Somewhere in my childhood I learned the song that says, “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, Guess I’ll go eat worms.” There’s more to the song but those words came to mind when I read that Martin Luther described himself as “a poor stinking bag of worms.”[i]
According to Luther, Paul leaves no one on neutral ground when he declares,
All [humanity is] ungodly and wicked, and in their wickedness they suppress truth, hence they are deserving of wrath.[ii]
This is not how we typically talk about ourselves or others but this chapter in Paul’s letter to the Romans demands that we pay attention to our sin-soaked world.
Remember, for Paul, sin is a pervasive force in the world actively rebelling against God and God’s ways;
it is not merely the bad choices or moral failings any one of us commit on any given day.
In verses 18 to 20, Paul explains the futility of free choice in a sinful world.
18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Romans 7:18-20 NRS)This is the bondage of the will, that even when we will to do what is right, we are deceived. We cannot, apart from Christ, accomplish the good that we want.
Until this week, I had not known that scholars debate how we should hear the “I” in this passage. New Testament professor Walter Taylor outlines five of the possibilities: [iii]
First, some think that Paul was talking about himself and his dissatisfaction with God and the law, in a diary-like entry of his pre-Christ perspective. But that reading requires that we reconcile his claims in Philippians 3 where he boasts of his accomplishments in the flesh, (4-6) and Galatians 1 where he describes his prior life persecuting the church. (15-17)
A second interpretation is that the “I” equals the Christian. But then, how do we reconcile Paul’s own words in the previous chapter where he tells us that Christians have been freed from their enslavement to sin?
A third possibility is that the “I” refers to Adam and the humanity brought about by Adam. In Romans 5 Paul describes the old and new creations and the consequences of the actions of both Adam and Christ.
And yet another view is that “I” is the sinner viewed by the person who is now justified, like a character in a television show having flashbacks to the ways things were.
Taylor’s final suggestion is supported by James Dunn’s reading of Paul in The Theology of Paul the Apostle: that the “I” is in fact the present-day Christian, living in the “already -- but not yet.”
This is also where, I believe, we get Luther’s own simul iustus et peccator “at the same time justified and yet a sinner.”[iv]
“Saint and sinner” does not mean, as Paul has already decried, that we continue sinning willfully, but that we surrender to Christ, fully aware of what we cannot do.
The story of Cain in Genesis 4 describes Eve’s firstborn and a confrontation with God where God tells the man, “Sin is crouching at your door.” (Genesis 4:7, NIV)
We don’t like to talk about sin and we especially don’t want to examine the power sin holds over our own lives and its place in the systems we live under. But our ignorance of it doesn’t diminish its power or reality. Sin is crouching at our door.
It has the power, as God tells Cain, to make us “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:12 NRS) It has the power to poison our relationships with each other, to infect the body of Christ and to weaken us. And the law is no help, because, on our own, we cannot fulfill the law.
But we have the remedy: Christ, our deliverer.
When Paul asks in verse 24, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24 NRS), he knows the answer. And so do we.
As Luther writes,
since God has taken my salvation out of my hands into his, making it depend on his choice and not mine, and has promised to save me, not by my own work or exertion but by his grace and mercy, I am assured and certain both that he is faithful and will not lie to me, and also that he is too great and powerful for any demons or any adversities to be able to break him or snatch him from me.[v]
God has rescued us!
And in Christ, we are no longer poor stinking bags of worms. In Christ, we are planted in the House of the Lord (Psalm 92), in the land of faithfulness, to flourish and bear fruit.
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Amen.
[i] Martin Luther. “Admonition Against Insurrection.” (1522).
[ii] Martin Luther, “Bondage of the Will” (1525) in Luther’s Theological Writings. 169.
[iii] Walter F. Taylor, Jr. “Commentary of Romans 7:15-25a.” Workingpreacher.org, Luther Seminary.
[iv] Martin Luther. Romans. 114-115.
[v] Martin Luther, “Bondage of the Will”. 193.
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