Wanting and Doing

 

Sunday, July 6^th, 2008

Proper 9/ Ordinary 14 A/ Pentecost +8

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 7:15-25a

Theme: The struggle to overcome sin

 

 “¹⁵I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. ¹⁸For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. ²¹So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. ²²For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, ²³but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. ²⁴Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.

 

I remember the day I took my faith commitment and put it out there in a way that I couldn’t always control.  It was the spring semester of my freshman year in college.  I don’t remember the exact date, and the act was somewhat minor, but with long-term consequences.  I bought one of those silver plastic fish that you stick on the back or the bumper of your car.  It was a simple one – no Greek letters spelling out Icthus or anything like that – it was just the outline – the two arcs that form the body and tail of a fish – that tradition tells us was the way early Christians identified each other. 

 

After I put it on, I realized really quickly that how I drove my car and acted behind the wheel was going to need to … align with what that symbol MEANT to ME.  Not that I was an aggressive or rude driver, but I became acutely aware of the need to let what I displayed on my CAR be reflected in how I behaved ALL THE TIME. 

 

I drove that car for another two years after I put that symbol on the back of the trunk.  It was a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme – two doors, and a giant engine.  My next car was a 1978 Honda Civic Station Wagon.  It DIDN’T end up with a fish on the back of it. 

 

During those years I was, as I’ve shared with you before, working out what *I* believed and why … and putting the decal on my car was a step in that process. 

 

When we encounter something new, or maybe something old, but in a brand new way, at least in my case, I found I needed to explore all the ramifications of that new thing, or the new view of the old thing.  In the case of my faith, I tended to go to the extreme … or the perceived extreme, in order to explore what it meant to hold to that view, to make that particular stand, to be counted as one of ‘them’ – the radical, the committed, the ‘true believers’. 

 

There was a big push for holiness, a REALLY big push for it.  Being holy meant speaking the truth fearlessly.  It meant keeping yourself apart.  It meant avoiding those places and practices that could lead to temptation and sin.  It meant diving into a deep pool of study and prayer and discipleship.  And it was exhilarating. 

 

But there was this THING that kept happening. 

 

Regardless of how good my quiet time had been, regardless of how deep the Bible Study had been, or how sweet the fellowship had been, or how pointed the message had been, I still sinned. 

 

And what confounded me then still confounds me just as it did Paul.   

 

Every day I struggle with sin. 

 

Every single day. 

 

Some days it is easier than others.  I’ll be busy or preoccupied, or focusing on something outside myself and the day will simply go by in a blur, and I’ll get to the end of the day and though I may be tired, there’ll be a sense of contentment that I don’t always recognize the cause of.  And occasionally it will occur to me that it was more what DIDN’T happen rather than what DID.

It’s not that I didn’t sin.  I still do.  It is just not in the more obvious ways that are available to us as humans. 

 

But the TYPE of sin is not the issue.  The issue is the FACT of sin. 

 

Paul is voicing the struggle that we face each day as Christians.  We do what we least WANT to do, and DON’T do what we MOST want to do.  That is basically what the passage boils down to.  We still struggle – sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, with sin in our lives. 

 

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been following Paul’s argument to the church in Rome about what their – and by extension, our – relationship is to sin after we’ve made the choice to become Christ-followers.  He underscored the fact that through the act of baptism we publicly present the inner reality which is taking place in our lives – that is, that we are dying to an old way of living and being raised in a new life – one that is powered by the Holy Spirit and guided by the risen Christ.  And after he makes what are very strong arguments for this, he comes along and throws this one at us. 

 

He – Paul himself – the missionary to the gentiles, the single most influential person in the rise of Christianity after Jesus himself – confesses that he still struggles with sin. 

 

So if the whole point of being a Christian is to overcome sin, then why is he sitting there writing after nearly three decades of work and suffering for the Kingdom of God, telling us that he HASN’T overcome it??

 

Well, maybe the whole point of being a Christian ISN’T to overcome sin.  Yes, it is a huge PIECE of it, but it is not the single sole purpose of becoming a follower of Christ. 

 

You see, the whole point of becoming a Christian is to re-engage our relationship to God through Jesus Christ.  I mentioned last week that the life of faith is traditionally called a pilgrimage, a journey, and it is just that. 

 

Here Paul is, near the end of his life, and he is still calling himself a wretched man and his body a body of death.  And yet, he has accomplished so much in those nearly three decades that he is and always will be the measure of a life given freely to Christ for the sake of the Gospel. 

 

What Paul seems to be telling us is that yes, sin matters – sin is still a part of us by virtue of the fact that we live in mortal bodies and they are weak.  There is going to be no getting away from that on this side of heaven.  It will always present a struggle, it will always be a foe.  It will always be looking for ways to undermine us and cut us down and tell us we’re not really worthy of what Christ has done for us, so we should stop acting like we are and on that point I would actually concede it partially.  We SHOULD stop acting like we are more worthy of what Christ has done for us than the next person WHOEVER that next person may be. 

 

Jesus didn’t distinguish between sins.  Gluttony, gossip, and murder are all in there together.  There’s no “these you can get away with, these you can’t” verse in the Gospels or any of the rest of the New Testament.

 

The reality of our lives as Christians who sin is that, though we struggle to overcome sin, and sometimes do, and other times don’t, God still loves us and remains in relationship with us – as Paul says – Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! 

 

So, what does this mean for us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

It is that ‘Through Jesus Christ our Lord’ part that is critical.  We do it all through him – and through the Holy Spirit.  We learn from what Scripture tells us he did and said.  We allow the Holy Spirit to resonate with that story into our own stories – the ones of our lives – and we draw from that resonance a strength, a determination, and a sense of what it is to be living in a state of Grace in the presence of a God who IS Holy, who IS other, and yet who DOES want to know us and wants us to know HIM.  It is through his command to love each other IN SPITE OF THE FACT OF SIN IN OUR LIVES that we begin to live out within our family of faith community what God wants us to live out into the rest of the world, because it is a vision of what God meant the world to be to begin with.  Grace doesn’t abound because we let sin abound in our lives.  Grace abounds because God is a patient, loving, caring, engaged God who wants to get to know God’s children as they grow up and as they grow closer to God.  And it is that same grace that we are called to share with the world.         

 

Let’s pray. 

 

 

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

Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.                                 

                                      -William Sloan Coffin & H. Stephen Shoemaker