Wages or Gift?
Trinity 1 Proper 8
Romans 6: 12-23
If I am guessing correctly, the lesson from St Paul’s letter to the Romans this morning left you rather cold, perhaps puzzled. Paul is talking about enslavement to sin, bodies as instruments of wickedness or righteousness, the wages of sin and the free gift of life. At least we think we get that last one: the gift of life in Christ—that is what God will give us through faith in Jesus. But what does the rest of the discussion have to do with it? If life in Christ is a gift, why do we have to worry about being a slave to obedience which leads to righteousness? Aren’t we justified through faith? What, if any, is the relationship between presenting our members to God as instruments of righteousness and getting the free gift of God which is eternal life in Christ Jesus? Now I realize that this may be a little too much to tackle on summer’s Sunday morning, but our lectionary places this passage before us, so we should probably give some attention to it. Actually, it turns out that Paul is talking about something exceedingly important.
In order to understand his point, however, we must look at something he said earlier in his letter. Paul locates the origin of everything that is wrong in our world in a single word: not sin, but idolatry. That doesn’t sound particularly relevant to us, since most of us don’t have incense burning before statues of our household gods and I cannot think of anyone I know having gone to the local shrine to sacrifice a chicken lately. Of course, but that kind of idolatry is very crude. Paul’s meaning is deeper. He claims that human beings have been created with a need to serve something or someone. That is simply the way we are: we shall have some kind of master. Another way of saying this is that we live our lives according to a dominant interest. Something in our lives directs and organizes what we do—even if we don’t choose anything intentionally, we shall serve something by default. If we just drift along without thinking, then we shall serve the dominant interests of our culture, or our bodily desires and impulses, as Paul put it in our lesson this morning. Now we were meant for something quite particular by our Creator: to serve him as our God and, in doing so, to have life in abundance, in accordance with the purpose of our creation.
But, as we all know, humankind long ago went astray and looked for other gods to serve. As a recent commentator on Romans puts it [Paul Achtemeier, Romans, p. 66]: Idolatry “means not trusting God to be the kind of God we can live with.” So we have chosen other gods more suitable to our perceived needs, in order to make ourselves acceptable to them. Living for the wrong gods always leads to sin—that is, a mess: all of the ways in which we constantly frustrate the purpose of our existence and set ourselves against the true God and each other. Our modern world is no less filled with idols than the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s experience—but ours are somewhat different. Ours are more ideological. That is, we serve ideas rather more than personifications of natural powers—although Paul called greed an idol and there are many who still worship that one. Usually we don’t bow down before the sun-god; but we do bow down before the power of the market. We don’t sacrifice our children to Moloch, but we sacrifice poor people all the time to financial laws as set forth by the high priests of the World Bank, or we sacrifice the unborn to the demands of personal freedom enshrined as our right to choose. We have worshipped at the altar of personal freedom to such an extent that it is killing us spiritually, as the author of a contemporary novel has illustrated in his book by that title. You can always tell when an idol is being served because of all the collateral damage.
In his first chapter of the letter to the Romans, Paul says that God’s wrath is aroused by such idolatry and its sinful effects. Now that is a harsh word, divine wrath, and we must be careful to understand it correctly. God’s wrath is not a kind of irritable annoyance elevated to an infinite degree. It is rather his opposition to our evil. The way it manifests itself in our world, says St Paul, oddly enough, is by God letting have our own way. He will restrain and guide us if we choose Him for our God. But if we stubbornly follow our own idols, He will give us our freedom—and we will have to live with the effects of our sin. Some of those effects are perennial miseries: poverty and war, for example. Others are more recent: global warming and environmental pollution, for example. You can tell we are serving idols when it becomes impossible even to discuss the effects of our sin: the gods we serve forbid it. We just shout at each other and the gods are pleased.
In other words, when we have given our hearts to idols of our own manufacture, the result is that they control us: “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?” says St Paul. Our problem is, then, that we are captive to our own idols. And this is where Jesus comes in. He breaks the power of the old idols over us and allows us to enter into a living relationship with our true God. As the author I cited above put it: “By relying solely on Christ, we are delivered from our attempts to make ourselves acceptable to God by creating gods we can make ourselves acceptable to.” [p.69] If we are willing to trust in Jesus, God will accept us back into a true relationship with Him, for Jesus is God’s way of setting the world right again.
And this explains that rather difficult, perhaps misleading, final verse of our lesson: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We can understand the “wages” part: that is, the effect of our service of false gods is the death that comes from being alienated from our Creator, in Whom alone is life. The god you serve will eventually form you in its own image. A lifeless god can only produce death. But the “gift” of eternal life doesn’t seem to correlate with what Paul has already said: “now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification.” How is it that a new slavery is the same as a gift? If God has given eternal life to us as a gift, why is it that we need to worry about yielding ourselves to Him as servants in order to attain to righteousness? The answer is found in what it means to trust in God, to have faith in Him. If God, the Father of our Lord Jesus, is really God—the Creator and Redeemer of all—then to have trust in this God, to relate to Him as our God, requires us to be His servants. That is how we attain righteousness, which means our loyalty to the covenant God makes with us in Christ. We were made for obedience to this God and only find our true life as we find our true relationship with God. But we don’t achieve our acceptance with God. He graciously accepts us because the work of Christ has broken all idolatries. He restores us to a relationship with Him if we are willing to enter it—that is, if we are willing to trust Him as our God. But, entering into this relationship, we express our loyalty to Him only in being His servants—doing His will—and in no other way.
Sometimes people think of God as if He were a certain kind parent. There are parents whose children can never seem to please them. The parents set up rules and demand obedience and expect their children to perform in order to find the acceptance that their hearts long for. The trouble is that their children can never really please them. Nothing short of perfection is acceptable. And since perfection is pretty much impossible, the child, no matter how hard he tries to win the parent’s approval, always falls short. There are people who think of God that way: the demanding and never satisfied parent. Perhaps it is not surprising that they finally construct some other god they can be more comfortable with. But the Father of our Lord Jesus is not like that. He has graciously restored the possibility of acceptance for everyone who trusts Him, particularly as He has manifested Himself in Jesus. This is what Paul means by grace and the gift of eternal life. But accepting grace—entering into the relationship—means that one now wants to please the Father of all and so gives himself or herself to a whole-hearted obedience—that is, to be a real follower or disciple of Jesus. To refuse the obedience is to refuse the grace. It seems unlikely, perhaps, but this is the service which is also perfect freedom. Serving oneself is not perfect freedom, since we are incapable of being our own gods.
It was by reading St Paul this week that I think I have finally also understood something which has always puzzled me: a saying of Jesus’ which we shall actually encounter in our Gospel lesson next week. In Matthew 11:28-30 Jesus says this: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” I have often wondered how Jesus could have said that. The Cross is an easy yoke and a light burden? And that is what he asked of all his followers: take up your cross and follow me. But Paul has explained it. There is no heavier burden than serving a false god. Behind every idol there is the frustration of all our deepest hopes and desires—idolatry is a service which is also despair. No matter how hard it may seem in the present, to serve the living God, by faith in Jesus and according to his word and example, is always a place of rest for the soul. In Christ we serve the God who made us and offers us a service that is also our liberty, because it is the way to the fulfillment of all the true desires of the heart.