Hilton Head Island, SC – February 12, 2012
Romans 7:4-25
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. – Romans 7:20 (RSV)
The apostle Paul had more hang-ups than a psychiatrist with fifty years in practice could shake a stick at. (By the way, we have two such psychiatrists in this congregation, which may say a) something about them, b) something about us, c) something about all of us, or d) nothing about anybody.) Anyway, Paul was a singular piece of work --- personally, professionally, psychologically, theologically, religiously, and, perhaps, sexually. But into most of that we shall not now delve. And into some of it, never.
Instead, we will spend some time this morning inspecting some of the things Paul said about the biblical law, the Torah, in the 7th chapter of his letter to the Romans. In the 5th and 6th chapters, Paul seemed to suggest that God’s law was written down, presumably in the time of Moses, to show us what is right and what is wrong. “If it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin” (7:7), wrote Paul. But, he said later in Romans 7, we are not capable of following the law without fail. Everybody botches things, he says, although he not express it with that particular word.
One of Paul’s biggest hang-ups was that he originally was a Pharisee. The Pharisees were experts in the Torah. They wrote extensive commentaries about it which became part of normative Judaism in the 1st century. Many of those writings remain authoritative to this day. But Paul wasn’t just a Pharisee; he was, by his own admission, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a super-Pharisee, a fanatical Pharisee. He tried to do everything which he believed the biblical law demanded. In the end, he discovered, he couldn’t do it. And thus he deduced that the ultimate thing the law did to him was to convince him he couldn’t keep the law in every circumstance.
“I do not understand my own actions,” Paul wrote in Romans 7. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do not do what I want, I agree the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.”
Another of Paul’s biggest hang-ups is that he had a perpetual thing about sin. He was, as they say, “agin’ it.” But Paul wasn’t just against sin; he was hooked on sin, possessed by sin, obsessed with sin. It became a central feature of his theology, and because it was, and because Paul’s letters comprise about a third of the New Testament, and because many preachers down through the centuries were more devoted to the teachings of Paul than the teachings of Jesus, sin became a very big factor in much of Christianity.
Had Paul been raised as a normal Jewish boy in a normal Jewish family, Christians probably wouldn’t have so many of their own hang-ups about sin. But he wasn’t, and we do. And how are we to deal with this issue?
Let us turn to our sermon text, which sounds like verses you have just heard, and is certainly an extension of Paul’s thought following them. “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me” (7:20). Let us be clear about what this statement is not. It is not Flip Wilson saying, “The devil made me do it.” This is not Paul trying to weasel out of his culpability for the sins he commits, nor is he suggesting a weasel way for us, either. Instead this is Paul explaining something which the Church later described in much greater detail as “original sin.”
The very term “original sin” may sound confusing to you. What, exactly, does it mean? What it doesn’t mean are specific examples of sins which are unique in and of themselves, in other words, original sins. “What, you mean you super-glued a rubber ball into the tailpipe of the car of a man you don’t like, so that when he got a block down the street the car blew up and you nearly killed him? Now that’s original!” But that isn’t what original sin is, or at least what it is supposed to be.
The concept of original sin, or even the doctrine of original sin, if you prefer, is the notion that in our very origin, by having been born to human parents, who were born to human parents, who were born to human parents, going all the way back to Adam and Eve, who purportedly were chucked by God out of the Garden of Eden because of their sin, we are all incapable of NOT sinning. By the fact that we are humans, we are sinners. We inherit the certainty that we shall all sin. Not everything we do is sinful, not by a long shot, even for the worst of us, but no one is able perpetually to refrain from sinning. That’s what is meant by original sin. And that’s what Paul indicated was his problem, and yours, and mine.
“Wretched man that I am!” Paul exclaimed at the end of Romans 7; “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (7:25) Thank God, says Paul, there is an answer. And the answer lies not in anything we can do or anything we can become. It is found in the person of Jesus Christ. Specifically, sin is overcome by Christ’s death on the cross. The cross is THE central theme in the theology of Saul of Tarsus, who later became the apostle Paul. Paul considered all of his hang-ups were solved by the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” Paul says in the opening verse of the 8th chapter. No matter how obnoxious anyone might be, if they believed in Jesus and in the salvation made possible by his crucifixion and resurrection, God had given them a way out of their dilemma. Everyone with a proper faith shall be rescued. This was the core of Paul’s belief system.
A couple were awakened at 3:00 AM by someone pounding on the door. The husband cautiously went to the door. An inebriated stranger asked for a push. The husband loudly said, “No; it is 3:00 AM, and I’m not coming out.” When he got back into bed, his wife asked who it was, and he said it was a drunk wanting a push. “Well,” she said, “don’t you remember when we broke down on the road a few months ago, and those men helped us? Get out there and do the right thing! God loves drunk people too!” So the husband got dressed and went outside in the rain. “Are you still out here?” he asked. “Yes,” came the answer. “Do you still need a push?” “Oh, yes, please!” said the voice. “Well where are you?” The inebriate explained, “Back here on the swing set.” “God loves drunk people too,” Paul would say, “if they have proper faith.”
To those of you who have heard at least a dozen or so of my sermons, it must be obvious either that I daily read The Times of London (which I don’t), or that somebody who does send me clippings regularly from that newspaper (which Trudy Yates of Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, England, and formerly of Hilton Head Island, does). From time to time, several of you have given me clippings from other publications which you think I should read, and I am grateful to you as well for providing me that information.
Anyway, about every two or three weeks Trudy dispatches a batch of clippings from the Cotwolds. Recently there was an editorial piece by Hugh Rifkind. He was writing about the group of people who occupied the financial district in London, and then retreated to the small public area outside St. Paul’s Cathedral to set up their protest camp. For a time the church officials allowed them to stay there, but then it was decided to have them removed by the police. A couple of days after that happened, the canon of the cathedral (the chief cleric), Giles Fraser, resigned from his position in protest to the decision made by ecclesiastical higher-ups. Mr. Rifkind applauded Dr. Fraser, and excoriated the church high mucky-mucks.
Hugh Rifkind explained his background, saying he is an agnostic. “I’m not a Christian. I was born and raised, technically, an orthodox Jew. This was Scottish orthodox Jewry, though, which is very laid back and only involves a few hundred people, most of whom I’m related to.” He goes on to write, “Just because I’m not religious, though, that doesn’t mean I don’t value religion…. I have benefited from Christian kindness more than once in my life through Christians who have helped me in a manner in which I’d never have bothered to help them. I know orthodox Jews who give up their free time to wash the dead. Religion pressures you to behave well even when you don’t feel like it.”
We ought, says the “lapsed” Scottish Jew, to do the right thing, like Giles Fraser did. It does no good, he would probably say in response to Romans 7, that we don’t do what we know we should do, and it is because sin takes hold of us. Uh-uh, Mr. R. would say; that’s no excuse.
There was another editorial by Libby Purves, one of Trudy Yates’ and my favorite Times editorialists. Ms. Purves was raised Roman Catholic, but she has been on a crusade against the British Catholic hierarchy for the way in which they have bollixed their priestly sexual abuse scandals. Deference to the clergy was a good idea, she said, but it has become sorely tested. Ms. Purves wrote, “Everyone feels rage at the violation of children. But if you grew up in the Roman Catholic Church and remain guardedly fond of some of its ideals and honest clerics, that rage is incandescent…. So there is a very deep horror in the long history of official cover-ups of absolving and counseling the priestly sinner without stripping away the protection of office and handing him over to lay justice.” Nevertheless, as Libby Purves suggests, hundreds or perhaps thousands of pedophile priests have escaped secular justice behind the wall of church protection.
Romans 7:21-23: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 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 and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.” The devil didn’t make me do it; it was my eyes or my ears or heart or hands or legs or private parts that made me do it.
Really? Is that how sin actually works? Do we sin simply because we are human, or is there something more basic, something in a faulty character or a flaccid will which explains our misbehavior and the sordid nature of our sin - - - or our sins?
On the cover of today’s bulletin is a quote from Ben Franklin. “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden; it is forbidden because it is hurtful. Nor is a duty beneficial because it is commanded, but it is commanded because it is beneficial.” Sometimes I think Paul tried too hard to psychoanalyze himself and his hang-ups. Why did he – or you or I – do what he or we did or do which we shouldn’t have done? Generally we do it because we want to; that’s why. That isn’t always true; sometimes we may no real choices other than bad ones. But usually when we break God’s laws, we do it because that’s what we want to do.
Paul has addressed a very difficult issue, men and women. There is no easy or clear way out of this mess. Hugo, Libby, and Ben are explaining it one way, and Paul is saying it another way. And many others explain it in many other ways.
Now of course we could decide it is all a red herring, and that all the laws in the Bible were instituted by people, not by God. No doubt that is true in some instances, but we trust not in all instances. Besides, as Paul says, even people who have never read the Bible observe many of its laws, because those laws are written on their hearts. Atheists, agnostics, and people of eastern religions agree with Jews, Christians, and Muslims about many things that are right or wrong. Whether these are divine laws shall never be affirmed by everyone, but they are universally observed, or at least recognized, in any event.
I deduce that one of the things I am saying here, but did not intend to say before I started to write this sermon, is that even if original sin is an accurate description of part of the human condition, it still does not excuse bad behavior. Nor can we blithely declare that if we have the right kind of faith we will escape the error of our ways. Even the finest believers fall off the wagon again and again. Sin exacts a price, and it is not solely Jesus Christ on the cross who pays the price. That is too easy an explanation for our persistent and permanent problem.
There are many people, many Christians among them, who do not believe in the reality of sin at all. Even those who do accept its reality differ greatly on how sin can be combated or overcome. Paul himself did not always agree with himself on how sin could be negated. We can take consolation in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declared, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Whatever you conclude about why you do some of the foolish things you do, it won’t prevent you from doing similar things again - - - and again - - - and again. So who will deliver us from all this?
Here is the good news of the Gospel, and with it we end: Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord; we have been freed from the curse of the law! Amen, and amen!