Romans 8:12-25; Isaiah 44:6-8; Psalm 86:11-17
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In the sentence before our reading begins, Paul has told the Roman believers that
“If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you.” (Romans 8:11)
If we parse what Paul has said here in his usual dense style, we will realize that this is an affirmation of the Trinity. It speaks of the Spirit, the one who raise Jesus, and Christ. All three are connected, intertwined, and responsible to each other in the greater work of fulfilling God’s purpose.
So then, Paul begins his next thought: “So then, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation.” “We are debtors.” That’s not exactly something we want to hear. Our monthly credit card bills, car or house payments all too enthusiastically remind us of that. We dislike having that frequent reminder. It lowers our self-estimation, and that’s a real downer. Worse than that, being told we are debtors when all our IOUs are cleared and the bill collector has no reason to pound on our door is a real drag. We would resent that implication. After all, we tend to agree with Polonius in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, when he counseled his son Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” This concept is a good ideal, but it’s not practical.
Having told his readers that they are debtors, Paul then goes on to explain. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases the apostle, “We don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent.” That is, we are not debtors to our flesh, we don’t owe anything to our selfish ways of living.
There is not a thing we could have done saving ourselves. God has done everything we needed to be done. Therefore, we have an obligation to respond, not to ourselves, not to our human nature wracked with sin, but to God. That’s something more than our mother whispering in our ear, “Say ‘Thank you,’ Rick.” Because of all that Christ has done and is going to do for us, we are obligated to live in the power and control of the Holy Spirit.
The way that Paul puts this is that we are to refuse the drives and desires of our still attractive but crucified sinful nature. We are to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions. Paul says that redeemed life in Christ is a call to live “sensible, ethical, and godly lives right now” (Titus 2:12). The old, sinful nature may present its demands, based upon the past but we have no obligation to cooperate. It is like having fraud protection on our credit cards. We aren’t required to pay for something fraudulently charged to our account. Jesus has cancelled the debt to sin.
I suppose that we could look at this as refinancing our debt. We no longer owe a debt of death to sin. The debt we now owe is a debt of life and it is owed to God. Why is that? Because “all who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters....[Y]ou received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children.”
The true children of God are everyone who are led by the Spirit of God. The Spirit-led life stands out. It can’t be hid. Believers not only have the Spirit, they are also led by the Spirit.
Paul uses adoption to illustrate the believer’s new relationship with God and his or her privileges as part of God’s family. In Roman culture familiar to both Paul and his readers, the adopted person lost all the rights which came from the old family and gained all the rights of a legitimate child in the new family. The adoptee became a full heir to all the rights, privileges, responsibilities, and assets and debts of the new family.
That’s why Paul uses the image about becoming a Christian. When a person comes to Christ, he or she gets everything that goes with being a child in God’s family. One of the outstanding privileges of family of God membership is being led by the Spirit. What a gift the new family relationship provides!
Former American poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about a boy making a lanyard at summer camp. With the help of his counselor he wove the plastic strands into a lanyard which he gave to his mother. Collins writes:
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied.
Collins concludes the poem,
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift – not the worn truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-toned lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.(1)
We are like that boy giving the lanyard to his mother. There is nothing that we can give to God that is equivalent to all that God has done for us in Christ. There is no way to place a human value on the inheritance we receive with Christ through the Spirit.
Paul’s Jewish co-religionists understood themselves to heirs of God in terms of being the possessors of the “Promised Land.” They had lost it completely once, and gotten it back (by dint of God’s activity). Now it was overrun by foreign overlords. Paul told Jews and Gentiles about a different inheritance that God had prepared in Christ, not geographical land but God’s spiritual kingdom, the realm of God’s rule. Too often that gets interpreted as something in the future. But Paul’s emphasis about the Spirit being in believers suggests that the realm of God’s rule is a present reality when the Spirit is fully dwelling in the hearts of believers.
Many Christians are conditioned to think of atonement as Christ’s cross paying the debt owed to the law, or the devil, or even to God. That would mean that sinners have a debt defined by the law. But Christians are debt free, due to Christ's payment in the crucifixion. This would mean that at one time each of us was in debt to the law; but now, with Christ, we don’t owe the law a thing.
Just as we are about to breathe a sigh of relief, Paul makes the astounding claim that we are still debtors. But for Paul everything depends upon to whom the debt is owed. He says that the debt we owe is owed to the Spirit. As he said, the now-cancelled debt to sin gave death. The debt we now owe gives life. What a strange debt this is!
If you talk to your accountant, you know that debt is a liability. When your CPA puts your balance sheet together, liabilities – debts – are subtracted from assets to determine net worth. That’s the accounting law. Debt reduces assets. However, the Spirit doesn’t do accounting according to human principles. Debt owed to the Spirit increases your net spiritual worth; it doesn’t take away from it. Spirit debt is not what must be repaid, but what is paid to you. Christ said it this way: “Everyone who has will be given more” (Luke 19:26). In other words, whoever has the Spirit of Christ will receive more as the person grows and matures in Christ-like faith.
Debt is not our basic problem; it is to whom we owe the debt that matters. The more we seek to have the Spirit power our faith, the more we try to live the kind of life Christ modeled for us, the more we hand over our lives to God, the more we add to our debt to the Spirit. The more we owe the Spirit, the greater our total worth is as an heir with Christ to the glory of God’s holy rule. That’s a debt everyone of us needs to take on. That’s the debt we owe, and we owe it to the Spirit.
(1) Billy Collins, Lanyard, 2007.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Isaiah 55:10-13; Psalm 65:9-13; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
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Major League Baseball has started the second half of the season. Last Tuesday’s All Star Game was the 88th. It took 10 innings, but the American League continued their recent dominance of All Star Games. For those of us more supportive of the National League, the last two decades have been dismal.
I grew up listening to baseball on the radio. It was always exciting. I don’t know if the games went faster then, but the announcer’s chatter between pitches and hits provided the color that watching the game live without announcing doesn’t have. And it seemed like there were fewer commercials then. You know how memory works, so that probably isn’t so.
One thing about baseball is that the home team always has the last chance to bat. If they are ahead they won’t need it. If they are behind, they have a chance to win, or at least tie and take the game into extra innings.
There is a play on words which attributes the creation of baseball not to Abner Doubleday but to God. If a person misreads the first verse of Genesis, it could say, “In the big inning....” Be that as it may, if God were to be involved with baseball, God would always be the home team, God would always bat last. That’s the gist of the verses we have before us today from the prophet Isaiah. God has the last word. It goes out and doesn’t return to go empty. God wins.
All of Isaiah 55 is memorable. The opening verses are used on a Lenten Sunday in one of the lectionary years.
All of you who are thirsty, come to the water! Whoever has no money, come, buy food and eat! Without money, at no cost, buy wine and milk! Why spend money for what isn’t food, and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy?
The first five verses will be the Old Testament lesson in three weeks and are coupled with the story from Matthew of the feeding of the 5,000.
Isaiah 55 opens as an invitation to a banquet. The reading comes at the end of the section often referred to as Second Isaiah and the writer is looking to the day of Israel’s return to Jerusalem and Judea, the rebuilding of the Temple, the reestablishment of lineage of the Davidic kings, and birth of the New Jerusalem symbolizing the dawn of God’s universal reign of righteous compassion. That will indeed be something worth celebrating.
Whenever with think about celebrations and festivals in the biblical context, we can’t help but think of the parable which Jesus told about the wedding feast (Matthew 22:1–10). When the announcement was delivered that the feast was ready, all the invited guests had more important business to attend to. So the invitation list was revised: “Go to the roads on the edge of town and invite everyone you find to the wedding party.”
There it is, stated plainly and simply: The most precious gift of all — the gift of life in God’s presence — is free. The only thing that can invalidate the gift is your insistence that there are places you would rather be and things you would rather do. Why anyone would ever opt for their choice over God’s is impossible to fathom. What are the possibilities? You want to determine the menu. You aren’t an afternoon person. You want to be in control of the company you keep. After all, someone you can’t stand might be there. But God will be there. Yeah, didn’t the host say that anyone could attend? But Jesus may join the wedding feast! Wouldn’t it be better to be in God’s presence, sitting with Jesus, that worrying about who else might be there?
The morale of Israel in exile was pretty bleak. After the defeat of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, God’s approval rating plummeted to an all-time low. How could God allow God’s people to be defeated? How could God lose? The prophet Jeremiah dealt with the same issues. He took a British approach with the exiles in Babylon. “Keep a stiff upper lip. Keep calm and carry on. Dig into the local community and improve it. Don’t just survive, thrive. Look at me, I bought property in suburban Anathoth.”
Isaiah uses the image of the feast to seal the promise of God’s activity. Second Isaiah had started out in chapter 40 with two questions: Was God able to save Israel? And was God willing to save Israel? Isaiah saw that the problem wasn’t with God but with the people. He tells the people,
“Seek the Lord when he can still be found; call him while he is yet near. Let the wicked abandon their ways and the sinful their schemes. Return to the Lord so that he may have mercy on them, to our God, because he is generous with forgiveness.”
We live our spiritual lives no differently than we do our personal lives. We are loathe to admit that any fault lies on our side of the relationship. It is a habitual comfort to blame the other person, to blame someone else, to blame God. So we rationalize with fake logic. That’s what the Israelites did: If God possessed sufficient power and concern, Jerusalem would not have been destroyed by pagans and we would not be exiles in a foreign land.
You can hear Second Isaiah audibly sigh. He patiently but firmly lays out his argument about God’s wrath being a necessary response to the persistence of sin and God’s judgment being ultimately overruled by God’s mercy. He has said it before but it always seems to be lost on the people still straining to maintain their pride.
It is at that point that the prophet refocuses the people’s thinking:
“My plans aren’t your plans, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”
The human foible is that we are always trying to tell God what to do. To bring back the baseball image, it’s as if we believe that we are the field manager and God is the ace reliever in the bullpen, waiting to be called up to close a nasty inning. In reality, we are the opponents and God is the home team. God always bats last. And God always wins.
Second Isaiah wants to leave that message with the Israelites as he closes out his prophetic work.
“[M]y word that comes from my mouth; it does not return to me empty. Instead, it does what I want, and accomplishes what I intend.”
The prophet’s image teems with quiet confidence in the triumph of God’s righteousness and the trustworthiness of God’s promises. He echoes the statement that he made as wrestled with God’s call to him in chapter 40: “The grass dries up; the flower withers, but our God’s word will exist forever.”
This Isaiah earnestly believes that only God’s word was the sure and certain basis for the reconstruction of their spiritual, personal, and corporate lives. “It does what I want, and accomplishes what I intend.”
The prophet concludes his final thought by announcing that there will be a festive procession of the freed exiles when they return to their home in joy and in peace. What a conclusion! What an affirmation of faith! Salvation is God’s ultimate accomplishment. The only things which human beings need to bring to the celebration are open hearts effervescing with joy and voices bubbling in song. Creation is seen as being whole again, for in the festive celebration, humanity is joined by nature. Everything in creation will be brought to wholeness by the Redeemer. The transformation into glory of all that the Lord has created provides the proper ballpark for the abiding presence of the God of glory. God always bats last, and God always wins.
Where is the despair in your life that needs Isaiah’s confident word? What is the exile that you are suffering through? Where are you contending against God by trying to run your own life? These are the places where you can receive the prophet’s word of assurance: God’s word doesn’t return empty. God’s word accomplishes what it sets out to do. God always bats last. God always wins.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
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A number of years ago the eclectic trivia website, Mental Floss, compiled a list of “25 most important questions in the history of the universe.” You know the kinds of questions that appeared on the list, the ones that you couldn’t answer when your children asked them.
• Why is the sky blue?
• Why do snooze buttons only give you nine more minutes of sleep?
• Why can’t you tickle yourself?
• Those big clocks in the parlor — why do we call them “grandfather clocks?” (That one makes you want to ask, ‘Are there grandchildren clocks?’)
These questions and more — like “Why does Hawaii have Interstate highways?” — are adult versions of the riddles we used to ask as kids. You remember the ones you laughed at as a kid and groaned at as an adult:
• What did the sock say to the foot? You’re putting me on.
• What did the tie say to the hat? You go on ahead, I’ll hang around.
• What do whales like to chew? Blubber gum.
The television game show, “To Tell the Truth” has come back. The premise is that three people pose as a person with a particular skill, story, or experience. The panel asks questions in an attempt to guess which if the three is really who they claim to be.
We all know people who are full of questions. Whether we voice them or not, we often have questions or at least wonderings about something that happens. They don’t have to be grade school questions. Sometimes adults ask really deep, gnawing questions which don’t have easy answers, questions that are conundrums and paradoxes.
That’s where Paul is. He seems to be having a stream of consciousness conversation as he talks out his faith in the letter addressed to the Roman believers. “I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead, I do the thing that I hate.” It really bothers him. He says it again. “The desire to do good is inside of me, but I can’t do it. I don’t do the good that I want to do, but I do the evil that I don’t want to do.”
Most of us are neither as verbose or as articulate as Paul is. Nevertheless, we have asked ourselves that same question, maybe even posed it to a trusted confidant or pastor.
So how do we get to the answer? We have to start with that theological four-letter word, “sin.” We avoid saying it like other naughty words.
For all of Paul’s Pharisee training to tick off the boxes of dos and don’ts, Paul knows that sin is something much larger. It’s a power, a principle, a propensity, a proclivity, a penchant that pervades his inner self and dwells deep within him. It’s as if he is programmed to be that way. Fifth century St. Augustine called it “original sin” and 16th century Reformer John Calvin and others called it “total depravity.” Theological terms aside, sin is a problem that corrupts every relationship with God and neighbor, whether it’s in Paul or you or me.
We can certainly relate to Paul’s inner struggle. I know we don’t want to think about it, but let’s look at the things that we sometimes do unthinkingly that are sin as well as the things we do know better about. Sin is what causes us to gossip with our friends when we know we shouldn’t. Sin is wasting time on the job when we don’t want to work. Sin is jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence. Sin is deliberately ignoring facts. Sin is abusing drugs and alcohol or eating foods we know are harmful to us. Sin is snapping at friends and loved ones. Sin is coveting wealth and material possessions. Sin is turning a blind eye to the needs of others or the wrongs done by others. The vast majority of the time we know full well what course of action we should take — but don’t.
Paul shares three lessons that he learned in trying to deal with his old sinful desires. (1) Knowledge is not the answer; Paul felt fine as long as he did not understand what the law demanded. When he learned the truth, he knew he was doomed. (2) Self-determination, that is, struggling in one’s own strength, doesn’t succeed; Paul found himself sinning in ways that weren’t even attractive to him. (3) Becoming a Christian does not stamp out all sin and temptation from a person’s life.
Sin. It’s all over. That doesn’t mean that everything we do is completely sinful, but that every dimension of our life — personal, community, national, global — is tainted by Sin.
Psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck put it this way in an interview with Christianity Today (February 2005):
“I think we’ve got things wrong. The predominant view in our culture is that this is a naturally good world that has somehow been contaminated by evil. It’s much more likely, I think, that this is a naturally evil world that has mysteriously been contaminated by goodness. And that the good bugs are growing and that indeed Satan is being defeated.”
We aren’t in a position to judge whether Satan is being defeated, but we are to take it on faith.
We are left with the question which probably didn’t make the Mental Floss list: “What — or who — will get us out of this mess?” Paul put it this way: “Who will deliver me from this dead corpse?” Then he supplies the answer: “Thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” The only antidote to total depravity is total grace, a grace that comes to us through our faith in Jesus Christ.
Being born again, born from above, born of the Spirit, starts in a moment of faith, but becoming like Christ takes a lifetime. In other of his letters Paul compared Christian growth to a strenuous race or fight. Paul emphasized since the beginning of his letter to the Roman believers that no one in the world is innocent. Further, no one deserves to be saved—neither the pagan who doesn’t know God’s laws nor the Christian or Jew who knows them and tries to keep them. All of us must depend totally on the work of Christ for our salvation. We cannot earn it by our good behavior.
In spite of Paul’s great knowledge of the Jewish faith traditions, and in spite of the often strained construction of his thoughts, Paul is very human. He is baring his soul before his Roman readers. He speaks from personal experience. We know a good bit about Paul, but there is a great deal more that we don’t know about him. Whatever that may be, we can only guess at.
What we do know from Paul is this: Those who are really under grace take sin seriously. Sin is no longer their master, but it is still a powerful adversary. If you and I don’t take sin seriously, we fall into it. And if we don’t take victory seriously, we fail to utilize the Holy Spirit’s help. The depth of Paul’s honesty highlights the magnificent message with which he follows up today’s reading at the beginning of his intensely powerful chapter 8: “So now there isn’t any condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Jesus Christ rescues us, saves us. It was costly for him, because he died in the “rescue” process. That’s what our salvation is about, that’s what makes it grace. Salvation, rescue, is not in the future. It has already taken place through the work of Jesus Christ as he lived, died, and was raised.
Our business, our vocation, our calling is to live in the truth of our new life. There’s no point waiting to be rescued, thinking that someone will come and save us with only seconds to go before our lives blow up. We are not the fair damsel tied to a railroad track by the dastardly villain of some silent movie melodrama. We have already been saved. There’s no point clinging to old resentments of being slighted, overlooked, cheated. There’s no point refusing to forgive, no point in cheating, lusting, fighting, carping, harping, stealing, lying — any of these things. It’s not who we are!
Who are we? Are we perfect? No way. This is what we are: We are forgiven, not flawless. And Paul knows that there always will be a war going on between the flesh and the spirit.
When I remember who I am, when you remember who you are, then each of us will know what it means to be “saved” and to live the way God wants us to. We are forgiven, not flawless.
Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
General Resources:
Homiletics, July 3, 2005,
Life Application Bible Commentary, “Romans.”
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
