June 29, 2014

Grace Episcopal Church, Canton, MS

Year A, Proper 8, Romans 6:12-23

            It’s easy, especially for Episcopalians, I think, to dismiss the Apostle Paul. Perhaps, I’m speaking only for myself, but I don’t think so. I think a lot of people have a hard time with Paul. For me what’s troublesome about the apostle is not so much such qualities as his seeming acceptance of slavery as a fact of life, as we have in the reading from Romans this morning, since the slavery he knew was in no way as cruel or inhuman as the slavery here in Mississippi. My difficulty with Paul has to do more with my temptation to read his letters as if he were a sort of moralizing grouch. If I’m not careful, it’s easy for me to see Paul as some holier-than-thou curmudgeon chiding not only the earliest followers of Christ but also you and me.

            Of course, I’ve learned that this is a pretty unfair view of Paul, a point I’ll come back to. And not only that but we—I—do well to remember to take all of scripture seriously, most especially those parts we’d just as soon dismiss, those parts that trouble us. And in full disclosure, I should say that all that talk about sin in the section of Romans we just heard is a little bit hard for me. I don’t really want to be told not to let sin exercise dominion within me. I don’t really want to hear that the wages of sin is death. In fact I’d rather just not think about sin at all.

            But if I’m honest with myself, I know that Paul knows what he’s talking about. Paul knew a before and after. Few of us have had the type of road-to-Damascus experience that transformed Paul’s life, that encounter with the risen Christ that separated his life into a time of knowing the love of God and that toxic empty time before of hating and persecuting those who worshipped Jesus as the Christ. But I think many of us understand from our own experience, if not such a delineated before and after, and if not such heinous actions as Paul’s, at least periods of time when we have had God at the center of our lives versus those times when we are living for something else, when we are living for ourselves, for success or material comforts or power or pleasure. We know the emptiness, the pain, I think, of living for something other than God, and of allowing sin to exercise dominion.

            And that’s really what this section of Romans comes down to. Although the letter to the Romans is a highly complex and tightly woven theological argument, Paul makes a really simple point in the verses we just heard. Essentially, we can choose God and life or we can choose sin and death. As the great Bob Dylan says, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” As Dylan sings,

                        

                        You may be an ambassador to England or France
                        You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
                        You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
                        You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls. . . .

                        Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
                        But you’re gonna have to serve somebody[1]

            Dylan may well have been channeling Paul, who like the great songwriter, keenly understood the human condition. Paul understood that whether we realize it or not—whether we choose to acknowledge it or not—it is a fact that we all serve someone or some thing. Paul, in this letter to the baptized followers of Jesus in Rome, to these house churches he did not found but cared deeply about, makes the point that we are all slaves to something. We are slaves either to God or to something other than God. We are slaves either to God or to sin and death. As one New Testament scholar writes, “As human creatures, Christians are free only within the framework of some lordship, either of God or of sin. . . . The choice is . . . slavery to which lord, to which ruling power?”[2]

            On its surface it’s perhaps not the easiest of messages to hear. God or death. It’s pretty black and white, a pretty hard line, so perhaps you can understand my struggle with Paul. But here is the thing about the Apostle Paul. He had a story to tell—has a story to tell—a story so good and so transformative that he gladly suffered so very much—shipwreck, flogging, stoning, imprisonment (2 Cor 11:23-25)—in order to tell it.[3]  And it’s a story so very simple that it’s sometimes extremely difficult to believe. It’s a story that is unfortunately often complicated by our own desire to control the outcomes of this life, our own desire to control who is in and who is out, our own desire to remake God in our own image.

            This is too bad because the underlying and ultimate point of all that Paul wrote to all the many churches to whom he wrote was simply that in Jesus Christ he had discovered a love so great and so sure and so completely beyond anything that he could ever have imagined.[4] He, Paul, was loved. Loved despite all he had done, thought, believed. Despite all he might ever do, think, believe. Just as you are loved. Just as I am loved. Paul had, in Jesus Christ, discovered a love that had transformed him completely, transformed him from a persecutor of those who did not believe the way he thought they should into a man longing for all whom he encountered to experience his deep, deep joy and peace.

            In this section of Romans, Paul tells us that we can serve God and life or we can serve sin and death. But thanks be to God that he also tells us that we, through the free gift of God’s love, this love without limit, without qualification, through the grace of God, through the sacrament of baptism—the outward sign of that grace in which we have died and been raised with Christ—through all this, Paul tells us, we have already been freed from sin and death to God and life. And being enslaved to God is of course perfect freedom.

            If you are like me, you have experienced the terrible bondage of living for yourself, of serving everything around you but God. Perhaps you know the bondage of clasping to a grudge in an effort to serve the desire to be right. Or the bondage of collecting and disseminating gossip to help ourselves feel better for a fleeting moment. And on and on. Our culture constantly tells us that serving ourselves is best, so it’s easy to forget that serving God is true freedom.

            But I pray that we may all go forth this morning remembering that through the love of God, through the immeasurable love shown to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been freed from enslavement to sin. I pray that we remember that through his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ has taken on and defeated the shame of sin and death. I pray that we remember that we have been freed to serve God in all whom we encounter. We have been freed to accept and show forth the love of God in all whom we meet. And I pray that we may remember that this freedom is in fact life worth living in the here and now. It is life with meaning and purpose and it is the path to true peace and joy on this side of the grave. This freedom is in fact eternal life, and we only have to open our hearts and surrender to it. 

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[1] Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody” http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/gotta-serve-somebody.

[2] Paul J. Achtemeier, Romans (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 109.

[3] The idea of Paul having a compelling story is from A. Katherine Grieb, The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), xvii-xxiv.

[4] Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 449.