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Tailspin of Guilt Romans 7:15 – 25a Oh my gosh! What drama! Before we give Paul the award for tail-spinning theatrics, let’s admit to ourselves that, indeed, we have been in the same place many times in our lives. We know what to do. We know what is the right thing to do. But we don’t do it. Most of you are old enough to remember Flip Wilson, the comedian. His classic line — as he continued to do what he knew was not right: ”The devil made me do it.” This spinning that Paul gets into can turn into absolute hopelessness. One of the commentaries I read this week put it this way: We are “up the swift-flowing creek of sin without a paddle — and with a bad leak in the boat.” (M. Soard, T. Dozeman, K McCabe. Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary. Nashville: Abingdon, 1992) How do we stop the world of spinning — and get off? Or do we even believe this is a serious issue? The unraveling of conspiracies and political espionage usually makes our heads whirl, and yet there is seemingly so much entertainment value in trying to figure out which story is true…which person is good…which one is villainous. Of course, James Bond always came out un-scarred and working for the ‘right’ side, but that’s hardly true in real political life or in our own personal lives — or is it? Before we discard Paul’s theatrics, let’s try to figure out some of the basic concepts with which he is dealing. Basic concepts that might, indeed, transfer into our personal, community and worldly lives. Paul wrote, taught and believed that sin was real. That evil was alive and well. Sin is not a word that we use much today. We play down the concept and soften (or eliminate) one end of the spectrum of good and bad. We categorize lies — a big lie; a little ‘white’ lie (please note the racist undertones in that one); a lie to protect the feelings of someone — and find ways to justify all of them. We also tend to reduce the word ‘sin’ to ‘misdeeds’ — again denying there is such a thing as sin or evil. That’s a slippery slope, my friends — a dangerous road to travel and antithetical to the Christian faith. Even though each of us may have varying passions in our lives — different calls placed on us by God — there is one standard, guide and line to draw that allows us to know right from wrong. That is, whenever we usurp that which is God’s role in this life — as the one who creates and gives meaning to life — then we have crossed the line. Therefore, any time we decide that someone’s life is not precious, any time we reduce the sacredness of another’s gifts, any time we demean the choices of another’s dream we have moved ourselves into the position that does not belong to us, and we have crossed into the realm of evil. We can easily see this in daily news stories about murderers, child abusers, and abductors. Last fall, I shared with you what I thought was one of the most evil ‘opportunities’ in America. Edgar Ray Killen was a novelty at the Mississippi State Fair. People were invited to shake his hand and receive tokens with his name. Long believed to be the ringleader of the Ku Klux Klan murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner — 3 men killed while they were registering Blacks to vote in 1964 — Killen was freed because one juror couldn’t convict a preacher. What he did was evil, but associating his freedom with the veil of the ministry of Jesus Christ was obscene. He lived (and we lived) to hear others affirm that 10 days ago. That’s a ‘big’ story — about someone else. So often we neglect to identify evil in our own voices when we malign:
The list goes on deeper into our homes and neighborhoods and broader into the world. Any time we set ourselves as THE standard rather than believing and remembering that God is the one who created life and breathes meaning to every portion of life we sin and we have fallen off the mark, moved to the end of the spectrum and are in the realm of what is evil. So, point number one with Paul is that sin is alive, evil is working and we (all of us) are contributors more often than we like to believe. The second point in Paul’s spinning around in this letter to the church in Rome, is that we cannot seem to stop this sinning — this evil making — even when we know we are doing it. Again, in contemporary times and also in pre-modern times, there is a basic fallacy about progressive good. Somewhere in our mind’s eye, we believe that if we work hard enough we can get better. In a ridiculously simple example, if we could get everyone in our household to pick up clothes, dirty dishes, old newspapers, and mail our homes would get neater and neater and we soon would all have Martha Stewart homes and feel some sort of redemption. My father — who never served in the military — liked to serve as a drill sergeant for the family when we were on vacation. We all had in-house duties before breakfast, and then before we could go swimming, we had to clean up debris and weed the front and back yards at our summer cottage every morning. I know he was teaching us discipline (which is admirable and important) but as a little girl I often got confused about the connection of godliness, cleanliness and my father’s acceptance and love of me. The glitch is when we think our work will move us to some state of perfection. The absolute perfection of a clean house, an organized neighborhood, a well-functioning congregation, a unified and patriotic country is not only impossible but the constant striving blinds us from receiving God’s greatest gift: grace! There are great expectations on us, and there is also realization that God loves us, even when we don’t meet them. That IS the Gospel – the truth – the Good news, revealed by Jesus Christ. Spinning into absolute guilt that we cannot do anything we know is right, and swirling into progressive righteousness where we believe we can attain perfection have the same ending: we lose our need of God. Fontella Bass – last Sunday evening at Ivory Perry Park sang her well-known hit, Rescue Me, and put a faith spin on it as she was singing to the children of our neighborhood. The same words Paul cried out for us all — who will rescue us from this tailspin of guilt AND the perfection hoax? Thanks be to God — who through Jesus Christ — taught us we are not alone or independent nor were we made to be so. We are not God – nor were we made to be so. SW |
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