“Take Your Pick”
Romans 6:12-23
“Thy will be done” and “Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” We sing or say these words every Sunday morning together.
But are these words what we really mean? Are they how we’ve chosen to live?
Part of our problem is that we live in a world which every other day of the week presses us to pray, “My will be done.” A magazine ad from Toyota (and I own a Toyota, by the way) explains why you should buy their car: “Little kids are selfish. Impulsive. They don’t make rational decisions. When they see something they want, they want it now. Little kids have a lot of fun. Hmmm. Introducing Solara… It’s for you.”
Archbishop of Denver, J. Francis Stafford laments, “Idolatry of the self, the worship of my needs, my appetites, my choices, to the exclusion of moral restraints – is now the motive force behind much of the market economy and emerging politics… In the United States today, more and more people actually believe that whatever they want, they deserve and should have.”
Gil Bowen, a retired pastor on the North Shore of Chicago, notes, “these kinds of appeals are out there because they work. They sell, because they appeal to a side of all of us that is real and that is the very human if immature desire to have our own way in life. Which is the worst thing that can happen to us. A child or adolescent who always gets his way stays a child or adolescent at whatever age. And if there is any problem with the current scene, it is the degree to which many have managed to do just that, have things pretty much our own way, to the detriment of the growth of the soul, ability to embrace the more difficult sides of reality, the disappointments and detours, capacity for patience and genuine empathy toward other real human beings.”
The following words have been circulating on the internet for years now, but they bear repeating for this morning’s purposes: “The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less. We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time; we have more degrees, but less sense, more knowledge but less judgment; more experts, but more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.
“We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. These are times of tall men and short character; steep profits and shallow relationships.”
What is the deal? What is our problem? As much as these ads and quotes are real, they make it sound as if these are new issues, but they are in fact very old issues just packaged in contemporary ways.
From day one in the Bible – well, actually it was more like day 8 or 9 if you want to get all literal about it – the issue was there. Despite knowing that Someone Else brought us and the universe into being, we keep vying to be Masters of it all. Whatever nod we may give to a Higher Power, a Sovereign Lord, a Creator God, we carry on like we really do have the capacity to be the master or our universe.
We act as though we are too sophisticated to deal with such primal concepts as sin and salvation, with issues of obedience and righteousness, iniquity and death. We instead are big on thinking we are self-determining, free, autonomous selves. The Apostle Paul’s language about being slaves to sin or being set free to righteousness sounds okay for a Southern Baptist tent revival, but it does not strike us as particularly relevant in our more relaxed and enlightened religious settings.
Well, I have no interest in being a Southern Baptist Preacher (and they certainly have no interest in hearing from a Presbyterian woman!), but I do have an interest in taking sin seriously. Its evidence is all around me and within me. To ignore that I am no master of my universe but am often mastered by many things, is to ignore not only the message of Scripture but the messes of history. It is to misunderstand human nature and human well-being. I think Scottish theologian P.T. Forsyth was correct in saying, “The first duty of the soul is not to find its freedom, but rather to find its master.” Or as Bob Dylan sung it, “Everybody serves somebody.”
You see, here’s the thing the Apostle Paul wants us to understand in this passage. Human beings are creatures, not gods. We are made to have a God, to be appropriately dependent on the One who made us and loves us and desires heaven and life for us. In Jesus he came to reveal both what true humanity looks like and what God’s love looks like. We don’t have to choose to be mastered by the love of this God. We don’t have to choose this life. But if we don’t, Paul preaches urgently, we are choosing to be mastered by something else; we are choosing a life apart from God. We are choosing a condition called sin, a condition that actively chooses to trust something or someone other than God to secure our life.
Make no mistake, says Paul, God did not create you to leave you to yourself and whatever other master you might choose. Since you did not create your own self, you cannot be your own Lord. Either God is your Lord or you are enslaved to some form of death, says Paul. In other words, your allegiance is to something that is separating you from God’s will for your life. In Paul’s stark language, you are a slave to God or a slave to sin; the former brings life as it should be, the latter brings death even as we live. The stifling of our higher instincts, the blinding of our truer insights, the atrophy of our finer qualities and relationships – these so separate us from the sources of true life that our existence is a foretaste of a final death wherein we have entirely cut ourselves off from God, having chosen a different master of our universe.
There are few passages in the New Testament where the problem of human freedom is so explicitly discussed. “Do you not know,” asks Paul, “that if you yield yourselves to any one as an obedient slave, you are the slave of the one whom you obey?” (vs. 16). So, he says, we can be the slaves of sin (free will gives us that right) or the servants of God’s righteousness. We can opt to live like we’re god or we can opt to serve God. According to Paul, there is no third, neutral choice.
Does this sound scary to you? Threatening?
Old School? Does this sound
like Paul is trying to instill the fear of God in you lest you lose your life?
In a way it sounds like last week’s text where Jesus said, “Those who find
their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find
it.” (Matt. 10:39)
Well, in a way that is exactly what Paul intends, and his words cause us to recoil. We are quite sure we got away from all that fear business years ago. We’re certain “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” went out with Jonathon Edwards and the Puritans.
But what if there is a legitimate dimension of fear in the serious moral life, in the outcome of a moral universe? Asking what it is we fear as we go about our days can be revealing of where we are in this business of shaping a life. Most of our contemporaries seem to fear everything or everyone other than God. There is fear of almost everything other than what happens when we choose to ignore God.
So what if Paul is wisely awakening us to the fear of making a mess of life? The will of God for us, the commandments to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves, far from being a damper on a real healthy life are the very substance of which a healthy and good life together are made possible. Shouldn’t we fear taking life into our own hands? Shouldn’t we fear the consequences of trying to live life outside its original intention for us? We do both ourselves and our children a deep disservice if we do not take this truth about life with utter seriousness, if we do not fear messing up our lives by violating our integrity, if we do not seek to form the hearts and minds of our children and ourselves in the direction of this truth.
Make no mistake about it – We are called to live with our hearts and minds turned toward God because our very lives depend upon it; not because God seeks to punish us -- God does not-- but because the logical consequence of choosing to lead our own lives is that we also get to live with the results. Take your pick, says Paul, and choose with intention. God wants to give us life. But we have to want it from God.
Keith Miller, Texas businessman, tells of a breakthrough that happened in
his life. “I used to walk down the
streets and suddenly would break out in a cold sweat. I thought I might be
losing my mind. I had so many things
I wanted to do and so many demands on my time that I thought I would go crazy.
One day it was so bad that I got I in my company car and took off … As
I was driving through the tall pine wood country of
“As I sat there I began to cry like a little boy, which I suddenly realized I was inside. I looked up toward the sky. For the first time there was nothing I wanted to do with my life. And I said, “God, if there’s anything you want in this soul, take it.” This was almost ten years ago. But something came into my life that day which has never left. There weren’t any … flashing lights or visions, but it was a deep intuitive realization of what it is God wants from a man which I had never known before. And the peace which came with this understanding was not an experience in itself, but rather a cessation of the conflicts of a lifetime. I realized then that God does not want a man’s money, nor does He primarily want his time. He wants your will, and if you give Him your will, He’ll begin to show you life as you’ve never seen it before, help you sort out your values, sluff off the unimportant, commit to what counts. As I sat there, now the tears were a release from a lifetime of being bound by myself, my stubbornness, my determination to have it all and do it all my own way… Although I could not understand nor articulate for many months what had happened to me, I knew to the core of my soul that I had somehow made personal contact with the very Meaning of my Life. I started the car and turned toward home.”
Today and every day, may we all make the choice… to turn toward home… to the One who masters us with tender grace and compassion and leads us away from death into Real life, both now and forever. Amen.
Melanie Hammond Clark
Covenant Presbyterian Church
Racine, WI
June 29, 2008