Having Been Set Free
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
Proper 8/ Ordinary 13 A/ Pentecost +7
Romans 6:12-23
Theme: Freedom from sin, living towards righteousness
“12Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, 18and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. 20When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. 23For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I was surprised, honestly, by the brief essay on the back of our bulleting this morning. Pleasantly surprised. Dwayne Hastings, who is vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, states that “men operating out of a Judeo-Christian worldview founded the United States not as a Christian nation, but a nation where all men and women would be able to practice their faith freely while respecting those in authority over them … they valued the freedom they had … and constructed a form of government that encapsulated that liberty.”
If you’ve had a chance to read the essay you may have caught that I left out two of the original words in what I just said. The two words come right after the phrase “valued the freedom they had” – they are the words “in Christ”.
While I would wholly affirm that we have freedom in Christ that DOES have an impact on the freedom we experience in ALL areas of our lives, I would have to step away from including that as a blanket statement with regards to the framers of our constitution. It is simply not the case that they were all Christians. They WERE, to a man, secularists -- not that they did not believe in the place or the INFLUENCE of faith in public life, but in the sense that what they were aiming for was a society that was not governed by a pseudo theocracy – an agglomeration of the church and state that ended up doing a disservice to both in one fell swoop.
But the message this morning is not about the history of our country – though it certainly touches on that – it is about the freedom we have in Christ, so on with the task at hand.
To review, we’ve been following Paul’s argument towards his conclusions about what it means to be alive in Christ and dead to sin – the issue that he is wrestling with – and I DO mean wrestling – he struggled with this himself – is the presence of sin in the life of the believer.
After his discourse in the verses just before these – what we read last Sunday – on being dead to sin and alive to Christ – we actually are continuing in his exposition of his case. He is completing the thought.
Though we do have history of slavery in the
The point Paul is making in this section of the passage speaks out of that daily experience of slavery – to be in a condition where you have NO say in what you do, where you go, who you speak to, NOTHING in your life is yours to command. Paul is saying that that is what OUR condition was like in regards to sin before we chose to make Christ our Lord. That we were slaves to sin – we had no pull, no sway, no influence on the decisions and choices that resulted in our sinning because we had no power to countermand those choices – it was a pretty concrete and down to earth illustration for the people of the church in Rome because they were equally aware – perhaps in some cases MORE aware of it than even Paul himself. There’s a fair amount of certainty in saying that some of the members of the church of Rome were slaves themselves, who had been granted permission to attend services, or there’s an equal likelihood that some of the folks there were slave owners themselves – in either case, they would be able to fully appreciate the description Paul is providing of being a slave to sin and a slave to righteousness – to obedience.
It seems with last Sunday’s argument about being dead to sin and alive to Christ, or a slave to Christ NOW in the wake of being a slave to sin BEFORE they knew Christ, Paul is dwelling at the extreme ends of the spectrum – life and death, slavery and freedom … is that warranted?
After all, what we will begin to see is that, for all his arguments about BEING dead to sin and alive to Christ, or about being a slave to CHRIST now, and no LONGER being a slave to sin … we still have to deal with sin in our lives AFTER surrendering them to our new Lord and master – Jesus Christ. That is the question that has vexed theologians for the last two thousand years – SCHOLARS wrestle with the problem – much LESS those of us who are run-of-the-mill Christians, just working at being faithful to Christ each day we wake up.
It’s at this point that we get to step back from the immediacy of the problem – not the seriousness, not the troubling aspect of it, not the discouraging aspect of it – but the befuddling part of it – and remind ourselves that this whole business of following Christ is also traditionally called a journey – a pilgrimage … it is a process by which we draw (hopefully) constantly closer to our destination, but which we will probably not reach in this life.
As Christians, we have split personalities: the old self and the new self. The old self used to be in charge, the new self is that which is surrendered to the Lordship of Christ. The old self didn’t vacate the premises the moment we decided to make Jesus our Lord – in some areas of our lives, maybe – but certainly not in all of them.
And what is in some cases our constant battle, we find ourselves exhaustively fighting with a self that refuses to recognize defeat. And we, being creatures of habit, are prone to fall into old ones that correspond to the old self rather than the new. It is difficult, it is subtle, it is completely rational and logical, and reasonable to expect ourselves to do this. It is also one of the most difficult aspects of living out our faith – to be so given to MAKING our faith a reality, only to be confronted with, not an overwhelming, powerful enemy that we didn’t expect, but one which we had hoped to have defeated long before NOW and with which we are all too familiar.
The framers of the constitution knew the old self they were up against: State-sanctioned religion. They knew that an imposed faith is hard pressed at best to become genuine faith at all, and that the only way for faith to make a truly PERSONAL change on an individual level – and THUS to hopefully begin an ever-growing change on a societal level that faith HAD to be FREELY chosen, freely followed, freely maintained.
God asks for no less. God never forces us to choose. Even after we’ve decided to follow Christ, our experience shows us that we do not lose the capacity to sin. For some of us, that is so stating the obvious that it borders on the absurd. For others of us, we have to wrestle with the possibility that what we had assumed all along to be Christian virtues were anything but. We are faced with the need to unmask the old self that has hidden behind old attitudes, old thoughts, old practices and habits … and somehow lulled us into believing that they are acceptable to God when in fact they are antithetical to what Christ taught and lived.
What does this mean for
It means that we can’t let our guard down. Yeah, that’s exhausting, and it is constant. But we are dealing with an enemy that DOESN’T tire, that doesn’t really sleep, that is constantly on the prowl, looking for someone to devour. It is our own old self.
So how do we train ourselves, how do we prepare, how do we grow into being able to, with the Holy Spirit’s help, overcome that old self? For one thing, we start early, if possible. That is why we have Sunday School, that is why we have the extended session for children during worship. That is why we have events to bring our children and youth together and continually engage them in the learning and practicing of our faith. Not to make it a tradition to follow, or an automatic reaction, but to instill in them a love for scripture and for God in Christ that would direct their actions and thoughts through to the point where they would make the decision for themselves to make Christ Lord of their lives.
Let’s pray.
Growing up in Chile, any time a family or an individual in the church went on an extended trip, the Sunday before they left we would have a moment in the service where we would send greetings to the church or churches they would be visiting in their travels. It was a normal part of the life of the church – it kept us connected to sister churches up and down the country (not a lot of ‘across’ in
This coming week we have two groups going out from
I’d like us today to speak the congregational benediction to those of us who will be traveling – as representatives of both our church family and of our risen Lord.
May the Lord bless you and keep you
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.
May God give you grace never to sell yourself short;
Grace to risk something big for something good;
Grace to remember that the world is now
Too dangerous for anything but truth
And too small for anything but love.
So may God take your minds and think through them,
May God take your lips and speak through them,
May God take your hearts and set them on fire
FOR Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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