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Sermon - The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 29th June 2008
St Alban's Epping 7, 8 & 10am
Readings: Genesis 22:1-14, Psalm 13, Romans 6:12-23, Matthew 10:40-42
Romans was not written to provide "a theology of the Christian life," but Paul's larger argu ment demands that at certain points he write more or less exactly that. Chapter 6 is one of the two clearest examples of a theology of life and the other being chapter 12. Among the principal things Paul insists upon is that being a Christian means living from within a particular story. It is the subversive story of God and the world, focused on Israel and then on the Messiah and reaching its climax in the Messiah's death and resurrection. No Christian can ever tell this story too frequently, or know it too well, because it is the story that has shaped us in baptism and that must continue to shape thought, life, and prayer for ever. Otherwise we will be living a lie, allowing sin to continue exercising a sovereignty to which it has no more right.
The Exodus story, which stands behind so much of this chapter, remains decisive. We in the Anglican Church have retained it in our liturgy, particularly at Easter with the renewal of baptismal vows, reflecting our profound belief that we are a part of God’s ongoing story of salvation and rescue from our captivity. The story of coming out of slavery into freedom, with all the new puzzles and respon sibilities that freedom brings, is the story of the gospel, the story within which Jesus delib erately framed his own final moments with his followers, the story on which he himself drew to give meaning to his death. Just as the Jewish people discovered in the Exodus story the character of their rescuing God, so the covenant faithfulness of this same God has been fully unveiled in the paschal events of Golgotha and Easter. Learning about the Christian life and learning about the God revealed in Jesus Christ are two sides of the same coin.
It is a measure of how deeply this story of salvation has been woven into the consciousness of Western culture that a great many movements, national, political, social and cultural, have told their own stories as liberation narratives. This reflects more than simply the influence of the Magna Carta on the subsequent British world and its deriva tives. It is the sign of a culture stamped with the word "freedom" at a deeper level than that. The cry for freedom is one we instinctively recognize and want to respond to. At this point the Exodus story offers itself as the true story of the human race and the Christian retelling of this story in terms of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ must do so as well. This story cannot simply be one "little story" among others, as though it could take its place happily on the cultural smorgasbord, offering a certain kind of "religious experience," alongside other stories that effectively enslaved humans and led them off to die. Even the post-modern critique that insists that all large meta-narratives are instruments of slavery appeals to and gets its power from, one story that, it assumes, is not: and that story is precisely its own version, filtered through many layers of cultural accretions, of the Exodus narrative, the freeing of the slaves from Pharaoh's yoke. The Christian gospel is, at this level, telling the story that all humans know in their bones they want to hear.
It is true that in appealing to this story all kinds of things have been said and done that some way or other distort it, or even threaten to destroy it outright. The magicians of Egypt are also adept at producing miracles to validate their position. At the level of international politics the word "liberation" has often simply meant that a particular country has been taken over by a different form of virtual political enslavement. At both a personal and a global level, the financial loan that announces it will set you free to do all sorts of undreamed of things will then enslave you until you have paid it back. In terms of personal morality, the freedom of one person to expand their business empire may well be at the cost of the freedom of their neighbour to remain in busi ness; and the freedom of people to express their sexual potential regularly results both in the reduction of the freedom of others and also in their own enslavement to destructive and dehumanising habits of mind and body. Telling the story of freedom is, by itself, not enough. As Paul seems to have recognized, freedom from the slavery of sin involves a new kind of "liberated slavery," obedience to the God who loves us and seeks our true freedom, our true humanness. Thus we have discovered, in the political sphere, that freedom from oppressive external regimes is not enough for a struggling country. With freedom comes new responsibilities, to ourselves and to our neighbours and without these one may be worse off than in the original slavery itself. See how Zimbabwe has replaced one regime with another more sinister one.
This chapter shines a bright spotlight on the dangerous half-truth, that God accepts us as we are. Indeed, the question of 6:1,
“What are we to say? Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound?”
could be read as asking exactly this ques tion: Will "God's acceptance" do as a complete grounding of Christian ethics? Most certainly not! Grace reaches where we are and accepts us as we are, because anything less would result in nobody being saved. Justification is by through faith in God’s grace alone. However, grace is always transformative. Yes, God accepts us where we are, but God does not intend to leave us where we are. That would be precisely to "continue in sin, that grace might abound." Unless we are simply to ignore Romans 6, the radical inclusively of the gospel must be matched by the rad ical exclusivity of Christian holiness. There is such a thing as continuing to let sin control our lives and it will require serious moral effort to combat this tendency. The idea that Christian holiness is to be attained by every person simply doing what comes naturally would actually be funny was it not so widespread. True freedom is not simply the random, directionless life, but the genuine humanness that is attainable when we are in the correct relationship with God through allowing Jesus Christ to rule and guide our lives. This lordship makes demands that are as testing and difficult as they are actually liberating.
As we prayed last week in the Intercessions,
“ O God, we are many times afraid of our calling to covenant relationship with you. We would prefer to travel without responsibility. We would rather not risk being hurt. We find it more comfortable to have structures of power. We sometimes choose to stay with our guilt and separate ourselves from your community.”
The pattern, the motive and the moral power to live in true freedom, that is in other words, in "slav ery" to God, are found in that weaving of our own life story together with the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. We are all too aware that thousands, perhaps millions, of the baptised seem to have abandoned the practice of Christian faith and life, but we are neverthe less called to allow the dying and rising of Christ in which we have shared to have its force and way in our own lives. If Jesus and his dying and rising are simply a great example, we remain with out hope. Who seriously thinks that we can live up to that ideal in our own strength? But if the fact of the Word of God, the Logos, becoming part of our own story through the event of baptism, our life of faith that accompany it and above all the gift of the Holy Spirit, then we will indeed be able to make our own the victory of grace, to present our members, and our whole selves, as instruments of God's ongoing purposes.
We are the Body of Christ in the world and we should act accordingly.
This serom compossed using the The New Interptetor’ Bible Vol X