While We Were Yet Sinners[1]
Psalm 9:9-20
Romans 4:23-5:21
First Presbyterian Church Clarksville
Harmony Presbyterian Church
June 24, 2012
Ordinary 12
The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry
I never cared for group projects
in school. It was not so much that I did
not like working with other students because I did- I always got a checkmark
next to works and plays well with others.
And it was not because I am inherently an introvert or shy or anything
else for that matter. I just never cared
for the group projects.
On a level, group
projects make more sense. Many hands
make light work, etc. The same can be
said for many minds. Still I did not
like doing them. As beneficial as they
can be in so many ways, they just offend my own sense of justice.
I cannot recall a
single group project where everyone did an equal portion of the work. Someone always got the benefit of the grade
without putting in the sweat equity to get us there. These may have been my friends and
colleagues, but they were freeloading on my hard work and that offended my
sense of justice.
That sense of
what is just and unjust is, I think, what makes grace such a bittersweet pill
to swallow. On the one hand, we boldly
sing Amazing Grace with feeling and conviction and proclaim that it is indeed
grace, freely given, undeserved, abundant grace that saves a wretch like me. We
lift up our voices in praise and thanksgiving for God’s freely given gift of
grace…to us.
Because, let’s
face it. We deserve a little grace. When
everyone around us split for another church or no church, we are still
here. When the world turned its back on
the Gospel, we stood fast. We show up on
Sunday mornings, we volunteer to usher and greet, we give to the offering
plate, we come to Midweek Manna and volunteer in the Thrift Shop. We seek in
our lives over and over again to deserve and earn the freely given gift of God’s
grace.
So it is no
wonder that it offends our sense of fair play- our sense of cosmic justice-
that God’s free gift of grace is just that- free. It is not earned, it is not deserved, it is
simply freely given by God in Christ Jesus and even the slacker who doesn’t
help with the project drinks from the streaming waters of grace.
Why would God set
it up that way? Why would God create a
world in which the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike and so does the
grace of God?
Well, as you can
probably guess after a month with our friend Paul, he is raising a question
that is not reserved for his time. It is
an inherently human question and one that persists from Paul’s Rome to our Johnson
County. This idea of the freely given
grace of God is yet another reason Paul is convinced that the gospel is so
foolish, so ridiculous if we just stop and think about it.
After his
discourse on Abraham, we heard part of that last week; Paul turns his eye even
further back in history to Adam. Adam,
whose Hebrew name means human, is the common ancestor to all of us. Paul takes the name A’dam quite literally
when interpreting Adam and Adam’s sin as descriptive of all humanity. We are all A’dam and, consequently, we all
bear the sin of Adam. We are all tangled
in its nets and even when we think we have worked ourselves free, we are still
ensnared.
You see for Paul,
just as Adam was the way ticket into the tangled web of sin, Christ is the only
way out. Not faith in Christ. Not belief in Christ. Not even surrender to Christ. But Christ; the life, death and resurrection
of Christ; the freely given grace of Christ is the only way out of the prison
of sin we each find ourselves tangled within.
Still, we do have
a tendency to think of our own emergence from this tangled web of sin as the
product of at least some measure of our own spiritual hard work. I mean, Christ might give it the final umph,
but I loosened the lid!
However, Paul
emphasizes, as he so often does, that our individual needs and deeds, both good
and bad, are not the only things at work here.
God does see and know and love us as individuals distinct and unique in
God’s eyes, but our individuality does not mean that we are wholly disconnected
from our neighbors. It does not mean
that we have to somehow go it alone in the world. Thinking that we do and our constant trying
to do so is nothing more than a wage for our sin.
Still we have
difficulty seeing ourselves as part of this human whole- this body of humanity
bound in sin by Adam and freed from sin by Christ. Rather than heed the words of Dr. King that
we exist in a web of mutuality one with the other, we prefer that great American
philosopher Lilly Tomlin who said, “We are all in this thing together, by
ourselves.”
We are constantly
tugged from the promise of our unity into the divisions created of our own
minds.
Paul recognized
this in the Romans of his day and he tries mightily to persuade them that if we
are joined to Adam in sin, then we are also joined to Christ in his obedience
to God, and we all receive God’s act of grace through Jesus’ merit and
faithfulness. Paul does not suggest that we are somehow to
understand our own sin as inconsequential because it is not. Sin does still bear its wage of death,
whether in body or in spirit. But Christ
also still bears his promise of life, in resurrection and renewal.
The healthy
spiritual life keeps both our sinfulness and God’s saving grace in balance
recognizing that just as sin cannot drag us to a place too distant for God’s
grace to reach us, so God’s grace does not take us so far that the consequences
of our sinfulness are forgotten. Though
sin may no longer reign supreme, it is still very real and its consequences as
well.
For Paul, grace
is more about saving us for rather than saving us from. It is what empowers and compels us forward in
history rather than leaving us to retreat ever further into our own
sinfulness. It is not a get out of hell free card giving
us carte blanche to live, as Calvin said, the life of a libertine. Instead it is something to be held in awe
and wonder.
Martin Luther,
when he went to say his first mass as a priest, was so struck by his own
paralyzing fear of his unworthiness that he wrote of the moment:
“I was utterly stupefied and
terror-stricken. I thought to myself, ‘With
what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all [people] ought to
tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or
raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The
angels surround him. At his nod the earth
trembles. And shall I…say ‘I want this,
I ask for that?’ For I am dust and ashes
and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God.”[2]
What Luther would
come to realize in his life is that Paul’s words are not hollow and it is
indeed true that “God proves his love for us in that even while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us.” He
realized that, yes, left to our own devices we are unworthy to even raise our
eyes or hands to the heavens so stained are we all by sin. But we are not left to our own devices. We are not left alone in the world to forever
divert our eyes from the holy. We have
in Christ our true companion and savior and it is by his grace; his
faithfulness; his love that we are freed to turn our fearful and sinful hearts
to God.
It is that
freedom from the bondage of sin that frees us for the works of mercy so
needed in the world;
that frees us for a life lived in thanksgiving to God;
that frees us for a life not focused on earning our
own salvation but embodying the promise of Christ’s salvation to a broken
world.
And make no
mistake about it, friends, the work of the church is the work of salvation. Not merely salvation from hell, but salvation
from hell on earth. That freedom for that comes so freely from the whelming grace of God in Christ
Jesus is a message the world needs to hear and we are called to proclaim it in
thought, in word and in deed.
And, yes we will
falter and we will fail. Yes, we will
often lapse back into our old sense of justice and have difficulty seeing
beyond our own ideas of deserving to Christ’s idea of generosity. We will find ourselves resenting those who do
not pull their weight on the group project that is the work of God in the
world. Because we grace freely given in
Christ does not mean that we will never again taste sin inherited from
Adam. We will. Over and over and over again, we will know
what it is to sin, yet as often as we find ourselves standing in a posture of
sin, we need only remember that as many times as we sin and fall short of the
glory of God, that many times plus one is the number of times God forgives.
One of the most enduring
stories of a life lived in confidence in this sort of grace is the life of
English clergyman John Newton. Most
famous as the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, Newton was someone who knew the
miracle of grace and set about the rest of his life determined not to forget
it. A former slave trader, Newton knew
that his sins were too great for him ever to merit salvation. Yet, in Christ Jesus he was saved not only
from the wage of his sin but for the work of grace in the world. Through his witness as writer, preacher, hymn
writer and mentor to young Abolitionists, Newton found the grace of Jesus
Christ compelling his life as well as saving his soul.
Near the end of
his life, Newton summed up his own understanding of grace in words that should
be written on each of our hearts and lives.
“My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things; that I am a great
sinner and that Christ is a great savior.”
John Newton, the self-described libertine and
slave trader, would live long enough to watch the wages of sin be washed away
by the tide of grace as parliament voted to ban the slave trade.
So may it be for
each of us. May we who live in the
knowledge of the love and grace of God, live lives that bear witness to the
promise of Christ and, should it please God, may we have a glimpse in our own
time of the work of salvation over and against the wage of sin in our world.
In the name of God
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
[1] I
am indebted to Dr. Brian Wyatt for insights provided by his sermon on this text
presented to our study group in March 2012.
He also drew in the reference to Luther and the vivid memory of group
projects in seminary!
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