In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What if I told you that your debt had been forgiven? All of it – the mortgage, the car, the student loans, and the credit card. Well, I don’t actually have the ability to forgive that debt, but as we continue working our way through Romans, we see that St. Paul is suggesting that Jesus Christ does liberate us from being debtors to the flesh. Our faith is supposed to be transformative, to radically change the way we interpret and live in the world. I can’t promise you that faith will cancel out what you owe the bank, but faith can make it so that what you owe is just money, not your entire life.
When Paul writes that we are not to be debtors to the flesh, he’s using a technical term of his day. To be a debtor is to have a set of obligations. Roman culture was built upon a complex series of relationships. Your life was dictated by social expectations and duties. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound all that different from today. We use the phrase “keeping up appearances,” whereas Paul uses the phrase “debtors,” but it’s the same idea. How many times have you said or thought “I really don’t want to go to this event or do that project, but people will expect me to be there.” Now sometimes a bit of peer pressure can be a good thing in helping us to keep our obligations to one another, but more often than not we’re just going through the motions because we are debtors to our public image.
I remember being in Greensboro and a parishioner told me that she wouldn’t be able to make much of a financial contribution to the church. She had just bought a new house and said, “With this new mortgage, am I supposed to not feed my kids so that I can give to the church?” The nice thing about this being a former parishioner is that I can now more fully respond to that question.
How often do we give God what is leftover instead of starting there? I’m going to make some generalizations of which I can be guilty, if they don’t apply to you, then forgive me. We tend to pray when we can find time in our busy lives, we often give what we’re able to after we’ve paid the bills and taken a nice vacation or two, we plan to attend church as long as nothing else is on the calendar for the weekend, and we think that religion is all well and good up to a point – and that point is usually when we have to change our minds about either politics or our lifestyle.
What I wanted to say in response to this person, but couldn’t summon the courage to say was “When you decided to buy that new home, did you think about how it would affect your ability to give to the church? Did you consider how many extra hours you would have to work away from your children to afford that mortgage?”
The thing is that we all have an idea of what we want our lives to look like – and often it’s a rather nice vision. But there are definite costs the lifestyles we choose. Keeping up with the Joneses (what Paul calls “the flesh”) is consuming work. It means buying more house than we really need as a status symbol, which means that we have to work longer hours than we might like, which means we have less time at home with family, it means that we’re more tired on the weekends, and therefore are less likely to come to church. For some it’s not the house, it’s being perceived as a person of influence, so going to social events and always worrying about being well dressed distracts us from the life that God intends for us.
We’ve even made this into a virtue – calling it “ambition.” As a bit of self-confession, I’m an ambitious person, you don’t get to be the Rector of St. Luke’s without some ambition. And I’m not saying that having goals and dreams are bad, but we must always count the cost of pursuing them. If you’re in debt to the things of the flesh, then you’re not free to follow Christ. Paul saw these sorts of social debts as being crippling to following Christ because if we’re distracted by the flesh, we’ll miss out on the Spirit.
In Paul’s time, participating in the life of the church was causing problems for people when it came to meeting these social expectations. There weren’t churches on every corner and worship didn’t last an hour – it was more of a commitment than that. So Christians that were attending worship had to abandon some of their social obligations. It meant not always being available for their patrons, so being a Christian was disrupting the economy. Paul writes to say “You don’t owe the flesh anything, so don’t worry about it.”
Paul reminds us that the flesh doesn’t actually give us anything of value. Pursuing the desires of the flesh only leads to death. We don’t find community, or love, or peace, or salvation in the things of the flesh like possessions and pleasures. As Paul writes and as many of us instinctively know, we don’t find the grace of God in things. For Paul, no longer do societal obligations or expectations get to decide what you are to do or be. Instead, we are defined by the Spirit which dwells within us. Faith provides us with a new way of being.
Paul writes that “You have received a spirit of adoption… we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” This is a truly radical and transformative statement. In Roman culture, being adopted changed your life. An adopted child was given the same status as blood. Children by birth could be disowned and kicked out of the family if they didn’t meet expectations, but adopted children became permanent members of the family, unable to ever be disowned. And by adoption, you became heirs to the family line. Octavian who became Caesar Augustus laid claim to the throne because he was the adopted son of Julius Caesar. And this is what God does for us – adopts us into the family of God as permanent members who have a rightful claim to the fullness of God’s grace and mercy.
So if you are the inheritor of God’s riches, then you truly don’t need to be a debtor to the flesh. What can the flesh give you that God can’t? Nothing. So don’t sell yourself out for things like expectations, or prestige, or glory because God had made you a part of the family and God has bestowed upon you the riches of God’s blessing. Don’t try to go out and secure your own blessing, rather just enjoy the blessing that God has already given to you.
We waste so much time and energy on trying to do all of this work for ourselves as we make ourselves debtors to the flesh. Paul points out in this passage that even when we cry out “Abba! Father!” that it is the Spirit within us shouting out – so even our prayer is something that God does for us. But so often we think that faith is something we do rather than something that we receive. It isn’t up to you to make the choice to believe in God or accept Jesus because you’ve been adopted by God. When a child is born, it doesn’t have to decide who its parents will be – even in cases of adoption, children don’t review the applications of potential parents and decide which ones they want.
Isn’t it absurd that we claim that Jesus Christ is able to kick down the gates of Hell, and then we also say “but you have to let him into your heart”, as if we have the ability to control God’s grace? The love of God can overcome our most stubborn resistance. We might open the door to let God in, but if we don’t, God has no problem knocking down doors to get in.
When we understand faith as St. Paul does, faith isn’t about what we do, but rather what God has done for us. Faith isn’t about inviting God in your heart or life, it’s realizing that God has always been there. The conversion of faith isn’t about acceptance but recognition.
Paul is writing to help us recognize this – that in God we live and move and have our being. Paul wants us to know that God deeply loves you, not because you’ve earned it, but because God simply loves you because you are you and because God is God. Paul wants us to know that we don’t owe any debts to the flesh, to expectations, to appearances. The “oughts” and “shoulds” of society will demand your time, your energy, your life – but you’ll get nothing of any true value in return. Rather, the grace of God is already yours because you are an heir in God’s household. God has adopted you for all time, regardless of how badly you might mess things up.
There is another way other than the competitive rat race. There is another way than trying to keep up appearances. There is a peace which passes all understanding. There is a love which burns bright even in the darkest of nights. There is a mercy that makes reconciliation always possible. God has made you an heir, and this peace, love, and mercy are yours.
In Christ, you are freed from any debts that you owe. The flesh, society, the world have no claims on you, there are no liens on your soul. That doesn’t mean these things won’t ask you to make payments; but know that in Christ, you are free.
Take this as the invitation to recognize that God’s grace is already a part of your life. Knowing that God’s love has already been given to you, you might reconsider how you spend your time, your money, your emotions, your energy, your life – if you find that you’re paying too much to the flesh and to keeping up appearances, then spend some time in prayer and thought about how you might tell those debt collectors of the flesh to buzz off. For, thanks be to God, in Christ, we are free.
