A Homily on Romans 7.15-25
A Homily on Romans 7.15-25
Read along with
Zechariah 9.9-12; Psalm
145.8-14; Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30
Prayer
of Invocation
Father, you have taught us to keep
all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of
your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and
united to one another in pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Prayer
of Illumination
Father,
there are so many voices right now clamoring for our attention; there is our
own voice that either tells us we are not worthy and that we do not belong, or
it tells us we have rights that should be demanded; there are the voices that
scream to us about what the good life is, what justice is, who’s right, who’s
wrong; voices that seek to shame us; voices that seek to give us false assurance;
voices that encourage us to doubt or to be cynical. In this hour, we ask for
your voice to pierce through our darkness, to cut through the clutter--that we
may hear the word You have for us; and that Your word may be met with the power
of Your Spirit, who is transforming us to the image of Your Son; in whose name
we pray. Amen.
Proclamation
We all want to be the best version
of ourselves. But what do we need to get there? What do we need
to be able to be all that we were made to be? What do we need in order
to fulfill our calling, in order to live out our purpose in life, to become the
best you that you can be?
The Western, North American story
has profoundly shaped the assumptions that we hold about how to become the best
that we can be. Often at an unexamined level, we think that what we ultimately
need to be the best version of ourselves is information—education and
know-how that will empower us to be all that we ought to be. And so what we
lack, what we need is knowledge. The only thing between us and our
fullest life is knowing the right stuff! This is one of the reasons why science
and technology have become so prominent in our world; they are often seen as
the key to becoming all we can be because science gives us the power to know
the world as it truly is, and technology gives us the power to manipulate
our world, to make our knowledge work for our best interests and achieve our
goals.
We can even see this assumption
about the necessity of knowledge in the way of thinking in Christian culture as
well. Often Christians will suggest that what we need more than anything else
is a proper view of the world, a Christian worldview. The real work of a
the Christian life is to line up all that God has revealed, organize it in a
systematic fashion, and know how it confronts and contradicts other claims made
about our world from other worldviews. Once we have a Christian worldview, we
can see the world properly, and seeing properly, knowing rightly,
empowers us to become all that we were made to be. ‘Knowledge is power’
we might say.
Another particular way that we are
conditioned to think about formation and becoming our best self is in terms of
freedom or independence: the assumption is that we can only be our best,
truest selves when we have the liberty to express the deepest longings and
desires of our hearts. Connecting with and living out our authentic, genuine
wants and desires enable us to be all that we were made to be. Freedom from
limits; freedom from restrictions; freedom from rules, laws, customs, norms,
peer pressure; freedom for me to determine who I am and what I do. This is what
we need to be all that we were made to be.
Knowledge and freedom--that’s what
we need to be all that we can be. (This, by the way, is what a secular,
non-Christian liberal arts education is shaping us to think and be. It is why
you parents should consider sending your children to a university that thinks Christianly
about the liberal arts.)
We run into a big problem when we
compare these two common approaches to personal and community formation with
what the Bible says about the human condition however, and it is here where
Paul’s discussion in Romans 1-8 is very helpful. To start with, Paul tells us
that we are not as free as we might think we are; in fact, he tell us that we
are slaves; we are enslaved to Sin: “All are under sin” (3.9)
For Paul, there is an agency at
work in the world, a power that reigns in and through us to make us disobedient
to God. We might want to capitalize the s on Sin to draw this out. Sin is a
power that not only works at the individual level; it is a power that
influences the shape of systems and institutions of this world with the goal of
distorting our desires, and making us think that our best life is one that is
self-sufficient and independent from God and others (Romans 6; Eph 2.1-3). The
Apostle Paul says that Sin has affected our hearts so that we don’t love, want,
or desire the right things; and that even if at some level we want the
right things, we can’t do the right thing; and it has affected our minds such
that we suppress the knowledge (literally press it down) when it tells us
things we don’t like (e.g. Rom 1.18-23). Paul calls this condition ‘death’; he
says that left on our own, we are all dead in our trespasses and sins. This is
our condition, left on our own.
So yes, we need knowledge
(insight, information) and freedom—but they are not enough; they are not
sufficient. They alone cannot liberate us from our condition of slavery. We
need more than concepts, principles (even biblical ones), and ideas; we
need a life outside of ourselves that can deliver us from our dire condition.
We need intervention, life support or CPR if you will, that enables us to want
rightly, to know rightly, and to do rightly. In short, we do not just need
forgiveness of sins; we also need to be freed from the power of Sin, our slave
master. And that life, that liberation, only comes from God.
So,
what we need more than anything else is God’s life, His personal presence with
us. God’s empowering presence. In the midst of all the questions that Romans 7
raises, this is what Paul is saying to us; this is his main point.
It
is important to remember that at this point in the letter he is addressing his
fellow Jews (7.4) who have organized their entire lives around the
keeping of God’s Law, God’s revelation of who He is and what His will is. They
have been given information, sacred knowledge about who God is and what He
wants of His people. They have organized their lives around putting that
knowledge to practice, applying that information to their lives. And yet it
seems as if Paul has been denigrating this revelation, this sacred information
(Rom 3.21; 7.6). And so, he wants to address this question before he moves
on.
It
is also important to note that Romans 7.7-25 is a digression, in a sense. In my
Romans class, I ask my students to read from Romans 6.1-7.6, skip over Rom
7.7-25, and then jump right to Romans 8.1-39. Try it. It flows quite nicely.
The theme that Paul is developing from Rom 6 onward is our new life in Christ
by the empowering presence of the Spirit. But this flow gets disrupted by Rom
7.7-25. I imagine that Paul, in the process of editing Romans, got some
feedback from a friend. Upon reading 7.6, the friend said something like “hold
up, Paul. You’ve made a couple of unsavory comments about the Law (3.21). You
probably need to clarify what your position is on the Law before you go on or
you are going to lose half your crowd.”
Given
the vast amount of scholarly work done on this section of Romans, I am not sure
how much he has clarified! But the point in raising all this is to show that
the main theme of this section (7.7-25) is the Law. To be more precise, Paul
argues that the Law “promises life” (7.10), that it is holy, righteous, and
good (7.12); that it is spiritual (7.14), but that our condition is such that
we are held captive by the law of Sin and thus unable to put the Law into
practice (7.23; law in the sense of rule).
There
is much we could discuss about Romans 7.15-25, especially regarding the
identity of the “I” ( whether the “I” is a Christian, a pre-Christian, a Jew,
or whatever other option is out there). We will have to leave that for another
time, perhaps a Missio Dei conversation. The main point that Paul
is stressing here with this inspired digression is that though the Law is good,
holy, righteous, and spiritual, it does not have the power in and of itself to
liberate us from the Sin master. For we are “sold under sin” (7.14); we do not
have the ability to carry out the Law (7.18). Our condition is much worse than
just needing revelation, some bit of information that we can apply to
our lives; we need liberation; we need God’s life. And to preview Paul’s next
point in the letter (Romans 8), what we need is the life-giving Spirit. Why?
Because the Spirit is God’s empowering presence; the Spirit tells us who we
are; the Spirit communicates God’s love to us (Rom 5.5); the Spirit cleanses us
and regenerates our hard-hearts (Titus 3.3-7); the Spirit bears witness to our
spirit, telling us that we are God’s children, part of God’s family (Rom 8.17;
Gal 4.4-7); the Spirit says to us “you are mine” (Eph 1.11-14); the Spirit
conforms us to the pattern of Christ’s self-giving life (Phil 2.1-11); the Spirit
takes the foolish gospel of Jesus Christ and makes it the wisdom of God for us
(1 Cor 1.18-2.16).
The
Holy Spirit. I am not sure what comes to your mind when you think about the
Holy Spirit. But at the core of it all, the Holy Spirit is God’s empowering
presence with us, who enables us to share in the love and life of God and
to love others the way that Christ has loved us. When the Spirit interrupts,
intersects, intercedes, intervenes in our lives with His life of love, we
become what we were made to be. We become our best self, we become fully human.
Paul calls this walking according to the Spirit, or keeping in step with the
Spirit, or being led by the Spirit. To walk in the Spirit is to become
increasingly dependent, limited, vulnerable. Why? Because the Spirit enables us
to trust, to become dependent upon God and others. The Spirit helps us embrace
our limits and obligations. This is the gift of God to us. We will talk more
about this in the weeks to come as we explore Paul’s thoughts in Romans 8. For
now, let’s pause, take a deep breath, and thank God that he has not left us as
slaves to Sin in this world, but instead by His Spirit has given us His own
self to enable us to be what we were made to be—beloved children of God.
Eucharist
And
this is the primary witness of the Spirit--you belong; you are His; you are his
beloved; He loves you; you are part of his family. (Romans 8.17; Gal
4.4-7; 2 Thess 2.13-14). This is perhaps our greatest challenge, this is where
the Spirit is leading us, to believe in this word that the He has spoken to us.
As H. Nouwen has said:
Being
the Beloved is the origin and the fulfillment of the life of the Spirit...From
the moment we [receive] the truth of being the Beloved, we are faced with the
call to become who we are. Becoming the Beloved is the greatest spiritual
journey we have to make...Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual
life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the
"Beloved". Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our
existence...you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is:
manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The
world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be
realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt,
offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: ‘These feelings,
strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth,
even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God,
precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in
an everlasting belief.[1]
We
declare all this and participate in this reality when we join together to give
thanks at the Lord’s Supper.
Benediction
The
Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and
if children, then heirs--heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ
Roman 8.17
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