Eighth Sunday After Pentecost Year A 2008

July Drafts 2008
08 Pentecost A 2008
July 6, 2008

Romans 7:15-25a
15 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but 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. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

The Rescuer

Philippi is beginning to ask itself the question: What does God want us to do and be?

We are each accustomed, I suppose, to being concerned with God’s will for us as individuals. But how often have we given thought to our purpose as a congregation?

Today’s lesson opens the door on what we might term the problem the church addresses.

Throughout my life I wanted to do not just the right thing, but the very best thing. I craved success in life, a kind of success that would change the world in some hugely positive way. And in the process of doing this, I got in more and more and more trouble.

Along the way, for the sake of what I thought was my great mission, I hurt all kinds of people, destroyed all kinds of relationships, and had absolutely no clue that I was in the wrong. Quite the contrary, I was sure that everyone else was to blame and I was just trying to be the best person I could be. I ended up in a dark spiritual prison of my own making, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually shattered.

In the midst of my despair, God reached out to me through a whole set of amazing people from all sorts of quarters around me.

I had a wonderful mentor name Willie Steinbach, a layman. Willie is dying now, a slow death in the twilight of stroke-related dementia, at his home in Urbanna. I have asked Philippi to adopt him and his wife Judy and I encourage you to visit him. If you’re lucky, he’ll smile at you and you’ll see in his eyes the great joy in his spirit.

At the time he became my friend, I was just coming back from a wild ride in Nervous Breakdown Land. I was deeply afraid of slipping back into the madness I’d been living in for some years previous. I used to call him up or get together with him and I’d lay out all the things that were happening in my life and all my fears about them. I’d ask him what to do.

He’d say, “Stand still.” Just “Stand still.” In fact, a number of people who had been helped by Willie used to call him “Stand Still Willie.” Sometimes he’d add, “Just let this thing wash over you.”

By “this thing,” he meant God’s grace and power. I had been so used to conquering my problems myself, facing them down in the street like some lone gunman in an old western. What I didn’t realize was that this very belief was the bondage that nearly destroyed me.

I had no idea what real freedom looked like or felt like. I had no idea how light the yoke of Christ actually was. But once I stood still and let the grace of God wash over me, I began to have glimpses.

An amazing new discovery in the Spirit was the experience of falling in love with God. This is not a romantic kind of love, but it’s more like that passionate love a boy has for his mother or a girl for her father. This kind of love has no concern about the law of God. Why does anyone who loves God need to worry about the law of God? The only thing one wants is to please God in everything all the time. When in the Spirit, there is nothing short of perfection that any child of God wants to strive for.

And there is no desire to take any of the credit for what God is doing.

I think this is one of the things people find most difficult to accept. That the only real power in the world is God’s. That human power is really nothing but a kind of mass delusion in which humankind is more-or-less hopelessly trapped.

In Matthew Jesus uses the parable of people refusing, on the one hand, to dance to the flute of the wedding, and on the other, to mourn when hearing wailing. He was speaking about the resistance he faced from the religious leaders of his day. John the Baptist was ascetic and people accused him of being possessed, while Jesus came celebrating and people said he was an alcoholic.

I remember seeing a woman at a wedding trying to get her six-year-old son to dance. The little boy was not getting something he wanted, so he was pouting and refusing to participate. The woman, possibly the boy’s mother, tried drawing him out for a slow dance and letting him stand on her feet, but he was wooden and sullen the whole time. Then, when a faster song came along, she wiggled and jumped and smiled encouragingly at him, but he only stood at the fringes of the crowd with his hands in his pockets.

The gospel of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is an invitation to live a life full of holy joy and anticipation. It is above all an invitation to shake free of the burdens imposed on us by the decay and death we see all around and even within us. But are we able to, apart from the power of Christ?

Throughout the letter to the Romans, Paul struggles with this question and tries to interpret it through the lens of the Old Testament. How did human beings end up in such a bondage that they are not free to be what they deeply and truly want to be. Paul goes all the way back to Genesis and the story of Adam in the garden.

“He started it!” Do you remember that playground defense? Somehow we think if the other guy started something, then we are justified in returning tit for tat. In fact, we are such social creatures, God has made us so, that we tend to take as permission everything everyone else does.

Do you remember the old dialogue with mom? She’d ask, “Why did you do that?” and you said, “Well, Frankie was doing it too.” And Mom said, “If Frankie jumped off a cliff, would you jump off the cliff too?”

The fact is, yes, we probably would.

A study was reported in the book The Tipping Point about a rash of suicides on an isolated island in the South Pacific. All the suicides were teen-aged boys. It was found that all had killed themselves over unrequited love. The study concluded that when the first boy killed himself, and the event was reported along with its cause, others suffering unrequited love were, in a strange subconscious way, given permission to follow suit. This is how human beings relate to one another. We naturally follow along with the rest of the group with which we identify ourselves.

Paul makes the point that it only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole darn bunch. Adam, by disobeying God, opened a Pandora’s box we are all absolutely unable to shut.

But Paul goes on to say that if one bad apple can spoil a whole darn bunch, one resurrected apple can make a bunch of spoiled ones fresh. If one man gave us all permission to disobey God, one man can also give us permission to obey him.

This is the message of the gospel. Christ is risen. Death is defeated and it’s only a matter of time before God sets everything right, every wrong will be punished, every victim redressed. Anyone who believes this good news begins to be transformed themselves.

Of course, very few actually believe this. Very few want to believe it. First of all, it takes the whole process out of human hands and that is offensive to wise and worldly people who think human beings are quite capable of straightening things out on their own. Those who cannot are simply deficient and deserve whatever they get.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the Disciples were really taking off, a guy named Miller thought he had figured out when Jesus was coming again, and he set a date. A lot of people believed him.

Many people sold everything they had and gave the money away. Lots of people paid off old debts and reconciled themselves with former enemies. Others wrote passionate letters to the government about various social injustices they felt had to be addressed right now. In short, the concrete expectation of resurrection made a huge difference in how they thought about their lives, their world and their neighbors.

Of course, thousands gathered on the day in question, which eventually came to be known as the Great Disappointment. Of interest is that some of those people clung to a belief that something cosmic had indeed happened, but had been hidden from view. That group went on to become the Seventh-Day Adventists.

We of course do not share these particular views of the coming kingdom. But it seems to me if we are going to think about our mission as a congregation, we need to come to some common understanding, however imperfect, of just what God is doing in the world through the church.

Today’s lesson from Paul gives us the beginning of an answer. People want to love God with all their hearts and all their souls and all their minds, and their neighbors as themselves, but they are prevented from doing so. It is our job to let them know that Christ offers us the power and the grace to be set free.

It is our job as a congregation to be that rush of grace that each new believers can just stand still and let wash over them.

Amen.