SERMON FOR JUNE 28, 2020    TEXT: ROMANS 6:12-23
     A teacher I know made frequent reference to a book entitled Self- Compassion by Kristin Neff, an educational psychologist at the University of Texas. I began to pay closer attention to the citations, which both intrigued me and called forth some resistance on my part. This is the passage that led me to buy the book and read the whole thing for myself. “In reality, it doesn’t make any more sense to harshly blame ourselves than it does to blame a hurricane. . . . A hurricane is an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon rising out of a particular set of interacting conditions — air pressure, ground temperature, humidity, wind, and so on. The same applies to us: we aren’t self-contained units either. Like weather patterns, we are also an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions. Without food, water, air, and shelter, we’d be dead. Without our genes, family, friends, social history, and culture, we wouldn’t act or feel as we do. . . . When we acknowledge the intricate web of causes and conditions in which we are all imbedded, we can be less judgmental of ourselves and others” (p. 73).
     I found myself agreeing on one hand but sharply objecting on the other. I was ready to respond with my “but what about,” when Professor Neff beat me to it in the next paragraph. She writes: “‘But’ is often the interjection at this point. What’s wrong with judgment? Don’t we need judgment to figure out right from wrong? To take personal responsibility for our mistakes? It’s useful here to draw a distinction between judgment and discriminating wisdom. . . . Judgment defines people as bad versus good and tries to capture their essential nature with simplistic labels. Discriminating wisdom recognizes complexity and ambiguity. It recognizes when things are harmful or unjust but also recognizes the causes and conditions that lead to situations of harm or injustice in the first place. When wrongdoers are treated with compassion rather than harsh condemnation, cycles of conflict and suffering can be broken” (pp. 73-74). She concludes by pointing to Jesus who, as he hung dying on the cross, prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Professor Neff insists that the message is clear: we need to have understanding and compassion for even the worst wrongdoers, ourselves included.
     Part of me responded with skepticism. I hadn’t spent all these years mastering the doctrines of sin, confession and repentance to let myself off the hook this easily. After all, shifting responsibility onto my genes, my social location and the family dynamics in which I grew up feels like the weasel’s way out. And yet the description is accurate. No person comes into the world complete. Each one of us is born with a distinct temperament, and then we unfold as we interact with the countless people, places, experiences and possibilities we encounter over the years of our lives. 
     Indeed the doctrine of original sin is rooted in just such a fluid understanding of process. We reap the harvest of our individual sins from fields planted by others. We inherit the common human disabilities — what Luther described as the condition of being incurvatus in se, turned in on oneself — and ring our individual changes on them. When I was a little girl in the 1950’s in Annapolis, there was a gas station at the foot of Main Street by the city dock. It had two water fountains, one designated for “whites” and one for “coloreds.”  The history behind that invidious practice hobbled the growth of every child in the town. Once you’ve dragged the heavy links of the chain forged by previous generations, you hardly notice your own contribution to its inhuman weight. When you find yourself in the company of cynical people, who mock moral restraints, it is easy to be seduced, infected and deformed in their likeness. There are many variations of being incurvatus in se, the idolatry of self love. Original sin is not original; we simply inhabit what we inherit.
     The second lesson from last Sunday was the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans that preceded the one we just heard. In the first eleven verses of chapter 6 the Apostle proclaims the power of baptism, not in terms of what it might do but what it has already done. It is not a palliative for the ravages of sin; it is the cure. “How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 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” (vv. 2-4). 
     Paul recognizes our constant interconnectedness. No one is self-contained; no one is able to survey the world from a position outside of its ongoing flux and flow. We are bound by relationships throughout our lives and free when those relationships are life-giving. If enslavement to sin is our regular default position, bondage to God’s grace is our enduring emancipation. “But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification,” Paul concludes. “The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv. 22-23). 
    Sin does not settle its accounts in one lump sum at the grave. When you sell your soul to the devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan, day by day, year by year. He won’t cheat you; you will be paid what you have earned every step of the way. When it comes to God’s claim upon us, however, Paul does not speak of wages but of gift. The eternal life of Jesus is not the final reward for those who have made better choices. It is the power of grace here and now that breaks through our fear and self-serving, clears our vision, moves us beyond judgment to hope, and lets us change. 
    Kristin Neff concludes, “Discriminating wisdom . . . acknowledges that life has unfolded in such a way as to cause something to happen, but also allows for the possibility that with a new set of circumstances things might well go differently.”  No matter how similar the situation, how familiar the temptation, how reflexive the false move, you never step into the river at exactly the same place twice. So take heart. Jesus is always changing it up. Time and again his love makes for a new set of circumstances, and things can truly go differently.  Amen.