May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
A number of years ago, I had a conversation about the nature of sin with
a notable member of the church as you do when you're a clergy person.
The fundamental question of our conversation went something like,
is sin something we are born into or is sin a choice?
The church leader contended fiercely that sin was simply a choice,
and I didn't know enough to argue back.
But for those schooled in theology,
this conversation might be a distant echo to those famous Augustinian-Pelagian debates.
I'm sure you all wish you were a fly on the wall.
Anyway, his answer didn't sit quite right with me,
and I didn't know how to talk about it yet.
But if sin is merely a choice,
then why is everyone doing it?
Can't we just choose not to?
Most people want to do the right thing,
so why are we sinning?
If so, then why can't we just will it to be true?
Why can't we just do what is right?
Is it not that simple?
Today's lesson from Romans sees Paul struggle with similar questions.
Paul wonders why his intention to do the right thing doesn't always lead to the right thing.
There's no avoiding it.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with best intentions,
with the good intentions.
So the question, is sin something we were born into or is it a choice,
actually provides a false dichotomy.
It's a bad question.
The question doesn't demand an either or answer,
rather the question demands a both and answer.
Yes, sin is something we are born into.
Yes, sin is a choice.
One biblical commentator puts it like this, and this is paraphrasing.
Sin not only flourishes in our failings,
but even in our best actions.
Sin happens whether we will it to or not.
In other words, like Paul,
we have no idea what we're doing.
No wonder Jesus from the place of the cross says to his father,
forgive them, they have no idea what they're doing.
So what does this mean? So what?
In a nutshell, it means we need a savior.
Not only do we need a savior to show us how to live and how to love,
but we also need a savior who can free us from the power that sin has over our lives.
We need a savior who can release us from the root of sin,
which is the fear of failure, from the preoccupation with self.
Free us so that we might be free to love and serve each other.
As the Garden of Eden suggests,
the knowledge of good and evil isn't enough for us to overcome sin,
because A, the world isn't painted in black and white.
B, sin isn't really about breaking the rules,
but about the breaking of relationships,
which all hinge on different rules.
C, our willpower isn't enough.
We are born into sin after all.
We need help. We can't untangle the web that we and the world have spun.
We need something outside of ourselves to save ourselves.
Now, go back to your physics class, I think.
The second law of thermodynamics knows this.
We as an energy source cannot maintain energy on our own.
Entropy kicks in. We unravel. We become disordered.
We need an outside energy source to breathe into our lives,
to help us reorder and reorient.
Gregory of Nyssa invites us to imagine running up a sandy slope,
and then compare that to trying to save ourselves.
Imagine trying to run up a sandy slope.
You're not going to go anywhere.
The sand is going to come back down to your feet.
You're going to put forth great effort.
You're going to exhaust yourself,
and eventually you're going to bury yourself in the sand.
But ironically, this is exactly where the light of the gospel shines the brightest.
Buried when we are buried in the sand,
in those places where we throw up our hands and surrender and wave the white flag.
Now, this is a hard pill to swallow as we are a proud people.
We Americans have been taught not to rely on others, not to ask for help.
While this is noble in some respects,
this attitude has the power to deprive us from the easy yoke Jesus wants us to live by.
In these verses we read from Matthew,
just before them, Jesus has basically told his followers that if they want to join his program,
then they're going to have to rely on the generosity and the hospitality of others,
of strangers even.
As long as we hold on to the illusion that we can do it on our own,
then we will continue to bury ourselves under the burden of getting it right all by ourselves,
an impossible task.
In today's gospel lesson, when Jesus invites us to rest,
he is inviting us to rest from that burden,
that burden of getting it right all the time.
And that rest he talks about doesn't look like kicking our feet back under the cool breeze
with an ice cold lemonade.
Rather, this rest is found in his work, in the work that he got right for us,
a work that frees us from the fear of failure.
Because this work is already accomplished in Jesus.
His yoke is easy and his burden is light.
We don't have to prove ourselves to anyone anymore.
We are free to live for a God who has already proven himself to us.
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Christ frees us from the fear of failure by giving us work
that is completely concerned for the well-being of the other.
It's not dependent on us.
Now, it's well documented that English was not my strongest subject in high school.
If my 10th grade English teacher happened to attend a service where I was preaching,
she'd probably assume there was another Jack Alvey in Birmingham that looks exactly like me.
She'd probably think surely the Jack Alvey I knew wouldn't subject himself
to writing papers for a career.
I doubt she'd remember me at all.
But look at me now.
I write all the time.
At the very least, I write 13-word essays almost every week.
And most of the time, it's not a burden.
So what's the difference?
In school, I wrote about things I really didn't care about for someone
who in my mind was judging me.
In my professional career, I write about things I do care about for people I care about
who I don't think are necessarily judging me, not all the time.
In other words, the why behind my writing shifted.
My motivation changed.
Essentially, the writing I did as a student was to prove myself, my worth to someone else.
I wrote so that I could get a good grade, so I could pass the class,
so I could go to the next grade, so I could go to college, so I could get a job,
so I could put food on the table, et cetera, et cetera.
That's exhausting.
Trying to prove yourself to others in any context is exhausting and burdensome.
As a professional, don't get me wrong, I still feel the need to prove myself to others.
I'm not a perfect human being.
As Paul said, sin abounds.
But I'm not, I am freed from some of that burden in that my writing isn't just for me.
I'm not trying to prove myself.
Most days, I don't feel like I'm writing to keep my job,
to put food on the table, to pay the mortgage.
Most days, I feel like I'm writing and preaching because I believe in what I'm doing.
I believe that the gospel changes lives.
I believe that I know the gospel changed my life.
I believe it will change yours and I hope it has.
In other words, I'm not writing for myself.
I'm writing because I believe in the power of a gospel that says we don't have to prove ourselves
to a God who has already proven himself to us in Christ Jesus.
I'm writing because I believe in a gospel that frees us from a world that is burying us
with the impossible demand of getting it right so that we might rise to a life
where nothing is impossible with a God who raises even the dead to life.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin
and more about courageously doing God's will.
In other words, cautiously avoiding sin is a self-centered way of going about life.
It's still about you. You're still thinking about the self.
Courageously doing God's will, however, is about forgiving yourself.
It's about losing yourself in the service of others, regardless of how it makes you look.
By avoiding sin, we are still letting others, or sin, control our lives.
So the only way to truly be free is to realize that sin has no power over us.
It no longer gets to decide how we live our lives.
As far as I know, the only way to truly live free from this insidious power
is to live and find our rest in Jesus, to do the work that Jesus has given us to do,
not as a way to prove ourselves, but as a way to show gratitude for a God who loves us,
for a God who already gives us our worth and our value and our dignity.
I read this week that there is no salvation, I read this week there is no salvation in not sinning.
Great churches point people to Jesus.
So beloved in Christ, Jesus is calling us to himself so that we might know true rest
and true freedom by losing ourselves in a life of service to others.
The yoke of constantly having to prove ourselves to another,
of trying to get it right all the time has been replaced with Jesus' easy yoke,
a yoke that is lightened by the promise of everlasting life in this life and the life to come.
Amen.