"Enemies of God"

Robert Berra

St. Matthew’s, Chandler

Lent 3, Yr A

Exodus 17:1-7

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-42

Psalm 95

How would you rate your moral life?

Average?  Above average?  Below average?

Do others seem to you to be really self-righteous? Judgmental?

There’s a reason.

Last October, researchers at the University of London published a study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The title of the article was “The Illusion of Moral Superiority.” The findings were these:  Most people strongly believe they are just, virtuous, and moral; yet regard the average person as distinctly less so. Virtually all individuals involved in the random sample irrationally inflated their moral qualities.  These findings suggest that moral superiority is a strong and prevalent form of “positive illusion.”[1] 

This is not a new finding, actually.   At least since the late-1980s—and repeated in a significant number of studies—The common means of inferring the presence of positive illusions is to ask individuals how they compare with respect to the average person along some trait. This method consistently reveals that an implausibly high number of people believe that they are above average. This has been dubbed the ‘‘better-than-average effect.’’ Although this phenomenon emerges across a range of characteristics, the magnitude of self-enhancement is strongest for moral qualities.[2] 

Bottom line:  Most people consider themselves paragons of virtue; yet few folks perceive this abundance of virtue in others.[3] Such is the extent of this phenomenon that violent criminals consider themselves more moral than law-abiding citizens living in the same community.[4] 

And the thing is, it’s actually more reasonable and accurate to assume that another person is just as moral as we are. Normatively speaking, self-judgments act as valid cues to what the average person is like—justified by the fact that most people are in the majority most of the time. So gauging the typicality (typical-ness) of one’s own characteristics improves accuracy in judgments of others.  Neglecting this typical-ness amounts to a failure of inductive reasoning.

Still, we do this on the regular.  We tend to see ourselves as more moral than others, and almost always consider ourselves above average.

I bring this up because I imagine there might be a little bit of recoil when Paul calls us sinners and “enemies of God.”  Surely we aren’t that bad? 

Enemy?  Maybe that sounds too strong. Too dualistic.

Maybe we think we had or have a neutral relationship to God—a hands-off arrangement that goes both ways.

“I don’t bother God.  God doesn’t bother me.” 

“After all,”—we might think— “I’m a moral person.  I’m okay.  Surely there are worse people than me.”

What if we sat with that notion that we are—or were—enemies of God a little longer?  What does it mean to be an enemy of God?

It’s much easier to understand this rhetoric of “enemy” when we remember that Paul was writing this letter to a congregation in the heart of the empire that crucified Christ 25-30 years prior.

But there is more to it than the historical fact of the Roman Empire.  What continues to make this letter to the Romans and its naming of humankind as enemies of God so true—hard to hear, maybe; but true—is that humankind has rebelled against God, defied the divine purpose in our lives, and destroyed the fellowship for which we were intended.  From the beginning, we have erected upon a false foundation a whole series of relationships which constitute a kingdom of evil. [5]

While we were created for perfect relationship with God and with each other, humankind has been in the practice of rejecting these calls to take up our loving purpose.  We instead set up kingdoms in which the dignity of many is expendable for the comfort of a few who continue to live in suspicion of each other.  In which our fellow humans become commodities—things to be manipulated to our own will.  Or they are considered burdens, and all too easily we begin to regard others as expendable. 

Time and again the law, the prophets, Christ himself, and the apostles called us back into relationship with God and with each other with appeals to defend and care for the alien, the sick, the poor, the orphan, the widow, the hungry, the naked, the prisoner, the oppressed, the refugee, the workers seeking their wages. [6]  Yet humankind continues to sell each other cheaply. 

We name enemies we need to defeat.  We practice deceit and falsehood.  We create burdens, austerities, and hardships for others that we are not willing to face ourselves.[7]  We do not trust God’s love for us, and instead want to prove ourselves self-sufficient and free from everything and everyone. 

All of which intensifies our estrangement from God and from others and from ourselves.  And we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.

The reality is that in our natural state we are separated from God.  And for Paul to refer to himself and all of us as enemies of God is harsh, but a less-pointed description would not match the situation.  Our reconciliation was absolutely necessary, and utterly unattainable by our own striving.  And God’s dogged love for all means that He is unwilling to turn a blind eye to our hostility to him and our apathy and animosity to each other.

So how does God treat God’s enemies? 

Paul tells us that in this lesson, too.  God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ his son died for us.  Christ’s life was necessary; his death was necessary; his resurrection was necessary.  Through all of these, the hostility between us and God is bridged. And rather than simply being acquitted, and declared in a neutral relationship with God, we are called into reconciled, loving, relationship.

And in the Gospel lesson from John today, we see what it means that God sends Jesus Christ into the world not to condemn the world, but to save it.  Jesus meets the woman at the well, not with judgment, but a desire.  A desire to do the work his father had given him to do.  A desire to seek out the lost and those left bereft of hope. A desire to open reconciliation where there had been ethnic strife (Samaritans and Jews hated each other.) If God and Jesus were only interested in reconciling a select few, or passively waiting for people to seek to reconcile themselves, Jesus didn’t have to say a word to that woman.  But he is the perfect image of God’s active pursuit of renewed relationship with his creation. And by his example, he brings his disciples and us with him into the relentless…seeking…labor of God’s redeeming purpose.

You see, the offer of God in the work of reconciling us to him is not an offer in which we get to choose to be left alone. Paul writes elsewhere that we are called into the ministry of reconciliation.[8]  We do not get to sit in a personal salvation, assured of our safety with an eternal fire insurance policy. We are called to actively pursue our own reconciliation—giving ourselves to God’s purpose, and to invite the world into that same work.

Others have labored.  It is our time.

It is always a renewed time to let go our own self-righteousness—which even secular psychology is now able to quantify—and seek God’s righteousness. 

It’s time to temper our faith in ourselves, and find our faith in God’s purposes and mission.

For it is not our own morality or righteousness or faith in ourselves that saves us or makes us worthy of boasting about ourselves.  Instead, we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

…For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ [in whom we are knit as one body, and] through whom we have now received reconciliation.  Thanks be to God!

---

[1] Tappin, Ben M. and Ryan T. McKay. "The Illusion of Moral Superiority". Social Psychological and Personality Science (2016): 194855061667387.  Illusions are "beliefs that depart from reality" and they are positive when they involve unrealistic optimism about one's capacities, prospects, or control over the external environment.

[2] Ibid, 1.

[3] Ibid, 2.

[4] Ibid, 4.

[5] This phrasing is heavily indebted to John Knox, The Interpreter's Bible, Volume 9 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1954), 460.

[6] Ex. 22:21, Jas 1:27, Mt . 25:31-46, Prov 13:41, Jas. 5:4.

[7] Mt 23:4.

[8] 2Cor 5:18.

Sin and Grace in History

Proper 9 Year A RCL
Track 1
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 45: 11-18  or Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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 98^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 50^th 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.

           

[1] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence." The Christian Century 4, Sept. 1958: 479. 

[2] Ted A. Smith, Romans 7:15-25a, Theological Perspective, Feasting on the Word, Yr A Vol 3, 208

[3] Smith, ibid.

[4] Smith, ibid.

[5] Based on Smith, ibid.