Greetings, everyone. Welcome to Made to Be a Kingdom: How God Forms Us as His Sacred Royal Family, where we talk about the royal priesthood of God—us as the royal priesthood—which is the Church of God. This is Fr. Harry Linsinbigler; Fr. Anthony is working right now, but we will join him again shortly.

We’ve been talking about sin, and we brought up the fact that there are greater and lesser sins, and we brought that up biblically. One of the places where it’s brought up biblically is 1 John 5:16. “There is sin which is not unto death. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not unto death.” There’s sin which is unto death and sin which is not unto death, otherwise translated as there is sin which is mortal. All wrongdoing, all unrighteousness is sin. So it’s all serious, but there are some that are more grave, more deeply damaging to the soul than others, and there is sin which is not mortal. Again, 1 John 5:16.

Fr. Stanley Harakas once wrote, “Mortal sin, or sins unto death, keep us out of heaven as long as we do not repent of them, seek God’s forgiveness for them, and reform our lives.” St. Paul is clear: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” Read the rest of that passage for a rather exhaustive list of those sins unto death, which exclude even believers from the kingdom if they’re unrepented of.

We know that our Lord says that the cities of Israel will be judged more harshly than even heathen cities of old, because they ignored his teaching. We can read about that in the eleventh chapter of Matthew. We referenced last time John 19, where Jesus answered, “You would have no authority over me unless it were given to you from above, therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.”

So mortal sins do… We discussed last time that sin unto death indicates complete and total severance from God. So mortal sins, grievous sins, refer to sins which completely sever our relationship with God altogether. Unrighteousness cannot coexist with the presence of God. When we say “unto death,” of course, that doesn’t mean ceasing to exist, because “death” does not refer to ceasing to exist; but rather cutting one off from life. In this case, the second death, which is cutting off from eternal life, is the matter at hand.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council states that, frankly, any sin which is not repented of is mortal. It is unto death because it can keep us from entering into the Lord’s kingdom. However, I mean, there are those particular sins that are so grievous that by virtue of even doing them once, one has cut themselves off from communion with God.

We have a lot of different sources for this. We have Gennadius Scholarius, The Orthodox Confession, Chrysanthus of Jerusalem, which are all referenced by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain in his Exomologetarion. So he says according to those sources, mortal sins are “those voluntary sins which either corrupt a love for God alone or the love for neighbor and for God, and which render again the one committing them an enemy of God and liable to the eternal death of hell.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa defines mortal or grievous sin as “all sins that are attached to the ratiocinative faculty of the soul, as have been judged more harshly by the Fathers and meriting greater and longer and more painfully laborious efforts to return” to communion. So when we think of death we have to think of it as a severance from God’s presence, meaning from communion with him, because God is everywhere present and filling all things, but to enter into God’s presence by communion and union with him is not possible for sin to enter into such things, as we discussed the last time.

And St. Gregory of Nyssa says—and this is in the holy Canons, in his second canon—”...there’s more painfully laborious efforts to return: such as, for instance, if anyone has denied the belief in Christ…”

Sin unto death or mortal sin is discussed by St. Basil the Great: “A great sin is one which holds anyone in its power, whereas a small sin is one which does not get the upper hand.” Fr. Alexander Schmemann sort of comments on all this stuff and says:

The issue is not sinlessness, which no absolution can achieve, but the distinction always made by the Church between, on the one hand, the sins excommunicating a person from the Church’s life and grace, and, on the other hand, the sinfulness which is the inescapable fate of every man, every person, living in the world and wearing flesh. The latter is, so to speak, dissolved in the Church’s liturgy, and is the sinfulness that the Church confesses in the prayers of the faithful. […] We believe that in the measure of our repentance we receive his forgiveness (as it’s indicated by those very prayers).

People will wonder what all these sins unto death are. We are going to— These sins, and, again, any sin which is unrepented is a sin unto death, but there’s sins which immediately cut us off from the love of God and take a long time to return to repentance; the repentance takes a long time. A short list would be: blasphemy, denial of Christ, apostasy, idolatry, heresy, mutilation of one’s own body, the denial— for example, castration, cutting oneself, etc.— the denial of the goodness of God’s creation or a severe abuse of God’s creation, drug-dealing, drug abuse, sacrilege including the spurning of the sacraments, sorcery, witchcraft, murder, pedophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, prostitution, sexual promiscuity, homosexual intercourse, adultery, theft, extortion and other severe acts of covetousness and greed, bearing false witness against neighbor, meaning perjury and other related sins, murder in all of its forms, of course, intentional harm to the human body whether alive or dead, whether yourself or another’s—because it’s the mutilation of God’s temple—substance abuse, extortion, grievous unrepentant or uncorrected acts of disrespect or reviling towards Christ, his Church, bishop, priest, parents, spouse, police, and other authority figures, then perpetuating divisiveness in the Church or of the church of the home. And we have that—we can find that both in Scripture, in 1 Corinthians 5, in the canons, such as canons 2-8 of St. Gregory of Nyssa and several of the canons of St. Basil. Taking Communion in an unworthy manner, of course, mentioned in 1 Corinthians 11. So that’s either while still in a state of penance that you have not returned with absolution, or within a state of unrepentant and unconfessed grievous sin or altogether unpreparedly approaching Communion. This is all there in mortal sins.

But we can look at them according—a little bit more deeply. We look at the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are our basic list of mortal sins. Mortal sins against the first commandment, if we want to get more specific on the first commandment: heathenism, paganism, Satanism, the worship of fallen spirits, anti-theism, a professed antipathy towards God, heresy, apostasy, denial of Christ, sacrilege including the spurning of the sacraments intentionally. So that would be spitting out the Sacrament or in days of old people would steal it and then go do spells with it, for example, whether through witchcraft or astrology or something like that. One should note that heresy here is defined specifically by the Fathers as professing and teaching falsehood about God himself, his nature, and his person.

Moral sins against the second commandment—so the first commandment is: “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me”—against the second commandment is: “You shall not make unto yourself an idol.” In the Septuagint, idolon is not “graven image,” but idolon, “idol.” So mortal sins against the second commandment are materialism, idolatry—worship of idols, creating idols to worship them or channel an unclean spirit or a heathen god, heathen gods of course being fallen angels—sorcery, witchcraft, scientism. All of these involve misuse of worship, which is due to God alone, or the worship due to God alone but projecting it towards material things, for anything but the Creator of the universe, God himself.

Mortal sins against the third commandment. This is sins against “You shall not carry the Lord your God in vain. You shall not take up the name of the Lord your God in vain.” So blasphemy of course is at the forefront. The act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things, profane talk. Lying under oath before God is another one, a mortal sin against the third commandment, or swearing to God that you’re telling the truth when you’re telling a lie. Doing evil in the name of God. All those are mortal sins against the third commandment: blasphemy and lying under oath before God and doing evil in the name of God.

Mortal sins against the fourth commandment: profaning that which God set aside as holy, the perpetual neglect to worship God on his holy day. The Church has defined from of old that to avoid church for more than three weeks when a church is nearby, without a just cause, is an act of removing oneself from communion, and would require penance and confession. The primary sin against the fourth commandment is to turn your back on God, so apostasy would also be at the forefront of a sin against the fourth commandment, first and foremost. But not allowing work on Sunday, but spurning the Lord’s Day altogether is of course a mortal sin against the fourth commandment. Not allowing workers under you to take days of rest and times of rest, time to be with their families and time to go to church. Dishonoring the Church, turning away altogether from God in prayer: again, apostasy. Spurning fasting altogether, spurning charity towards others, and speaking ill of prayer, fasting, or almsgiving, or discouraging others as the result of spite for God and his Church for doing things that lead to God and lead to a relationship with him.

Mortal sins against the fifth commandment. Okay, so the last one was “Remember the sabbath.” Mortal sins against the fifth commandment, to honor your father and your mother: abuse of parents or neglect to care for them in old age, of course; refusal to carry out the last will of a parent, provided that it does not require you to sin, so if it says that they wish to cremate themselves and so on, you would pass, pass off to someone else that, to do that, and you would not execute their will on that point. Wishing… And, frankly, try to talk siblings and others into not cremating them, of course, would be a good option. Wishing death and evil on parents, again, is another mortal sin against the fifth commandment. Abuse or serious neglect of children; failure to provide for the religious upbringing of children, because they are not just your progeny but your parents’, and ultimately our parents’ going all the way back and ultimately to God, our heavenly Father. Obedience to parents must be abrogated when the parent wants us to sin, so we must disobey, as St. John Chrysostom says. Children must disobey when their parents command them to sin, so when the parent wants us to sin, but that severe disrespect for them is a grievous sin, so we still would not be—we would be firm but not disrespectful with them.

Mortal sins against the sixth commandment. “Thou shalt not murder,” so murder or the unlawful killing of a human being. This includes all manner: suicide; feticide, in other words, abortion. Recently we had a remark from one of the talking heads on a news show that “the Bible doesn’t mention abortion.” Well, it doesn’t mention fratricide, matricide, patricide, or infanticide, for that matter. It doesn’t mention any of those words, because it mentions murder; those are just particular types of murder and they always have been. This is undebatable. Suicide, feticide, infanticide, fratricide, matricide, patricide, and any other kind of homicide. Also manslaughter, which would come after murder as killing another, not by intention but still by sinful negligence. So you’re drinking too much and you drive down the road and you’re impaired and you kill someone, that’s grievous sinful negligence, and it’s still a mortal sin. Mutilation of one’s own body. Going back to the other one, though, we should not put ourselves in a place where we are seriously risking the life of another by driving impaired or doing other things whereby we’re impaired. So another one: mutilation of one’s own body, castration, cutting oneself, etc. This is an act, as the canons say, of self-murder, so this would include the so-called gender changes. This is a grievous sin. It’s a murder; it’s mutilating your body to be something other than what it was created to be.

Now, this is not the same thing as when someone becomes disfigured, either in birth or in accident because of some unfortunate thing, and they’re made to look back to—their surgery is done to bring them back to their natural state because it’s become unnatural through one of these processes. That is different. That’s cosmetic surgery that is good and doing things according to God, but mutilation of one’s own body, no.

Another mortal sin against the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not murder,” is denial of the goodness of God’s creation or severe abuse of God’s creation. Drug-dealing, which kills others; drug abuse, which harms a body or kills you; harming oneself or another through sorcery or witchcraft; non-accidental harm on the human body, whether alive or dead, whether yourself or another’s, so it’s mutilation of God’s temple; substance abuse; intentional cremation of human remains; any violence that either permanently ends a life or that wounds a person permanently without it being defense against violent aggression itself from another against oneself or another.

Seventh: mortal sins against the seventh commandment. Sins of adultery, so “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” So sins of adultery include what we would consider adultery proper, to have sexual relations with another besides one’s spouse; also in greater form canonically we have the abandonment of spouse, prostitution, torturing or terrorizing a spouse. Not the same as getting into marital arguments and having harsh words, which, again, they can get sinful, but that’s not the same thing as mortal sins against the seventh commandment, which is torturing or terrorizing a spouse. Also pedophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, sexual promiscuity, and homosexual intercourse are all sins, mortal sins, against the seventh commandment.

Eighth: sins against the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” include petty theft as a major sin, and certainly include fraud, larceny, embezzlement, extortion, blackmail, destruction of another person’s property, taking anything that belongs to another without a just and mutually agreed-upon payment or trade.

Mortal sins against the ninth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Included there are slander and libel against another person, as well as publicly casting speculative gossip, casting doubt or even guilt upon another without foundation and ruining another’s reputation based on false data or unfounded possibilities.

These are mortal sins. You should not be able to go to confession and then turn right back around to communion, because these have grievously affected our souls. According to the spiritual Fathers, disciplinary Fathers of the Church, and the canonical Tradition of the Church, these sins require a longer time to return to communion. Remember that all sins unto death are grievous sins, include allowing it to happen if another’s doing it, and failing to try to speak up or stop it. You’re guilty of it if you’ve failed on that front, because it’s not just what we do, but by what we don’t do, allowing a mortal sin to happen, which is why we defend—why the defense of another is grounded, why the defense of another is defensible, because if we just allowed someone to be wrongfully murdered without doing anything about it whatsoever, then we are… and we don’t speak out about it, we don’t do anything about it, we’re silent, then we have participated in that sin.

So the tenth is “Thou shalt not covet.” Now, this is a tricky one, because people think this means just sort of feelings, but don’t confuse covetousness with envy. Covetousness is a bit deeper. For example, hatching a plot or an attempt to take a neighbor’s spouse or property, even if it is not successful, it is a grievous sin. Covetousness of another’s spouse may or may not include adultery, but it goes beyond it. Adultery defiles oneself and the other’s marriage, but it does not necessarily include the desire to take away that spouse altogether, which this commandment does, hatching a plot to do that. So if it does, it’s a compound grievous sin, violating two major commandments in full, the seventh and the tenth, trying to hatch a plot to steal another’s spouse. That requires an even heavier penitential period that would be required by either one or the other. Also, to attempt to take another’s property by means that are unjust, that are wrong, that are evil, that are not right is a severe violation that rends one’s soul from God’s grace and requires a period of penance.

So these are the mortal sins summarized in the Ten Commandments, but more specifically listed there. Where do we go with all this? Well, where we go with all this is that we know the difference between what cuts us off altogether and what can be repented of. So actually we have seven levels of sin. We really… most people really only need to be cognizant of the two, but all the way from the pardonable to the mortal, and pardonable sin can be forgiven just with the simple act of prayer and contrition, and then we go up the list toward the mortal, where they get more and more and more serious.

When we look at some of these, what are these mortal sins, well, I mean, blasphemy: a lot of people: “What is blasphemy?” Well, it’s to act in contempt for God, a profane act or utterance against the Father, Son, and/or Holy Spirit. Sacrilege, what is that? It’s to intentionally profane, desecrate, profanely use or steal that which is sacred or holy. All right, so a word accidentally slipping out of your mouth is not blasphemy, although we are to be careful to use God’s name properly, but that’s not the same as blasphemy. The same thing with sacrilege. To accidentally drop a crumb of blessed bread and not realize it, or your child does it, okay, that’s not sacrilege.

So the same thing with idolatry. There are many levels of what we would call idolatry, but having other gods, worshiping other gods, other than the only true God, the Creator of all, that is where we come there. A common form of idolatry in the modern day is atheism, which really is worshiping either yourself, autotheism as I like to call it, or scientism, worshiping science, so-called, denying God’s existence and thereby making oneself a god, is this really autotheism that’s going on in our day. Another is to worship money and riches, or fame, to abandon God for a life of financial advancement. We know both professional singers and actors who down through the ages admitted that they sold their soul to Satan to get to where they are, and he paid off. See, that’s the thing about these fallen angels; sometimes they do pay off, but you’ve got to pay the piper. And at the end, that’s where it goes.

Apostasy. Apostasy is born of pride. We turn a way that we think we know more than God, that we think that we’re judging God correctly and so we’re turning away from him. Renunciation of Christ and his faith. Those who commit this sin are often known as the lapsed. It’s not the same as being lapsed out of laziness. Lapsed out of laziness is not the same thing as intentionally spurning Christ, but it’s still serious. That still affects deeply and severs our relationship with God, but to be lazy with him, but doesn’t do it altogether like the mortal sin of apostasy. So apostasy and idolatry are equivalent to spiritual adultery, since in apostasy… and by the sacraments we’ve been united in one flesh with Christ. So turning away with these two sins is very serious.

Heresy. So again, we explained that already, that, canonically speaking, it doesn’t refer to every error. Every false doctrine or teaching can be called heresy, but when we talk about a heretic, for example, we talk about one who— full-blown heresy is being falsely adhering to and publicly teaching false things about the person and nature of God.

Schism, splitting from the Church, is another mortal sin that we need to be very cognizant of. This includes creating splits in the Church or breaking communion, discipline, and obedience, leading to a rift. That can often be for one’s own purposes, selfish purposes. We also have simony or “symony,” selling grace, Church offices. We have to be careful there. The canons are very, very—well, Scripture and the canons are very, very strict against this mortal sin.

Witchcraft: invocation of spirits outside the Christian faith. In other words, we’re not speaking about appealing to angels and saints for their intercession, but rather the invocation of fallen spirits outside of the Christian faith, to supernaturally do one’s bidding. One may not in worship invoke anyone but one of the Holy Trinity. One may ask living persons or departed saintly persons to pray to God on their behalf, but no more, not as if they are God himself, not as if they are gods at all. One may not conjure spells nor participate in any paganism or heathenism or Tarot cards or seances or even to try and speak with any dead spirits, even with saints. We don’t do seances. That’s paganism, and you’ll actually be calling upon a demon rather than the person or angel whom you think you’re calling upon. To do so is to invoke malevolent spirits, ultimately, that will enslave you, since by doing so you’ve renounced God as your protector, and for which you will need a release.

Profaning the Lord’s day: to treat the Lord’s day with contempt or irreverence. This entails committing another grievous sin on the Lord’s day! So if you, say, go out and steal on Sunday, you’re committing two mortal sins, and so it is double-grievous. Also, the purposeful or neglectful abandoning of attending a Lord’s day Liturgy for a prolonged time without a just cause; failing to go to confession for years on end, for example, or failing to give a real confession—lying or withholding information—perpetually failing to give to the Church or to others in charitable giving: the widow’s mite, we remember. So if we perpetually fail to do that, that severs our relationship with God, because where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; that’s what our Lord said. And so we’ve removed our heart from God altogether.

The Lord says that Orthodox Christians who fail to partake of the body and blood—of his body and blood, continuous present—has no life in him or her, and thus is unto spiritual death or mortal. So not only must we refrain for a time when we commit, but if we commit a mortal sin— If we refrain for no good reason, the canons also crack down on that, for this very reason. One must not refrain from taking communion unless under penance for mortal, grievous sins, or have committed them without repentance. These are all very significant things.

We have now come to the end of our time, and we’ll be talking more about this in the future, but I thought this might be helpful to you the next time you’re going to confession. Some people are stuck—kind of get stuck with where is the line, what sins are what, and so it’s important to understand all those things. But I’ll just leave you finally with these words from our Lord. And you can find them in Mark 7.

There is nothing that enters a human from outside that can defile him, but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a human. For from within, out of the human heart, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, many forms of sexual immorality, many forms of murder, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, and evil eye; blasphemy, pride, and foolishness. All these things come from within and defile a person.

Let us allow the Lord, through the Holy Spirit, to come abide in us, cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Until next time, God speed!