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Sermon
at Nativity Episcopal Church, Scottsdale, AZ
“I do not understand my own actions. For
I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… So I find it to be a
law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” Romans 7:15, 21
Good
morning!
It
is a pleasure to be here with you today, and I am grateful to Susan and Wayne
for giving me the opportunity to join you in prayer.
My
name is Robert Berra, and I am the Episcopal Campus Chaplain for ASU
Polytechnic, a campus at the southeastern edge of the Valley, next to Gateway
Airport in Mesa. I think you have a short bio of me in your
bulletin, but I’d like to tell you one more thing about me that might help this
sermon make sense. I love history. My undergrad was a double major in History
and Education and before graduate school, I taught high school. I am fascinated by ideas—by how thought can
change the world. So, I’d like to start with something of a history of an idea,
and put it in conversation with our reading from Paul’s letter.
The
time before World War One for many European and American people was a time of
unparalleled optimism. Society seemed to
be on an upward swing—at least it was for those on top of the social order. From the Enlightenment to the beginning of
the Great War in 1914, human progress seemed unstoppable. The physical sciences made possible the
industrialization of society, with leaps and bounds in the development of transportation,
medicine, exploration, and easily obtained consumer goods.
The social sciences—economics, psychology, and
sociology— were also coming into their own; and at least in the case of the
social sciences, many saw the possibility of the human society reaching a Utopian goal of peace and perfect understanding. From the dawn of modernity, the claim that
the social goods of religion would be replaced by the discoveries of the social
sciences gained ground. Some of these
social goods were a sense of caring about others, social cohesion, changes in
the understanding of meaning to events, and a shift from clergy to scientists
as the new keepers of knowledge. Most
famous of these predictions was Karl Marx’s observation that religion could
serve as the “opiate of the masses,” masking the pain of an oppressive social
order. This not quite incorrect observation was often coupled to the hope that
all religion would be thrown off, people would finally see their oppression,
and act to bring about a just and equitable social order on the rubble of
faiths that would rather keep people longing for a heavenly reward instead of
addressing the real and pressing issues of human flourishing.
These were the challenges to Christianity; and to put
it in simplistic terms, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the challenge of
modernity meant that Christian thought in the United States split and ran a
gamut between fundamentalists—who refused to deal with new knowledge about the
natural world and new discoveries about the way the Bible was composed—and
Christian liberals—who almost jettisoned ‘sin’ as a meaningful concept and substituted
the hope of Christ’s coming again for a human-made Kingdom of Heaven achieved by
adherence to the Social Gospel. This
split is roughly the reason why—in the U.S.— the mainline churches seem so
different from the churches who cluster around fundamentalist or evangelical
identities.
In
many ways, World War One caused a crisis for those Utopian dreams of
uninterrupted progress, for both secular and Christian folks expecting an ideal
society. War on an industrial scale. The
scale and the efficiency of the killing and mayhem were unlike anything the
world had ever seen. At the battle of
Somme—a battle in 1916 that lasted five months—on the first day of that
battle—the British army lost 19,240 men. 1,000,000 would eventually die just in that
campaign. This week marked the 98th
anniversary of that battle’s beginning; and actually, this month is the 100th
anniversary of the beginning of World War One, in case you want to mark your
calendar.
After
the end of the war, after the monuments, many in Europe were left wondering
what had happened and traumatized. The
literature that came from men in the war witnessed death and futility become
major themes. Disillusionment with the
possibilities of human achievement became a stronger intellectual stream. Some recognized that even the optimism that
attempted to label WW1 “the war to end all wars” was misplaced. At the end of the war Marshal Ferdinand Foch,
the commander of all the allied forces, thought the allies had not been tough
enough in the extremely punitive Versailles Treaty and realized the world would
go to war again. He said of the treaty “This
is not peace; it is an armistice for twenty years.” He got it wrong by just 65 days.
In
Christian thought, the war and subsequent world events—such as witnessing the
rise of the Nazis in Germany and the excessive brutality of communist regimes—
shook the optimism of some of the liberal theologians of the early 20th
century. One theologian who exemplifies a
shift away from the myth of uninterrupted progress to what would be termed
“Christian realism” was Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr started his career as an idealistic
young man, but the brutality of war and the behavior of nations throughout the
20th century made him re-think liberal Christianity’s
near-jettisoning of sin as a concept central to the understanding of Christ’s
work in the world. Niebuhr’s
contribution is best summarized by this quote from one of his
contemporaries:
“[Of
Niebuhr it is said that] he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a
great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into … the
semi-fundamentalism of other…theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary
insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social
groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the
relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the
reality of sin on every level of man’s existence. These elements in Niebuhr’s
thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism
concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still
believed in man’s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for
evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man’s
social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.”[1]
This quote, by the way, is
from another great theological mind of the 20th century: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his
intellectual autobiography. The
admiration was mutual between the two.
What does this mean for
our reading from Romans? What does an
intellectual history have to do with our reality, both physical and spiritual?
I suggest it means mainline
Christianity would be well served to recover a radical understanding of both
the power of sin and the grace of God through Jesus Christ that gives us a fuller picture of where we find ourselves as a redeemed
people in a fallen world.
Our passage from Paul is
one of the most incisive and difficult descriptions of the human condition
according to Christianity. Not only are
there some people who actively choose evil, even those who would call
themselves good—or those who we would think are good—are not perfect. There is
something about us that makes even our good actions suspect. According to Paul, sin is not simply an act
of commission or omission. It is not
simply a missing of the mark. It is not
simply falling short of a series of ideals that are given to us either by the
faith we follow or the cultural values instilled in us. For Paul, sin is “an active, aggressive power
that seizes hold of God’s good gifts and bends them toward death.”[2] For Paul, this is what it meant to live under
the law. The law was good and holy, but
the power of sin was able to turn even something good and holy to destructive
ends, and Paul is speaking from experience.
For Paul, the greatest demonstration of the power of sin working through
him was the persecution of the Church; and he did not do this in spite of the
law. He did this because he kept a law
that sin had hijacked for its own purposes.
Sin is so powerful that it can wrench God’s gifts into serving its own
ends.[3]
Furthermore, the way sin
goes about this death-dealing work is not simply by our breaking of rules, but
by the distortion of relationships. Our
proper relationship with God, centered on God, is turned inwards—into a self-centeredness—and
we try to secure our own goals over against our neighbors and God. We turn away from a loving God whose Son
showed us a life of self-giving as the perfect expression of God’s will, and
instead seek our own advantage. We
strive by our own will instead of by trust in God. We see our fellow persons as competitors, not
children of God; as expendable, not loved; as obstacles, not fellow workers in
the Kingdom; as lesser than us, not as fellow heirs to the Kingdom.
Historically, Christianity
at its best has maintained this expansive view of the power of sin. It sees sin not as simply the cosmic chalking
up of an individual’s wrongdoing, but a state of humanity and an active force
inherent in humanity that tears us apart and keeps us from recognizing the
belovedness of others in God’s eyes.
And so, at every level of
society, within ourselves as individuals, as a city, as a state, as a nation,
as a globe—sin interferes. Think of all
the awareness campaigns of problems and troubles in the world that we are
inundated with. There are so many, and
we being finite beings can only choose a few to address. Furthermore, I recognize sin within myself;
like Paul I find within myself a mixture of motives to even the good that I
want to do—wondering how ego plays into my decisions, how my status within the
church helps or hinders humility, if I could do more for others if I but choose
to do so.
We recognize sin even in
our history—for example, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrined the
ideals and the rationale for the founding of our nation and the hope of freedom
and equality for all was not free from the hold of sin. The declaration was a world-shattering statement
of belief that nevertheless was an ideal that would not be achieved at the time
of its writing. Before the Declaration
could pass the Continental Congress, Jefferson was forced by southern delegates
to remove a condemnation of the slave trade.
Our nation was created and built on the principle of the equality of all
people, and yet from the very beginning people were shut out of that goal. Niebuhr called this—and other examples from
our national life—the irony of American History, in which, as a people, our
great virtues can make us ignorant or accepting of our vices.
That is Paul’s message to
us today: virtue and vice are closely
linked. We sometimes find that we do the
evil we would prefer not to do. We find
that in the good we do, something not quite right lurks nearby, perhaps as our
motive or our method for bringing about the good.
If this account of the
nature of sin seems all-encompassing and pervasive, the radical nature of God’s
grace and the unlimited reach of God’s reconciling work in the world is even
more so. For no other reason could Paul
write, “ For I delight in the law of God in my
inmost self, 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.
Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
The results of sin are
entirely within the scope of God’s saving work.
God’s presence through we who make up the Body of Christ, and the
slivers and glimpses we see of the Kingdom of God in the world still make it
possible to recognize the Good and call out the evil. These glimpses of God’s reconciling power
expose evil for what it is, even when evil is expressed in law and
culture. One example of these glimpses
of the Kingdom’s reconciling power were the marches and the demonstrations of
the Civil Rights era, which exposed the brutality and evil of the social order
that was commonly called good in the Southern states as activists both black
and white were beaten and attacked. In
those attacks on demonstrators, the sin of the system showed its logical
outworking, finally was recognized for what it was, and repulsed many. I
mentioned the slavery clause removed from the Declaration of Independence, but
this week—July 2— was also the 50th anniversary of the passing of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which attempted to address inequality that has
continued in our society. The work of
God in our midst.
We, through God’s power,
can effect good and be agents of the reconciling work of God. But we have to be careful not to continue the
mistakes of earlier generations. Discounting
the power of sin is one way in which the power of sin can grow. Thinking ourselves capable of countermanding
sin on our own ensnares us even further in its power. As theologian Ted Smith has written: “If the problem were weakness of the human
will, then reconciliation would require nothing more than a little extra
willpower. Jesus would be something like
a really good life coach, someone who could help us keep our resolutions. If the problem, however, is the power of sin
to twist the good gifts of God…to evil ends, then deliverance requires a defeat
of that power.”[4] And this is the Gospel we proclaim: God does not just give individual humans the
willpower to live our best lives now, or does God say that it does not matter
if we do not have that best life. In
Jesus Christ, God sets the cosmos free from bondage, redeeming our lives and
equipping us for the work God has given us to do.[5] And the ultimate victory will be God’s.
May we remember that
self-deception is always a possibility through the working of sin, and may we
not forget that the discernment of God’s will is everyone’s vocation. May we remember that we are not in this
alone—that God working through us is the antidote to any notion that we go our
own way with no help. May we not
abdicate our own responsibilities in this earthly pilgrimage to affect God’s
love and justice in this world. May we
remember these lessons, and take to heart that a world in which freedom,
justice, and love reign, a world in which we live up to the ideals of our Declaration
of Independence—and more importantly the character of the Kingdom to come—is
possible through God’s power, and only through God’s power.
Amen.
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