July 6, 2008

Scripture:         Romans 7:15-25a

Sermon:           “Between the Cup and the Lip”

            Let’s turn our attention now to the Word of the Lord.  I want to look at a passage from Romans with you.  So, open your Bible with me to the 7^th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.  We’ll look at verses 15 through 25.  That’s on page   of the New Testament of the pew Bible if you’d like to find it easily.

            Now, I have to tell you that this is one of my favorite texts.  By no means do I think it is the most important in all of scripture.  I just happen to love it.  And I’ll try to read it to you the way I hear it.  I think we encounter Paul here in his most human and, therefore, most convincing voice.  He’s confessing to the kind of weakness that we all struggle with, and that really interests me.

            So many times we think the Bible inapproachable.  Do you know what I mean?  It’s too holy.  Or we’re too broken.  And the Bible is hard for us to relate to at times because we think that the holy things spoken of might be out of our reach.  So, words like these kind of bring it all back down to where we can get our hands on it.  Paul’s wrestling with the very unholy side of himself that we all come to terms with.  And to hear him do this as a part of scripture has always meant a great deal to me.  No matter what I’m going through, there isn’t any distance between me and the God that loves me.  Do you know what I mean?  It’s true for you, too.

            Romans is Paul’s masterpiece in a lot of ways.  So, this wrestling with sin and the deep impulses within the human soul that causes us to wander away from God right here in the middle of Paul’s landmark work ought to say something to us.  I think that it is an indication of just how important your life and my life is in the activity of God within our world.  We matter.  And our lives matter.  And the struggles we have every day are at the very heart of how God is getting involved with bringing salvation to us.  Powerful stuff.

            Listen to the Word of the Lord…

            I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.  But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.  I can will what it is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

            So I find it to a law that when I want to do what is good, 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, 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!

            Wretched man that I am.  There are few more personal words in the Bible than these.  Wretched man that I am.  Have you ever said them?

            I picked up a friend in my car one time.  He hurled himself into the passenger seat and said, “Head west on I-20”.  Now the only thing west on Interstate 20 was Alabama, about 45 minutes away.  And if you’re in Georgia there just aren’t many reasons to go in that direction.  We’d say the best thing to come out of Alabama was I-20 East.  And my friend wanted to go west.

            “What in heaven’s name do you want to go that way for?”

            And he said, “I heard that the folks over there are a full hour behind us here.  Did you hear that?  If we go 45 minutes that way, we’ll be a full 60 minutes ahead of where we are right now.  And that means I’ll have 15 minutes of my life back.  And I’m not going to say the thing I just said to my wife before I left the house.  I’m such an idiot!”

            It probably doesn’t matter what the man said.  It hurt.  That’s what I know.  And it was the kind of thing you wish you hadn’t said just as soon as it left your lips.  And it sure would be nice to go back in time and try it all again.  Instead you’re left wondering how you could be so careless, so blind, so stupid.

            Wretched man that I am!  Paul said, “I don’t understand my own actions.  I don’t do the things that I want to do.  It’s the things I don’t want to do that I end up doing.”

            I don’t know how something that makes so little sense could sound so familiar.  I remember trying to explain myself to my parents when I was a boy.  And the best I could muster on most occasions to their very good questions of why I had done something, was the completely honest, yet utterly inconclusive, “I don’t know.”

            I wish that I knew then what I know now.  Saying “I don’t know” doesn’t cut it when you’re in hot water.  Does it?  I wish that I knew then that it was, actually, a biblical answer.  And there’s a great deal more truth to it than meets the eye.  There’s very little knowing why we do things that we know we shouldn’t do.  It’s the human dilemma.  How are you going to answer?  You messed up.  You knew better.  Why’d you do it?  I don’t know.

            That’s what Paul said.  You can read it right here.  “I do not understand my own actions.  I don’t know.”  Biblical.  You think that will fly when you tell it to your parents, your husband, your wife, your best friend?  But, you can’t say why.  You don’t know.  What you’d really like is to have the chance to do it over and do it right.

            I was visiting with a World War II veteran the other day.  There are fewer and fewer left, you know.  We were talking about the ebb and flow of life and how we all tend to go in cycles between feeling close to God and feeling so far away.  He said, “when I was at my battle station on the USS Nevada I was so close to God that I could offer Him a cigarette.”  I guess that’s like the saying goes:  there are no atheists in fox holes.

            We all have those very spiritual moments.  They are the times when God is so close, so real.  Sometimes they are born from very dire circumstances and you know that only God can determine your fate.  The hospital.  The funeral home.  The battle field.  The top of a mountain overlooking creation.  Gathered around this table on Sunday morning.  We have those moments, you know.  And so much of our mundane, everyday lives seems far from the Lord.

            Conventional wisdom tells us that if we could just maintain our connection to God that everything would work out just fine.  If we could just stay within God’s arms, remember always that God is right here, we’d make better decisions, live more like God wanted us to.  That’s what we think.  And we end up asking Paul’s question, you know, “why do I do the things that I do?”  We think that we must have turned away from God.  If we could just have those close spiritual moments all the time.

            Listen to what Paul said.  “I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.  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.  I’m captive to the law of sin in my body.”

            He finds it to be a law.  A law.  Like gravity.  It’s a law.  He says, “doesn’t it just seem to work that when I’m trying to experience the holiness of God that there is evil welling up inside of me?”  That even in our closest moments to the Almighty, we are vulnerable.  It’s lurking inside of us.  He’s almost suggesting that the deeper our connection to God is the more susceptible we are to doing what we most know we should not do.

            Does that make sense?  You’d almost have to believe that evil itself was seeking you out.  The more God dwells within your heart, the more evil will try to rule the rest of you.  Does that make sense?  Is that true?

            There’s a story about Jesus.  You’ve heard it.  The Gospel of Luke says that he was, what, full of the Holy Spirit.  He was so thoroughly connected to God after his baptism that he was full of the Holy Spirit.  That’s like those spiritual moments we all have, you know.  Full of the Holy Spirit.  And he went into the wilderness to escape the world for a while, grow closer to God.  The man fasted for 40 days.

            That’s the kind of thing that folks do in order to reconnect.  Leave the world behind for a while and just be open to God all around you.  Now, you’d think that would drive evil far, far  away.  You’ve been walking with God.  You’ve been dedicating yourself to knowing the Lord Almighty.  And what happened?

            Evil was just lurking wasn’t it?  You know this story in Luke 4.  Jesus was famished.  Close to God and full of the Holy Spirit he may have been.  Jesus was famished.  Someone said, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.  Feed yourself, man.  You deserve it for all you’ve been doing.”  Someone said that to him.  Luke says it was the devil.

            “I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”

            You ever leave church on a Sunday morning, just full of life, full of the Holy Spirit, and find yourself doing the very things you swore you wouldn’t?  And you do them with more vigor than ever?

            Jews talk about this stuff going on inside our souls all the time.  The yetzer ra and the yetzer tov.  It’s the inclination to do evil and the inclination to do good.  Yetzer ra.  Yetzer tov.  And the evil inclination is just how we take what is a good thing, a natural thing, and turn it into evil within ourselves.  You need to eat.  But you can become gluttonous.  You need intimacy and physical love leads to wonderful things, including children.  But you can view sex as a tool or a weapon.  Yetzer ra.  Sneaky stuff.

            A rabbi that I know said that the two inclinations always are in tension within us.  You can’t have good inclinations without tapping into something deep inside that can twist it all into an evil mess.

            Maybe you’ve got Christ’s compassionate heart for others.  You help those in need all around you.  That very good desire to be God’s hands to a broken and hurting world can also make you do things that violate God’s will.  You lose track of ethics.  Like Robin Hood, you steal from the rich to give to the poor.  Yetzer ra.  You want to do what is good and evil lies close at hand.  Maybe Paul’s onto something.

            When the old Greeks would write plays, they’d have a hero in the story.  And the hero was just like you and me.  There was something special, unique, and powerful about who that person was.  That’s just like us.  God’s made us with gifts to give to the world.  Only you can do what you do.  In these plays that the Greeks wrote, the hero always wound up in trouble.  It wasn’t because they ignored their gifts.  It was because their gifts carried with them a “tragic flaw”.  There’s something inherently dangerous in the good things we have and the good things we pursue.

            You’ve heard it said that there’s many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip.  I think that’s what Paul’s so worked up about.  No matter how much he wants to do good, no matter how closely he wants to be in tune with God, evil is just around the corner.  And it just seems to capture him and control him.  “I don’t know why I do the things that I do!”

            Very human words, don’t you think?  So human that Paul cries out, “wretched man that I am!”

            And what a mess we have on our hands.

            Then Paul says, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

            And here we are, you and I.  There isn’t one of us with a good explanation for what we’ve done and what we’ve been up to.  Sinners.  Some of us so close to God that we could speak in the tongues of angels.  Some of us feeling so far away that we’re just hoping this hour of worship will make a difference.  And each of us knowing that evil has controlled us.

            Do you know what we’re about to do?  Jesus Christ our Lord, knowing full well what we’re all about mind you…Jesus Christ is inviting us to sit down at this old wooden table with him.  And there he is going to give his life away on our behalf.  So come and sit down.  God is going to rescue us.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)