SERMON FOR JULY 5, 2020          TEXT: ROMANS 7:15-25a

          Years ago I participated in a series of theological dialogues with representatives from various Eastern Orthodox churches. I was one of the American delegates on a team of mostly European Lutherans. As heirs of the Reformation, estranged relatives of the Roman Catholic Church, we represented what is called Western or Latin Christianity. Our Orthodox counterparts represented the Eastern tradition. They came from Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Finland, and Serbia among other countries. The separation of these two branches of Christianity goes back centuries. The Roman Empire was vast and already disintegrating by the year 400. The western and eastern parts were increasingly cut off from one another. Rome and Constantinople went their separate ways more by historical necessity than deliberate design. West and East, Christians recognized one Lord, one faith and one baptism, but their traditions were formed by different experiences and theological interpretations.

          In the second half of the 20th century there was renewed enthusiasm for ecumenical dialogue, which is why Lutheran and Orthodox delegations were meeting and talking. One evening after dinner I was walking in the garden of the retreat center that hosted our gathering. An Orthodox representatives came up alongside me and said, “We are much luckier than you.” I had no idea what he was talking about; we all got the same dessert. So I settled for a neutral, “How so?” “Because,” he replied with great satisfaction, “we don’t have St. Augustine.”

          It has been said that all theology in the West, that is, the theology that has shaped our tradition, can be written as a series of footnotes to St. Augustine. He is that influential. But he was a bishop in North Africa in the 5th century A.D. He didn’t play a role in the development of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. My Orthodox companion was baffled in particular by Augustine’s understanding of sin and its effect on our ability to make choices. In the words of one Orthodox theologian, “God created man in His Image, which means that man has a free will.” Granted, that free will is curtailed by sin and ignorance, but it is still able to play its necessary role in securing our salvation. ’What God freely gives, we are free to accept or reject.”

          Augustine, on the other hand, insisted that original sin undermined the free will altogether. We who were made to ascend to God, joined to our Creator by obedience, reverence and love, had reversed direction. We had given ourselves over to desire for the things of this world. And once we had turned away, it was no longer in our power to turn back again, even if we wanted to do so. According to Augustine, we are no longer free to accept what God freely gives. Grace doesn’t just break through the sludge of accumulated disobedience and blindness to get an out-of-order will moving again. Then it could do the one thing needful: it could say “yes” to God; it could cooperate in its own salvation. For Augustine and his heirs the problem is not a weak will needing repair. It is strong will, alienated from God and fiercely self-absorbed. The first act of God’s grace is to break the will, not mend it. And ever after, its waywardness remains an enduring obstacle.

          “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love,” the hymn plainly acknowledges. This is why Martin Luther, heir to St. Augustine, describes the Christian as simul justus et peccator, simultaneously saint and sinner. In the order for confession and forgiveness in our hymnal the first admission we make is “that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.” Its predecessor, the LBW, put it even more starkly by using the word “bondage.” We are in bondage to sin. God forgives all our sins and cleanses us from all unrighteousness. By doing so God continuously claims us as His own. And we continue to have a devil of a time holding on to what God freely gives.    You either serve God or you don’t. It’s a constant struggle to keep your loyalties straight.

          That is one way of understanding today’s passage from Romans. “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!”

          There is considerable discussion of the identity of the “I” speaking here. Although it surely is an experience Paul understood personally, this is not intended as a moment of self-revelation. This is not autobiography; it is proclamation. The “I” speaks for any and every human being in their relationship to Christ. Moreover, there is good reason to think that Paul is describing a “before and after”, rather than a simultaneous “both and”. “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Jesus Christ our Lord will; indeed, he has.

          The role of the law is crucial in Paul’s description here. There is no question but that God’s law is good. Yet it is deadly. For those “sold into slavery under sin,” as Paul names us, the law offers no way out. In the passage preceding this one Paul describes the trap we fall into with this example: “I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (7:7-8). Sin turns the commandment to its own purposes and undermines our efforts to free ourselves through faithful obedience.

          That was then. This is now: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death,” Paul writes in chapter 8, verse 1. Last week we heard this passage from chapter 6: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed?” Note the past tense, “when you were,” “what advantage did you get.” Paul continues: “ But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life“ (6:20-22). The present condition, the “is” of sanctification and eternal life, has left the past behind. When you read chapter 7 in context, flowing out of chapter 6 and into chapter 8, you get a clearer perspective on the dilemma Paul is describing, that experience of not doing what I want but rather the very thing I hate. To quote one New Testament scholar, “. . . Romans 7 is not a final destination, defining our ongoing condition to which we’re consigned for the duration of our human lives, but the human condition and struggle from which those in Christ have been set free.”

          I had struggled to swim in deep theological waters like these for some time before I read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. A careful and honest thinker, James commented, “The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.” In other words, a theological account of the life of faith only becomes meaningful when it makes sense of what you have experienced. Something has to click with your own story. Have you felt the bondage that St. Augustine clearly did — that our freedom of will amounts to readily making the same bad choices over and over again? Have you found yourself trapped in the narrow world of “me, myself, and I,” pursuing things that feed your ego but constrict your heart? Have you tried to turn away and found it so much harder than it looks? Have you felt the firm presence, like a hand raising your chin and turning your face away from those things that lead to death, up towards the light of God? Have you felt the power of Christ’s life transforming your own? Beyond the weary conflict, free from sin, full of grace. “There is a state of mind,” writes William James, “known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.”

Amen.