Fourth Sunday after Pentecost / Lectionary 14A

John 8:31-36

Romans 6:12-23

Usually, we hear this gospel passage on Reformation Sunday, but it came to mind when I was preparing to preach on Paul’s letter to the Romans where he writes about slaves of sin becoming slaves to righteousness.

In the gospel, Jesus is addressing a group of Jews who have believed in him, and they say, “We have never been slaves to anyone.” (John 8:33)

Apparently, they had forgotten that two thousand years before this, their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt under Pharaoh. And because they didn’t see themselves as enslaved, they struggled to see the meaning of the freedom that Jesus offered.

In our American context “slavery” recalls the chattel slavery that began in 1619 and continued through the mid-nineteenth century. And similar to those first-century Christians, most of us who are white and descended from western European ancestors, would probably insist, “We [too] have never been slaves to anyone.”

But Jesus and Paul have something to say to us about that: We don’t know what we don’t know.

We think we’ve been free but we have been deceived. In verse 20 Paul addresses the illusory perception of freedom, writing that we were once free from righteousness, but that wasn’t because we were free. It was because we were still bound by sin.

The only freedom we know is under grace freely given by God in God’s mercy.

Our freedom is given to us by God through Jesus Christ. As Martin Luther wrote in his essay “The Freedom of a Christian”, “faith alone, without works, justifies, frees, and saves.”[i]

And there is no freedom apart from Jesus Christ. Everyone serves a master of one kind or another.[ii] So, we are either slaves of sin or we are slaves to righteousness. We are either slaves to human passions and addictions, or we are slaves to God and the things of God. There is no third way here.

Remember when Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”? (Matthew 6:21; Luke 12:34) We’ve become so conditioned to living in slavery to sin we don’t even recognize the freedom we’ve been given. When we put our gifts of time and our resources, our energy and effort into things of this world, we continue in our enslavement to the things of this world and our treasure is not in God and our hearts are not in God. But when we claim the freedom we already have in Christ, and we treasure God and the ways of God, our hearts follow.

And in Christ our eyes are opened to see that the freedom we are given is not only for ourselves. We are not free simply to exercise and protect our individual rights or freedoms; we are freed that we may love and serve others. Luther writes in that same essay:

A Christian is perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.[iii]

He continues with Paul’s own words from later in this letter: Christians “owe no one anything, except to love one another….” (Romans 13:8)

As Christians, this righteousness becomes the organizing center of our lives, a place of commitment and belonging.[iv] The center is not our country, our vocation or even our families, but God and the things of God. As one New Testament professor wrote, “Righteousness leads to increased spirituality and holiness both of heart and with each other.”[v]

Paul says here that “you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.” (Romans 6:17) The form of teaching — the very shape of discipleship — is the cross, where Jesus emptied himself, taking on all that is ours and gave up his life for us. Obedient from the heart, we become servants to the cross and to Jesus Christ who commands us to love one another.

This is heart-work that demands a high price. It demands that we let go of all that we grasp so tightly, that we might receive what God offers to us. It demands that we open ourselves to be changed from the inside out. It demands risking ourselves and trusting God is there, and that is hard!

But Paul concludes that while the wages of sin —when we stay enslaved in that world where we only think we are free from the devil and the powers that defy God — is death, the benefit of this difficult transformative work is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord: life where we know God’s abundant love and mercy for us and God’s power to heal what is withered, restore what is broken and renew what is dying.

Let us pray.

Holy and life-giving God,

Thank you for your Son Jesus who frees us from bondage even when we cannot see our shackles.

Thank you for your free gift of grace and the freedom we know in your love and mercy that renews us and gives us new life each day.

Show us how to love one another and live under the dominion of righteousness and Your ways.

We pray in the name of Your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.

Amen.

[i] Martin Luther. “The Freedom of a Christian.” Three Treatises. 282.

[ii] John B. Cobb, Jr. David J. Lull. Romans. 100.

[iii] Luther, 277.

[iv] Cobb and Lull, 100.

[v] Israel Kamudzandu. “Working Preacher.” Luther Seminary. https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4497, Accessed 6/25/2020.

Third Sunday after Pentecost/ Lectionary 12A

Romans 6:1b-11

Grace and peace to you.

DP Washburn once told me the story of an old preacher who was asked what the sermon was gonna to be about and when the preacher said it was gonna to be on sin, he was asked what he was going to say about it, and he answered, “I’m agin it!”

Earlier in his letter to the Romans Paul wrote, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” (5:20 NIV) And that statement is what compels the question that begins our reading today: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (6:1 NIV)

Not surprisingly, Paul answers his own question: “By no means!” (6:2)

Both the old-timey preacher and Paul’s adversaries are operating in a system where sin refers to individual actions that are good or bad, that help us climb an imaginary ladder to a better place with God or send us hurtling into the depths.

But Paul understands sin as more than our human striving or failing.

For Paul, sin is a force that corrupts God’s intentions for the world and humanity. It is the devil and all the forces that defy God, the powers of this world that rebel against God and the ways of sin that draw us away from God that we renounce at baptism. (Holy Baptism, ELW)

And so he goes on to write,

3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (6:3-4)

Against an understanding of baptism as ‘fire insurance’ or a performative ritual, Paul reminds us that baptism is about life and death.

One lecturer suggested this week that if we took baptism seriously, we would play a funeral dirge as we approached the font for the Holy Sacrament. His reasoning was that at the font where the earthly element of water is joined with God’s Word in Matthew 28 for us, we receive the promise and treasure of new life and new life is not possible unless it is preceded by death.

I know, we don’t like to talk about death. And we certainly don’t like to voluntarily enter into it. We prize our individualism and our independence too much for that. The death Scripture describes is death to sin, what Martin Luther describes as:

death to death, by which the soul is saved and separated from sin, as also the body is freed from corruption. By this death we are bound by grace and glory to the living God. (Luther's Commentary, 101)

In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther describes the new life we receive in baptism as:

victory over death and the devil, forgiveness of sin, God’s grace, the entire Christ and the Holy Spirit with his gifts. (Book of Concord, 461)

Next, echoing Jesus own words in John 11:25 when he told his followers, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” Paul writes,

5 For if we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

The Greek translated here as “united” is better translated as “planted together with.”

Gardens, vines and growing things are common metaphors in Scripture. Often symbols of abundance and good life, in Genesis and John we are reminded that gardens are also places that contain both life and death.

In Genesis 2-3, the garden is the place where the tree of knowledge of good and evil stands and where the four rivers run that water the earth and bring life to it.

In John 18 and 19, the garden is where Jesus is betrayed and arrested and where he is buried and resurrected.

Our death to sin means “we are made completely pure and innocent in God’s eyes. The guilt of sin is washed away and we are made totally new creatures.” (Bayer, 77) But the old Adam still lives in the world and must be slayed again every day. As Luther writes, “Thus a Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, begun once and continuing ever.” (Book of Concord, 465)

If you’ve ever tended a garden, you know it can go to seed and weeds pretty quickly. Disease and infestation can kill and too much or too little rain can either rot or scorch the plants. But well-cultivated and tended, it holds so much more possibility, promise and abundance.

Our life in Christ does not mean that we escape death. But in baptism God acts upon us and makes us who we are. Our old lives and identities die and we are planted together with Christ where we are called to walk in new life (6:4), planted where we are that our lives would show God’s abundant love and mercy to the world.

Thanks be to God. 

Amen.

Second Sunday after Pentecost/ Lectionary 11A

Romans 5:1-8

Grace and peace to you.

For most of the summer, our epistles or New Testament readings will come from St. Paul’s letter to the Christian church in Rome. It is the longest of Paul’s letters, which is why it is the first one in Scripture. Scholars believe Paul wrote it between 55 – 58 CE while he was living in Corinth, and unlike some of the other epistles attributed to him, this letter’s authorship is undisputed.

While Romans is not one of the four Gospels in our canon, Martin Luther once called it “the chief part of the New Testament and the [clearest] Gospel.”[i] Luther wrote that a Christian finds most things one ought to know in this letter,

namely, what is law, Gospel, sin, punishment, grace, faith, righteousness, Christ, God, good works, love, hope, the cross, and how we are to conduct ourselves toward everyone.[ii]

A summary of Paul’s teaching to the Church, the letter

is about God's saving work in Christ for Jew and Gentile alike, both of whom fall short of doing the will of God yet receive grace and mercy from God.[iii]

Whenever we hear one of Paul’s letters it’s helpful to remember that we are not the intended audience. We are eavesdropping on a conversation he is having with another group of people.

Often Paul wrote to communities where he had planted churches and addressed specific conflicts that were happening in those places. In his letter to the Romans, while he knows some of them by name, he is writing to a community or congregation of Christians that are largely unknown to him; he is planning to go there and meet them but that hasn’t happened yet. [iv]

Because we are on this side of history, we know it never will. He will go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested and lose his freedom, and when Paul does go to Rome it will be as a prisoner of the state and not a free missionary. [v]

But that’s another part of the story.

In this letter, instead of counseling the Romans on a particular aspect of their life together, Paul addresses fundamental parts of their – and his and our – life in Christ.[vi]

And as if we found scattered pages laying on the kitchen table, we pick up the letter in chapter five.

Here Paul writes about new life in Christ and the fruits of that life.

He begins,

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; (5:1-2)

I don’t know about you but, today, with our human sinfulness and brokenness on display throughout the world, in places of government, in intensive care beds in our U.S. hospitals and in places like Ghana where their public health officials have to fight COVID-19 with inadequate equipment, in the faces of hungry neighbors here and on the streets of places like India, this reassurance that we have peace felt like balm, soothing and restoring me.

And yet, if we only understand peace as a sense of calm and rest, we lose out on the fullness of what Paul is describing.

Peace with God is reconciliation with God. It is the peace of being in relationship with God, a relationship that only happens through Jesus Christ.

This relationship is only possible because of the grace - God’s favor or goodwill – we have received. It is never because of our works, or our efforts, but God’s own divine action upon us. Grace isn’t a transaction.

“This grace in which we stand” is the place where we are freed from sin and we are living in faith in Christ and Him alone.

Luther wrote, “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace.”[vii] Karl Barth wrote in his commentary on Romans that faith doesn’t offer us any shortcuts, but it does offer us hope that God will accomplish God’s purposes. [viii]

Continuing his letter, Paul wrote,

hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (5:5)

So maybe this peace with God, which is ours through our new life in Christ, is balm after all:

healing that comes from the Holy Spirit poured into us by God who abundantly loves us and gives us everlasting life;

and reconciliation – the restoration of relationship – that only happens when we see each other as God sees us, whole and beloved.

Let us pray…

Good and gracious God, Thank you for your Son Jesus in whom we have faith. We stand in Your grace that brings hope for our lives and our world. Show us how to bear your love into the world and see our neighbors as you see us, whole and beloved. Amen.

[i] Martin Luther. “Preface”, Commentary on Romans. Translated by J. Theodore Mueller.vii.

[ii] Luther, xxv-xxvii.

[iii] Arland Hultgren. “Summary.” Enter the Bible. Luther Seminary. https://www.enterthebible.org/newtestament.aspx?rid=6, Accessed 6/13/2020

[iv] Anders Nygran. Commentary on Romans. Translated by Carl C. Rasmussen, 1-8.

[v] ibid

[vi] ibid

[vii] Luther, xvii.

[viii] Karl Barth. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C. Hoskins. 153.