This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, July 2, 2023, drawing from Romans 6:12-23.
It often surprises people to know that preparing a sermon is something that takes time, and has a whole process behind it. If you grew up in evangelical environments, like a lot of our online community did, you're probably used to the pastor getting up and preaching in a way that is almost improvisational.
Almost that is, but not quite. Because, once you start to think about it, you realize that it can’t actually be completely off-the-cuff, no matter how folksy and conversational they make it sound, because they had to it was coming. In the week leading up to the service, this sleeves-rolled-up, down-home, sneakers and jeans preacher - whose entire outfit somehow costs thousands of dollars despite looking like something they picked out of the dumpster behind the thrift store - this guy hand-selected the bible passage that was read, and even if they don't have a specific manuscript to hand, they had plenty of time to prepare and memorize, at the very least, their main points.
And honestly…there’s nothing wrong with that. Preparation is a good thing. But when it comes to that whole process of preparation, the how of it really matters. Most evangelicals begin their process with an idea; a point they want to make, some social issue they want to speak to, some crisis in the community they need to address, and then they build outward from that. Once they know what they want to say, they select a Bible verse that can support that, or that they can pretend supports it, and begin carefully crafting an overwhelming, disarming, spiritual experience, allowing whatever point they mean to make to ride that tidal wave of loud music and swelling emotion until it is mistaken by everyone present as an authentic, spontaneous, spiritual experience.
And while I have spent a large portion of both my musical and ministerial careers speaking against utilizing this kind of emotional manipulation as a worship tool, there's actually something much deeper, much darker, that happened in that process first, that I'm guessing many of us didn't notice when I said it.
The first step, for this hypothetical evangelical preacher, before any of the crafty, polished, acts of manipulation, was to start with their own idea and intent.
Truth be told this is a trap that a great many preachers fall into, not just evangelicals; making the message of worship about what we want to say rather than what God wants to say. And I know that I can be a very opinionated person, which is why you'll find that I almost always start not by asking what I think the people need to hear, but by looking to the lectionary instead.
For those of you who don't know, by the way, the Revised Common Lectionary is a tool, shared by almost every branch of the Christian church, which takes the entire Bible and breaks it up into a prepared series of passages selected for every single Sunday in a three-year rotation. So, rather than picking our own scripture and bending it to our own will, we instead are given a scripture passage to draw upon, asking where God's will is in it for our people, today.
So every Sunday, I pop open the lectionary and find a half-dozen curated passages, specific for that week and, to be honest, I generally find God speaking something helpful, supportive, or even painful but necessary, peeking out from the text of the week.
But man…this week's text? This was a rough one.
And I'll be honest, there were other options. We could have talked about Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac, or a brief passage from Matthew about welcoming Jesus. But this one…it kept poking at me all week, like a small, sharp rock in my shoe. It hurts, but you know that there’s really nothing else you can do but sit down and deal with it.
And let's be honest, this is no small rock. Most of us have heard at least some of the verses in this passage, usually from some preacher or another insisting on telling us just how broken, wrong, and sinful we are.
Listen to some of these, for a second:
" Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions."
"…you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness."
"But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification."
These sound just…a LOT like any old street preacher we might stumble across, don't they? This really does sound like the same, old, toxic theology on which the great golden idols of prosperity-driven megachurches have been built, right? But it's even harder to take here, because we aren’t hearing coming from some goateed, flannel-wearing, 30-something with the carefully-crafted-cool of a second-year MBA student with a focus on marketing generic brand pharmaceuticals, but from someone who is quite arguably the most famous follower of Christ in history.
I mean, Paul is…a big deal, right? He's the great leader of church, the first real head of the church, with power, gravitas, and authority behind his words, isn’t he?
Well…no. Not really.
It was Peter, actually, so was the first head of the church, the first Pope chosen by Christ to lead. Not Paul. It was Peter whose teachings carried weight, gravitas, and authority. Peter who communicated the word of God clearly and unambiguously to his flock, and passed down his authority, given him by Jesus, to his successor.
So that was Paul, right? His successor?
Nope.
The truth is, Paul NEVER held office in the church. In fact, he operated totally independent of the church that Jesus founded, the great community built on Peter “the rock,” meaning that while he agreed with the teachings of Christ, he was never accountable to anyone but himself and his own personal issues when it came to what he taught.
And boy did he have issues.
Paul was a hardcore fundamentalist right from his earliest days, so much so that before his conversion to Christianity, his favorite pastime was hunting down and either capturing or straight-up murdering people with different beliefs from him; in this case, the nascent community of Christians. And while his encounter with Jesus along the Damascus road certainly changed what he believed in, the Paul we see in the seven Pauline epistles certainly seems as though he never changed how he believed. Even as a Christian, he's still very much a fundamentalist at heart, someone with a black-and-white, binary view of how the world works.
And it's OK to allow this information to be part of how we read the Bible, and to change how we understand it.
Oddly enough, when you get down to it, this is pretty much what Paul is actually saying here anyways. He uses this weird master/slave binary language to explain it, which was the style at the time, but what he's saying here is that we don't have to be beholden to a literal, word-for-word, legalistic understanding of how to serve God just because it's written that way in the scriptures.
You see, Paul here effectively outlines three categories; sin, the law, and grace. Now, as the first real theologian of the Christian faith, we can already see that he's doing that thing that every first-year seminary student just loves to do; using big, broad, complicated theological language to describe something utterly simple.
In short however, the three things he's really describing here are human nature by itself, legalistic Jewish fundamentalism (which is Paul's own religious background), and Christianity. And what he's saying is that whichever of the three you choose to embrace, that is the one which will define you, and the life you live.
If you choose to live by the law, by the dictates of first-century legalistic Jewish fundamentalism in his case, then your entire life is going to be defined by trying to keep up with that law; trying to make sure you dot your I's and cross your t's, making yourself as perfect as possible so you don't run afoul of the complexities of a life lived under the threat of divine legality. Today we see this all the time with evangelical fundamentalists, who dedicate their lives to understanding God through the lens of complex codes of purity, race, social order, economics, sexuality, and many…many more. That is a life defined by fear; fear of making a mistake, of acting or being wrong, and that kind of life can, and often will, end quite badly for yourself, and those around you.
If you choose to live what Paul calls the sinful life on the other hand, that is a life that doesn't bother with God at all. If that’s your choice, then right or wrong really cease to be concerns for you. As a result, you may prosper here and now, at the expense of others, but your relationships will grow hollow, your community will fall away, and you'll become isolated and alone, until all that is left to you is death. Just look at any billionaire today, and you'll see how well that goes. Look in the eyes of your Elons Musk, your Joels Osteen, or your Marks Zuckerberg, and you'll see the isolation, the loneliness; the hollow, empty feeling that only becomes more dark and cavernous the more money you dump into it. A cold, dark, lonely death, surrounded by all the riches of the world which could buy absolutely anything, except the love that defines us as bearers of the image of God; that is the reward at the end of this path, the wages of “sin” as Paul calls it.
Literally the opposite of a "living " wage really, I suppose.
And then there's that third option, what Paul calls "grace." What he's talking about here is a totally different approach, fairly unique at the time, in which we could step away from the sinful cravings of humanity for more and better, and at the same time also set aside meticulous adherence to religious law too. This third way has us use not ourselves and our desires, or religious legalism as guides for how to live our lives and relate to our God, but to use love as a tool to point the way to what is right and wrong instead.
The social constructs that define right and wrong may change, the laws of our religion may become harder to follow as the world changes around us, but love is always the same; a far more fixed and stable guide than any law, or anything we possess within ourselves.
You see, grace means that we are forgiven, so long as we embrace the love that comes to us from God, through Christ Jesus. We are totally allowed to make mistakes and, in doing so with love, to learn and grow and change. We don't have to follow same exact beliefs and practices as those who came before us, because we're not using the letter of the law as our guide. Grace and love are our guiding stars, not these ancient legal texts, not this collection of unread mail from the first evangelical to ever tell the Pope to get lost, and certainly not the ancient fever dreams of St. John of Patmos either.
Grace.
Grace means that we can look at these texts and see them for what they are; a gospel of love filtered through the perceptions and idiosyncrasies of people with their own stuff going on. Grace means that we can look at these texts and see not the scolding whip of a God who wants us to toe the line or else, but the helpful guidance of friends long gone, who wanted to give us the benefit of their understanding of a God who we will spend our entire lives coming to understand in our own way too.
As Christians, we've read passages like today's as almost a threat. "The wages of sin is death," it says, so throughout history we have gone out and tried to assimilate as many people as possible into our way of being, thinking it'll save them from that death. But while we were reading these texts as closely, and as literally as possible, we forgot the love that was within us, forgot that what it means to be Christian isn't to force people to be like us, but to bring that gospel grace out from us into their lives, showing love rather than demanding acceptance.
The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Free gift. No purchase necessary, no membership called for. No adherence to the law, no tithing, ritual, or baptism required. Grace is free. Forgiveness is free.
And the life eternal? Free too.
So that's what I would like to invite us to think about today; what does it truly mean to accept that kind of grace? Not personally, not in terms of how we relate to God, but in terms of how we understand and relate to others. How can we approach the world when we're not bound to the letter of the law, when we are able to adapt, and grow, and learn, and change, using love as our guiding star? What does the new life in Christ look like when we aren't tied to literalism anymore, not tied to the law, but only to love?Sounds an awful lot like "on earth as it is in heaven," doesn't it?
Комментарии