breath in pain to tell my story." Fred said, "What is your story, Daddy?" And he wrote, "I was wrong." He was. They did care.

And so was the woman at my old church. She was wrong too – when she said they didn’t care. But, she was stubborn. When I told her I knew lots of people who care – people who really care, she said, "Where are they?"

I said, "Everywhere you look there are people who care."

She said, "Really? Name some. Give me some names."

May I give her yours? May I use your name?