June 29, 2008
Romans 6:12-23
12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13 No 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. 14 For 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! 16 Do 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? 17 But 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, 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I 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.
20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Getting Used
Being human is about being used.
Most of us, when we think of being used, think about people manipulating us. It’s a vaguely dishonest thing. You know what I’m talking about. They come at you making it sound like they’re going to do something for you, but then by the end you’re the one doing all the giving.
Another way we talk about this is when we’re dehumanized by the world we live in. Do you ever feel like you’re a statistic? A demographic someone is trying to manipulate into buying or giving or serving or supporting? Do you ever feel like the world is this never-ending bartering game? The question is always, if you want something from me, well, what have you done for me lately?
Most of us think of ourselves individually as not participating in this syndrome. But really, what do we spend most of our time doing? If we’re not working for the boss, we’re working for the house, we’re working for the kids, we’re working for the spouse, we’re working for the community.
Being human is about being used.
People struggle very hard all their lives to get to the place where they are in a position to use others without being used themselves. A very few do attain this great goal. We call them the government.
Just kidding.
Make no mistake, you are being used. It is only a question of determining by what.
Certainly the economy is using you. The great and incomprehensible machine of world trade is using you. You bring your contribution and it is swept into the cycle and it spits out some of the things, though probably not everything, you want.
And yes, the government in all its varying levels is using you. It takes its bite out of your annual paycheck and spits out some of the things, though probably not everything, you want from it.
Certainly, your social circle is using you, your family and friends. You have a role to play that is important to them, and likewise, they have roles they more or less faithfully play, so that the whole thing produces some, though probably not all, of the things you want from your social circle.
We are so used to this world of barter and trade, this “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” culture, that we barely think about it. It seems, though, doesn’t it, that we all freely enter into these agreements, that we are choosing who or what uses us and to what extent they do. If we are used, we are allowing it freely.
But really, how much choice do we have? How much freedom do we have to willingly offer ourselves to any of these? What would happen if we stopped paying taxes? If we completely rejected any other human being from social involvement in our lives? What if we opted out of the economic system, stopped working, for example, or blew our pension and investments on movie tickets and dinners out?
Well, we’d have some consequences, wouldn’t we? We’d lose stuff. We’d lose security. We might be jailed or imprisoned. We might lose our lives!
This week we’ll celebrate the Fourth of July. One of the key themes of that celebration is the notion of freedom. I’d like to read to you from a sermon preached by one of the founders of the Disciples movement, Alexander Campbell:
Talk not of liberty which only makes men greater slaves. Under the monarchies ofI think many of our members don’t realize how ahead of their time our founders were. Campbell said that while our system of government is a great blow against the idea of one person’s tyranny over another, it opens up and encourages a new idolatry, the worship of the self.
the Old World men are more free from themselves than under the free government
of these United States. The reason is, under this free government the citizens
have the opportunity and the liberty of improving and bettering their
circumstances to such an extent as to engross all their energies, to call forth
all their powers: hence, upon themselves they impose such tasks and inflict such
toils and privations as few of the monarchies of the East would be so cruel as
to impose upon their subjects. Here in this land of liberty we see all men
striving for power. The accomplishment of one or more projects does not diminish
their labor or their enterprise. Quite the reverse: the more successful, the
more eager to commence again. And how often, how very often, do we see men dying under the whip of their own cupidity, in full harness pulling up the hill of
their own ambition, when death kindly interposes, takes the burden off their
galled shoulders, and strips them for the shroud! Yet they boast of being free!
Free!—yes, to make slaves of themselves!
In the book of Genesis, when God began this great project of building a nation for himself, he called Abraham, who was old and married to a barren wife, and miraculously gave him a son. This was the greatest joy of Abraham’s life, and his deepest love. But then, in a somewhat horrifying story, he called upon Abraham to sacrifice that very son.
The story haunts us because it asks us about our priorities, about what we are devoting our lives to and why. What is using us, and to what end?
Paul speaks to us about presenting our members to sin. This would seem to be self-evident, given the way most of us think about sin. But sin, understood from Paul’s perspective, is simply that unreflective way most of us live our lives, the millions of little decisions we barely think about, the thousands of ways we buy into the powers that are using us, the things we do that really, at the end of the day, are about our own survival, our own power, our own superiority, our own status, our own achievements, our own family, our own nation, our own race, our own wealth. We present ourselves to be used, and the ultimate user is ourselves.
We offer ourselves to be used by whatever power seems to be holding the gun to our heads, or by whatever power removes it even for a time. We offer ourselves to be used by whatever power is holding the biggest gun, particularly if that gun is pointed at someone else.
And what is the final paycheck these things issue to us? What at the end of the day do we really get from any of them? You’ve heard all the old clichés, haven’t you, about there being no U-Hauls on hearses? The final paycheck is death. Period.
But Jesus presented himself to be used by God. And God used him to reveal his love. God used him to announce that the terrible power of death would be defeated. God used him to heal and to forgive and to feed.
Jesus refused to be used by the biggest guns of his days, and they did exactly what they do whenever anyone defies them. They killed him. But then, three days later, God raised him from the dead. We know this because a whole lot of people at the time saw him. He was different than he had been before he had been killed. He was a new kind of human being. Yet he was real, and he was alive. He ate with his disciples. They touched him. God had defeated death.
If we believe this, nothing can ever be the same for us. The way is opened for us to present ourselves to be used by God.
Alexander Campbell completed his Fourth of July sermon with these words:
Conscience makes slaves as well as cowards of multitudes who boast of being
free. No person who is under the fear of death ever can be free. They who are
afraid of the consequences of death are all their lifetime in bondage. To escape
from this vassalage is worth of the greatest struggle which man could make.
This, however, is the first boon which Christianity tenders to all who put
themselves under its influence. It proclaims a jubilee to the soul—it opens the
prison-doors, and sets the captive free. The corruptions of anti-Christian
systems are admirably adapted to increase and cherish this fear, which tends to
bondage; but to those who embrace and bow to the real gospel, there is bestowed
a full deliverance, and gracious exemption from this most grievous bondage of
the soul.
This is the practice of our baptism, the principle of repentance as a way of life. The world and all its powers are constantly at us, constantly threatening us, constantly demanding our obedience. Repentance is turning away from them in an intentionally way and presenting oneself to God.
Christian practice, worship, prayer, biblical study, meditation, self-examination, confession, these are the intentional practices of repentance, intentional work that we do to turn our backs on the powers of the world and present ourselves to Jesus Christ.
Here’s a quote from a Bob Dylan song. You can get it on his album Slow Train Coming.
You may be an ambassador to England or France,Amen.
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
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
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