Sermon. St Michael and
All Angels with St Mary, Little Ilford. 12.07.20
Trinity 5 (Year A)
Romans 8.1-11
(following on from Trinity
4: Romans 7.15-25a)
I am going to do
something I have not done before. I am going to speak about a biblical text we
have not heard today. And I am going to do something I’ve done only very
rarely. I am going to preach on the Second Reading, the Letter, the Epistle
of Paul to the Romans. And since this is Paul we are talking about, I won’t
manage to be all that brief. I’ll pause for a moment while you all whoop
for joy! (You’re doing it inwardly, I can tell.)
Paul is indeed someone it
is easy and fashionable to dislike. He is often hard to
understand. That’s an understatement. The greatest minds in the history of the
Church have struggled to find him consistent. On top of that, he can come
across as misogynist and homophobic. And behind that some (many)
see in Paul a hatred of the body. As if for Paul the body is bad and to
be put in its place (as small as possible) and the soul is good, and to
be set free.
I ask you to trust me
that the last point (at least) is a plausible but wrong reading of Paul.
Most of the time, Paul speaks highly of the body. He it is, after all, who
tells us that we are the Body of Christ [1 Cor 12.27]. And he clearly
intends that as a great -the greatest - honour. The contrast he draws
isn’t really between the body and the soul. It this. It’s between
·
ourselves
as embodied human beings as Spirit-filled, and so in a lively
relationship with Gd, and
·
ourselves
as embodied human beings as seeking to have nothing to do with Gd and Gd’s
Spirit.
If we are not in
harmony with the Spirit, Paul tells us, then we are flesh. We are, we
might say, barely living organic matter. It’s extreme language and an
extreme contrast, for sure. But it’s not really to do with preferring the soul
to the body.
And, you know, whether we
understand Paul or not, whether we disagree with him on this or that (which we
are free to), let us at least thank him for sharing so much of his inner
life with us. Paul feels things deeply. There isn’t another biblical
writer whose existential reflections, thoughts, feeling and inner wrestlings
we’re let into like we are with Paul. We’d be the poorer without knowing of his
struggles, even if, as I say, we don’t always get them.
So, let’s go back to last
week’s message from Paul, from Romans. Paul tells us, as bluntly as you like:
“I do not do what I
want, but I do the very thing I hate…
Now if I do what I do
not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me…
Wretched man that I
am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God
through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
And that’s where we left
things last week. And this week, we continue:
“There is now no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Now, we cannot say that
is unclear. It is as clear as it is uplifting.
We can relate. In human lives, we are often “dysfunctional” (to use the modern word). We don’t do what
we intend to do. We do do what we set out to avoid. That might be full-blown addiction
(which is not rare). It might be those habits we have, (say) of finding
someone irritating, who means nothing by it and really can’t help how they are.
Or… variations are endless. Whatever it is, we are trapped in this
behaviour and can feel desperate. But! But Paul tells us we can turn to Christ,
who will free us of these traps, who will free and forgive us,
and leave us without any condemnation. Of course we want to say: “Thanks
be to God”.
God in Christ frees us
from the hold of sin and guilt. It is a powerful message. It is a welcome
message. I think we can say without contradiction that it is an orthodox
message. There is only one problem with it. It’s this:
it is not
what the text of Romans says.
No, I am afraid our
lectionary-devisers have edited something out. Just one half-verse,
admittedly. We know they often do miss bits out. We can’t pretend to be shocked
by that. But here the missing bit… well, if I say it changes the meaning,
I’m underplaying the point.
The text of Romans –
you’re very welcome to check this now or later – does indeed say:
“Who will rescue me…?...
Thanks be to Gd… There is now no condemnation”
But by putting back in
the bit left out we get this flow of argument:
“Who will rescue me
[from the hold of sin]? Thanks be to Gd through Jesus Christ…
“So then, with my
mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law
of sin.
“There is now no
condemnation”
I’ll pause to see if you
get a sense of how different the message is, with the bit taken out put back in.
With the bit taken out
put back in, Romans seems to be saying that even though with our flesh we are and
remain a slave to the law of sin, nevertheless there is no
condemnation.
With the bit taken out
put back in, the idea is not so much that Christ takes away the big conundrum of
our failing to do what we set out to do, as moral or caring people.
No. This way round, the
message is that Christ knows that this conundrum is and remains our
nature, and Christ loves and forgives us any way.
Two very different,
indeed opposed meanings. What do we do with this?
Well, in the first place,
if you want to treat this sermon as something like a “Public Service
Announcement” - a reminder always to read the bits the lectionary itself
misses out - then, well and good. Please do. To be candid, you will find
other examples when the change in meaning is pretty much as dramatic by putting
the bits left out back in. So I am calling for more Bible-reading outside of
the liturgy. Yes.
Second, it’s only fair to
say that our lectionary-devisers were not being capricious in cutting
out the half-verse. Many commentators see them as words added later, by a
scribe, not Paul. They were not, then, part of Paul’s original message.
That’s certainly plausible. We have already how much easier Paul is to
understand with the bit taken out left out: I sin. I don’t know how to stop
sinning. Christ frees me. Thank God. I am no longer condemned. So, maybe
that’s right; maybe that is Paul.
Except… Except this isn’t
really an abstract point, or one for the experts, a detail only? We can look
at our own experience as Christians to test out which meaning actually
works.
- Is it the case that by being in Christ we are simply freed from those strange, unwelcome, even agonising pulls to do what is wrong and unkind?
- Is it the case that if we are not condemned, that is because we are freed from sin, are sinless (or virtually sinless)?
- Can it be that Paul, in all his complexity, really Paul meant to say it’s as simple as that?
I am going to say that
even if the bit left out put back in was added later by a scribe, the scribe
was inspired. The Christian - the devout Christian, the fervent
Christian, the wise Christian - every bit as much as the non-Christian, lives
life as one who does not do the good they want, but the bad they do not
want to do is what they do.
This doesn’t mean
there is no change. This doesn’t mean we do not grow as Christians.
And indeed along the way (please Gd), we are freed from abiding sins and
habits and attitudes that hold us back. But the strange thing is that the more
we are freed from some weaknesses, the better we see others. So the
dynamic (the conundrum, as I’ve called it) continues.
I intend this to be a
hopeful message. It is a hopeful message. I am not saying we are simply stuck in our sins. It’s not a cycle we endlessly
repeat, till we die. The image is not of a circle, a closed circle, but of a
spiral, an open spiral. By Gd’s grace we are rising, rising to be
fit for the glory and joy and communion of heaven. But the rising up is
not a straight line, but, like a spiral, along the way we revisit old themes,
among them sin, weakness, stuckness, loss of control, coldness of heart.
But by Gd’s grace we revisit them from a new, a higher vantage point.
And if that makes little
sense to you (as it might), let me tell you it can be a powerful message for,
say, a prison chaplain. Sometimes prisoners can be people of real faith, worked-for
faith, but can look at the wreckage in their lives and feel despair.
They can feel hopelessly trapped. So that idea, that we do not simply cast
off sin, but can still be on that spiral upwards, revisiting our sinfulness,
from a healthier place, can really speak. To some, to many, and I think
I will say, just perhaps, to all.
Thanks be to Gd,
·
for
Paul’s confused and confusing honesty, and, just perhaps,
·
for
our lectionary-devisers, who force us sometimes to preach even on Romans!
Amen.
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