July 3, 2004
Seventh Sunday of Pentecost
Year A
Anyone who has paid even the slightest amount of attention to my
preaching probably knows that I am a big fan of the Gospel narratives,
the stories about Jesus. This preference for this part of the New
Testament is nothing new for me—over the years, given a weekly choice
of four different lectionary texts spread over the entire Bible, I’ve rarely
made a choice that didn’t include the Gospel text. My sermon files on
the letters of the New Testament are skimpy, so, this summer, I thought I
would challenge myself to do something different, to preach from the
epistle texts assigned by the lectionary, and, lucky me, we happen to find
ourselves in a year and a season where Paul’s letter to the church at
Roman is taking center stage. Now, after struggling all week with this
particular text from Romans, I’ve remembered WHY I have stayed away
from the epistles, the reasons why I stayed away from them like a cat
from water! And, in my opinion, the letter to the Romans is an especially
difficult read, because perhaps more so than any other of the major
letters in the New Testament, Paul is spending a large portion of the
epistle answering questions that no one in the 21st century is asking. In
this text, Paul is seeking to reconcile his Jewish past with his Christian
present, wrangling over the meaning of Jewish law, trying to explain, in a
way, the role of the Jewish people within his new understanding of the
Christian faith. And, I would also say that he is trying to justify, frankly,
why the followers of Jesus, had no success in attracting his fellow Jews in
the first century. When Paul writes Romans between 55-60 CE, the lines
between Jews and Christians were not so distinct as, say, for example,
they would become by the time the Gospel of John was written some 35
years later—very quickly, Christianity had become a religion that
attracted vastly more non-Jews than it did Jews, people of Jesus’ own
religious and cultural background. For me, reading Paul as he wrestles
with these issues is, to be perfectly truthful, its like watching paint dry—in
this letter, at least he’s not struggling with the issues the people I know
are struggling with. Again, I think, that’s primarily because the questions
he’s trying to answer, are not ones people in our modern and
postmodern times are really struggling with—no one I know has
struggled terribly with reconciling Judaism and Christianity, though I know
that this book has become an important centerpiece of Jewish-Christian
dialogue, even now. Romans, in a way, is a much more philosophical
work, whereas another one of Paul’s major writing, Paul’s first letter to
the church at Corinth, is more practical, dispensing advice on how to
deal with community life, and even how to deal with the clash between
traditional Judaism and the emerging Christian faith within a lived
community of faith. But the difference is that Paul knew the church at
Corinth, whereas Paul writes to the Romans without really knowing the
people he is writing to.
And yet, of course, there is clearly something here in Romans that has
made it such an important work for us Christians throughout the
centuries, and certainly for Protestant Christians. Paul may struggle with
the Jewish law and its meaning, but that struggle he’s experiencing here
in Romans is a profoundly human struggle. Even the passage we heard
today reeks of the broader human questions than the issue before Paul
some two thousands years ago, the issue of whether or not Jewish law is
the cause of human sin—really, the bigger question here is a meditation
on whether or not the very ethical rules humans were given cause the
very things the rules seek to prohibit, to stop. The German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, oddly enough, made a similar argument over a
hundred years ago, though in different terms, and though I don’t have
time this morning to go through Nietzche’s or even Paul’s full argument in
chapters 5-8, I do want to focus on this small, famous passage we have
before us this morning, part of an extended discussion he is having on
this issue, a moment where he shares himself and his own struggle with
his shadow self.
And I just want to be honest here—this is not an easy passage to read,
understand, or sometimes even to resonate with, nor particularly an easy
one to preach from—it is a difficult passage, if only because of the
somberness with which it tackles the topic of human sin, of the human
struggle with the shadow side of the human self. In the passage I just
read, I think Paul shares that deep human struggle with his first century
readers, he even personalizes, using language that seems to tell not
only of the broader human struggle but his struggle with these issues—
this is personal for Paul, in ways that you don’t always see in his other
writings. What he does here is to lay before his Roman readers the
human inability to do the good we all know we should do, and yet we so
often choose a different direction, a different way than the one we should
go towards. Paul here confronts the demons of the human soul, those
places and spaces within us that seem to refuse to do the right thing,
even when we know what the right thing to do is. Paul describes the
human struggle of knowing what the right thing to do is—and yet, doing
the opposite—and knowing that we are not doing the right thing in that
very moment. It is the knowing that we are asked by God, even by
others, to care about others, the world, strangers, friends, all of creation,
the child who is not our own, but is wasting from hunger—and yet the
finding ourselves caring not a bit, especially in our actions, about the
one, all of those ones, who has fallen by the side of road at the hand of
thieves, as in Christ’s famous parable about the Good Samaritan. “For I
do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He is like an addict
who is struggling with his addiction--Paul wants to put down that drink, we
want to put away our bitterness, we want to submerge our pettiness and
ego, we know what is killing us, literally and figuratively—and yet, we pick
up the drink, we wallow in the wrong we think has been done us and stay
with our bitterness, we obsess over what really does not matter, opting
for our petty issue when half the world is wondering where their next
meal is coming from. We know what the right thing to do is, but its almost
as if that knowing about what the right thing to do is, actually compels us
to do the wrong thing—this is essentially Paul’s struggle with the Jewish
law which he adores and believes in, and yet which, ironically enough,
seems to create the sin (behavior) it seeks to eliminate. Its an odd
argument and I am not sure always coherent, whether it comes from Paul
or even Nietzsche, but one can see where he is coming from. I mean, I
think we’ve all experienced something like that, haven’t we?—the
moment something becomes forbidden to us is the exact moment it
becomes the most desirable—tell me “no more cookies” and at that
moment, nothing sounds better than that 12th, but final, I promise,
chocolate chip cookie. Of course, on the other hand, tell me I can have
all the cookies I want, there is a good chance I’ll have stopped at a half
dozen cookies on my own—probably stop, because, after all its
chocolate chip cookies, and that kind of temptation for me is almost
unfair.
So, Paul describes one of the most human of dilemmas—knowing right
from wrong and yet doing the wrong instead of the right–being hateful
instead of being loving, and yet knowing that hate will eat us alive, being
selfish rather being generous, yet knowing that all is a gift, and, in the
end, we have no right to be selfish with what was never ours in the first
place; being suspicious of others and even of life itself, instead of
trusting life and others, knowing that we are not responsible for the
actions of others, only for our actions, our lives. For Paul, the
explanation for this human dilemma lies within—a war wages within us all,
he seems to indicate, shadow and light struggling for dominance—and
its an odd—maybe even disturbing—moment here in this passage, I
think, because Paul talks as if there is some sort of separate entity
different from himself doing this wrong he so often does, as if there was
something alien within him, as if he was captive of this shadow side of
himself, unable to do and be what he wants to be. I suspect that this is
one of the beginnings of what the church would later call “original sin”,
an idea that became an obsession of the later medieval church. This
shadow side of the human self is something that the Christian Church
has no doubt overemphasized over the centuries, this belief that human
beings have within them a corruption of spirit—the body of death—Paul
says here, that has caused great harm in us and in the larger world.
Another human tendency, the other human frailty Paul mentions but we
fail to remember is our tendency to be excessive in many things, and no
doubt that the church has run with the idea of original sin a little too
vigorously. Paul’s advice towards moderation in all things doesn’t get a
lot of play, back then or even now , at least not as much as this idea of
original sin has gotten, but it’s probably the more practical of the two
ideas here. Still, despite the overemphasis on this shadow side of
ourselves that happens here in Paul’s thought, I do think there is
something to remember here, I think, something we instinctually know—
and that is simply that we humans really are capable of great evil,
sometimes randomly, as we heard in the chilling testimony of the BTK
killer in Wichita a few days ago, a former church council president. Or
maybe the evil we do is situational, humans caught up in a wrong
moment in time as we saw in Rwanda a decade ago. The complexity of
human evil, something I had the privilege to study during college in a
series of courses I took on the Holocaust, is something that has always
come home to me in knowing the shadow and light dancing within the
particular people that composed the destructive machine that was the
Final Solution in Nazi Germany. The SS men and women at Buchenwald
and Auschwitz would, after a day of participating in the killing machine
that was the Holocaust, they would tenderly tuck their own children into
bed at night, a few yards from the gates of these infamous places of
mass murder. Those moments of tenderness from these men and
women after a day of murder, that just somehow captures the deep
ambiguity of the human soul, the human contradiction that Paul hints at
here in his letter the Romans.
Walker Percy, the well-known author, essayist, and winner of the
National Book Award in 1962, tells the story of an older priest in his novel
The Thanatos Syndrome, a priest who has locked himself up in a fire
watch tower at the end of life, much to the surprise of the characters in
the book. The priest is finally visited by another character and is asked
why he is there, why he has locked himself away from the rest of
humanity, and a story begins to unfold about the young man he once
was, about his visit to some cousins in Nazi Germany during the 1930’s.
With his cousins, he attended the Nazi mass rallies at Nuremberg, and
like his German cousins, he was enthralled by the pageantry of it all, and
the vision of this charismatic man who stood upon the dais and called the
people of Germany to become the super race that history had destined
them to become. This young man begs his parents in the United States
to let him stay in Germany and become a part of this movement, this
great and powerful tide of history. What haunts him in that tower, so late
in his life, is what could have been, how tenuous the choices are that
lead to who we become, and how, if things had been different, if his
parents had relented and said yes, how he too could have been one of
those men making their way home to their houses, to their wives and
children after a long day of murdering the children of other human
beings. Percy’s priest, in that fire tower, cannot shake the shadow in his
own soul, and, perhaps the way he has lived his whole life, and certainly
his vocation as a priest, has been a sometimes futile attempt to atone for
a path that could have been taken. The philosopher Hannah Arendt
called it the banality of evil, the ordinariness of human evil, done by
ordinary human beings.
And yet, even Paul cannot leave that priest up in that tower, struggling
with the shadows without any sort of hope—Paul doesn’t share his
dilemma in the letter to the Romans for no reason, maybe the human
dilemma, of knowing the right thing to do, but doing the wrong thing
instead—he writes to offer his hope, and to share with his readers the
Christian hope that the shadows within the human self are not all there
is. “Wretched man that I am!” he says—again, note the personal
language he uses—“who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Really, the whole
next chapter in Romans is what Paul offers as a solution to that shadow
side within human beings and for him, I think, that means nurturing the
light within us, the Spirit within us, the God within us, so that the shadows
become increasingly less deep, the darkness becomes more thin
because the light within us becomes stronger, more vibrant. The next
chapter, right after he asks this question about who will rescue him, is, I
think, Paul’s attempt seek out of that more gentle and light yoke from the
Christ, whose presence within us—and within everyone and within all the
world—will one day mean the eventual aligning of our beliefs with our
actions, that one day what we know to be the right thing to do, will be the
very thing we do. The reality is that the church’s overwhelming witness
over 2000 years has been that the world is becoming more full of God,
more filled with light, though one of would never know it from the current
millennial fever sisters and brothers believe. Certainly there has always
been a minority position within the church that believed that the world
was indeed getting worse and worse, that the light of God was growing
ever dimmer. But it always been a minor voice—the greater voice has
been saying that the dominion of God, the kingdom of God, is growing,
though it may be slow in spreading, for whatever reasons, certainly too
slow for my taste, and yet it grows, the realm of God grow outward and
inward, despite my impatience with the slowness of it and with my
impatience with God. I think this past few weeks this truth was really
brought home to me, sitting in a Wednesday night prayer meeting in an
African-American church in Biloxi, MS, with our youth on our recent work
trip—me, a child of the deep South, a white Mississippian from Meridian,
doing what even a generation or two ago my ancestors would never
have ever considered doing, which was worshipping with those whose
skin color was different. The Spirit of God, the light of God in this world,
though dim sometimes, it shines on, the breath of God in this world,
though shallow sometimes, it breathes on—within us, within the world.
Again, our work in this world is to tend to that light within us and to tend
to God’s light within creation, so that the one day the shadows will be no
more, both inside of us and within all of creation. Paul shares his own
demons, his own shadows, not so much in order to show us that there
are shadows within us—I mean, we already know those exist within us—
but to show us that we are in the presence of light, and that even the
shadows, in some crazy way, give witness to the presence of the light,
within us and around us. “Wretched man,” Paul writes in h is own
melodramatic way, “who will rescue me from this body of death! Thanks
be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Amen and amen.
