In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” For all of his high soaring rhetoric, today Paul puts his finger squarely on the human condition – I can will what 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. I don’t know about you all, but when I hear those words, I think “Yeah, been there, done that.”
Paul notes that Sin is the cause of our doing what we don’t want and not doing what we do want. Paul, being a devout Jew, knew about the Law of God – what was to be done and what was to be avoided. And he had the desire to keep the Law. But what he lacked, what we all lack, is the ability to keep the Law. Now, this isn’t because the Law is bad or deficient, but is because, as Paul puts it there is “another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin.”
So what is this Sin that Paul speaks of? When we encounter “sin” in Romans, it’s not referring to mistakes that we make or times when we disobey the rules. Sin is bigger than that for Paul. It’s best to think of “sin” as having a capital “S” at the beginning, reminding us of just how strong Sin is. For Paul, Sin is an active, aggressive, and corrosive power in our world. You might think of it like gravity, something that affects our entire reality, but is largely invisible and easy to take for granted. And what makes Sin so pernicious is that it can corrupt, twist, and co-opt even good things, like the Law. Sin can take a gift from God and bend it towards death. This, for Paul, is the war that he finds himself, and all of humanity, struggling in.
Think about Paul’s own life – he was a faithful Jew, following the Law as it is laid out in Scripture. And yet, doing what he truly believed was the right thing to do, doing what he thought God willed, doing what he thought would lead to a better world, he was persecuting the early followers of Jesus. He saw them as spreading a false version of the faith, as believing in a distorted version of the faith. And so stamping out this movement before more people were led astray would, in the end, be a good thing, he thought. Of course, Paul one day had an encounter with the Risen Lord and realized that good that he thought he had been doing was, in fact, not quite as good as he thought it was.
It’s a reality that we’ve all experienced as well, the reality of unintended consequences. People thought the new and exotic plant kudzu would be nice to add to some landscapes, but we didn’t realize it would become such an invasive species. We thought reparations forced on Germany after World War I would be a good thing, but little did we know that we were preparing the soil for the rise of the Third Reich. When we started to add airbags to cars for safety, many children died as a result of airbag impacts. So we started putting car seats in the backseat, which solved the airbag problem, but has meant that sometimes parents forget their children in the back seat of a hot car. The end results of this, and so many other actions, is that we do not end up doing the good that we want, but the evil which we do not want is what we wind up doing.
This is what Sin does. It takes our good desires and intentions and perverts them towards evil and death. Sometimes Sin does this by playing off our flawed assumptions, sometimes by using our fear, sometimes by our selfishness, sometimes by our hasty judgment. This focus on Sin is important because it reminds us that there are forces and pathologies in our world that are bigger than us, that lie in the shadows, and very much affect our lives and decisions.
Greed, for example, takes something like capitalism and perverts it into a system whereby we have come to expect unlimited access to disposable products that we don’t really need at the cost of the environment and the people who produce them in poor working conditions. Or because of unhealed emotional wounds we end up in co-dependent relationships or binge eating or drinking to escape the pain. Racism is perhaps the biggest scourge in our community today. Do we really think that our history of committing a genocide against the native peoples of this land and the enslavement of Africans for over a hundred years has no bearing on our society today? I know that I struggle with the fact that my retirement is being funded by stocks in companies that I am ethically opposed to.
This is what Sin looks like – forces so complex that we can’t make heads or tails of them. Sin is being stuck between a rock and a hard place, Sin is being “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” This is what leads Paul to exclaim in exasperation “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
It’s clear that the problem isn’t that we just need a better set of rules to follow, because the very Law given by God doesn’t lead to sinlessness. The issue isn’t that we just need more motivation, as Jesus is not our “life coach,” though some treat him that way. In the verse right before today’s passage began, Paul writes “I am in the flesh, sold into slavery under sin.” The issue, as St. Paul lays it out, is that we are captive to Sin.
As this passage from Romans concludes, Paul exclaims “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Where did that come from? He’s just convinced us that we’re mired in Sin and can’t follow our most basic and goodly desires. And then he erupts into doxology – Thanks be to God!
This doxology is rooted in at least two truths that might be helpful to us as we are caught in the web of Sin. The first is a wisdom that has been made popular by movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous – an admission that we are powerless over Sin, that our lives have become unmanageable, that only a power greater than ourselves came save us. None of us can go head to head against Sin; we’re going to lose that battle every time. You and I aren’t going to end racism, sexism, or poverty, not because we don’t want to, but because Sin is bigger than we are.
We need to be honest about the limits and failings of our humanity, and this is why our culture desperately needs the Church today. We need to be liberated from thinking that the failings of our society belong at the feet of any single person or group of people. We need to be freed from thinking that any of us live without being ensnared by Sin. We need to be unchained from the expectation that we can be our own messiahs. We need the Church’s proclamation and confession that Sin breaks things, and that we are broken by Sin. This can be a hard truth to swallow, as we like to think of ourselves as good, enlightened people. And we are. But we are also captive to Sin.
We are all sinners, caught up in a world of Sin. And this is incredibly grace-filled news. It means that every mistake you make isn’t because you are a bad person, but sometimes we’re caught up in things bigger than ourselves. Now this doesn’t excuse us from continuing in Sin, but the notion that we are all sinful is a deeply pastoral idea: we aren’t perfect and God doesn’t expect us to be. The Good News is that we have a Savior, and the sooner we can turn to Christ to save us, the sooner we can find liberation from Sin’s grip on us.
This is the other reason why Paul is able to proclaim “Thanks be to God,” by his Death and Resurrection, Jesus has destroyed our separation from God, he has made it possible for the Death that comes from Sin to not have the last word. This is the great proclamation found in a popular Easter hymn - The strife is o’er, the battle done; the victory of life is won; the song of triumph has begun.
But this victory isn’t always apparent. In World War II Germany, there was a jail for prisoners of war. The communication systems had broken, so the German guards hadn’t received news that the Allied forces had won the war and that Germany had surrendered. But some of the prisoners had made a small radio and were able to get news from the outside world. They had learned of the victory and for three days were joyful and nice to their captors. When they woke up on the fourth day, they found that the Germans heard the news and had run in fear, so they were finally able to leave their jail cells. Though they were confined for those first few days, the fact that their liberation was assured changed the way the saw the world.
Or perhaps you’ve heard of the Japanese holdouts in World War II. In 1945, Japan surrendered and the war was over. But several Japanese sailors hadn’t received the news and continued the fighting. For some, even 20 years later they were still fighting the battles of a war that was long over. Some of them hadn’t heard the news yet, as they were stationed on remote islands in the Pacific, some had heard the news but thought it was fake news and didn’t believe it, and still others willfully rejected the news because they had become so accustomed to fighting that they didn’t know how else to act.
This is how our faith is. Christ has defeated Sin, we no longer have to be a slave to Sin. We don’t have to keep score, we don’t have to keep grudges, we don’t have to live in fear. Sin, even though it has been defeated, still tries to get us to fight a war that is already over. Sin lures us into continued division through greed, and racism, and pride. Remember, though the enemy still fights, the battle is done, so keep your head up and keep the faith.
This passage from Romans is an invitation to take a hard and serious look at the ways in which we are enslaved by Sin. Thanks are due to God because in Christ we have been liberated; and if you don’t feel liberated, if you feel like you’re too engaged in a losing battle with Sin, spend some time in thought and prayer on where you feel captive to Sin. Know that I’m always available to meet with you to discuss this and to offer the Sacrament of Reconciliation, in which you might more deeply know of God’s liberating love for you. And always, as St. Paul does, we give thanks to God, for in Jesus Christ the power of Sin has been defeated, we are liberated, and though we are sinners, we are welcomed in the life of Grace. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
