There is a movie
called Changing Lanes about two men who have a minor traffic accident. Gavin is
a lawyer on his way to an important court hearing that means hundreds of
millions of dollars to his firm. Doyle is a recovering alcoholic who is also on
his way to court, a custody hearing that, while it doesn’t mean much to anyone
else, means the world to him. The accident and other mishaps along the way, the
high stakes that are involved for them both, all lead to a day that brings out
the absolute worst in each man. Both of these men started out their day with
high spirits and good intentions. By the end of the day each had discovered his
own frightful capacity for sinfulness.
Doyle says at one
point during this day, “I am the same man today that I was yesterday.” And yet
today everything is different than it was yesterday, all because he was
provoked, hurt, discounted, and then he made some bad decisions. Something
similar happened to Gavin. His desires were frustrated, and for someone of
power who is accustomed to having things go his way, this was intolerable. He,
too, then made some bad choices.
All along the way,
they want to make excuses for their behavior, saying, “That wasn’t me, I wasn’t
myself. I don’t normally do things like that.” But in reality, it was them,
they were acting themselves, a part of themselves they didn’t usually show. At
the end of this day, both Gavin and Doyle would know the meaning of Paul’s
words from the seventh chapter of Romans: “I do not understand my own
actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
We have just finished six
weeks in the book of Genesis, and some of those difficult stories are still on
our minds. While there is no question that Genesis is challenging, today we
will begin to see that the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome provides
some serious challenges of its own.
I have said before that the
letters of the New Testament give us a glimpse into the churches of the first
century, showing us what kinds of problems they were struggling with. For
example, when we read the letters to the Corinthians, we can see that they had
problems with pride and class divisions in their worship gatherings. In the
letters to the Thessalonians, the earliest letters, we can see the anxiety of this young church. We see that each of these letters were written in a particular context
to address particular concerns.
Yet the letter to the
Romans feels different. And the main difference, I think, is due to the fact
that this is a church Paul has never seen. Unlike the others, he did not found
this church. He has not had the opportunity to visit this church yet, although
he makes it clear that he very much wants to. In a sense, this is a letter of
introduction. Paul is sending his calling card, and letting them know just
where he is coming from, in a theological sense.
This letter to the Romans
is the most theological letter of Paul’s writings that we have. This chapter,
in particular, is where we get much of the grit of our Christian beliefs, but
it isn’t spoon-fed to us, by any stretch of the imagination. The benefits we
receive from Romans are won through faithful attention to the text and its
applications to our lives. Portions of chapter 8 are often used in funerals; I
remember one funeral in particular, when a daughter of the deceased said to me
afterward, “I got lost in Romans. But when you talked about Dad, I found my way
again.” It is when we can see the connection to the particulars of life, when
we can connect the words on the page to our own lives, that they give us
meaning.
So to understand this
passage from the letter, we first need to go back to the previous chapter, to
see where Paul is coming from, to better understand where he is going, and what
it all means to us. Where he is coming from, is a serious contemplation on the
problem of sin. He is telling us it is impossible for us to save ourselves through
our own actions, however upstanding our behavior might be. He speaks very
poignantly and personally about the frustrations of sinful human nature,
saying, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do
not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” For it is sin that dwells
in us, having such force over us that we cannot seem to do right no matter how
much we want to. “I find it to be a law,” he says, “that when I want to do what
is good, evil lies close at hand.” Does anyone not understand what he’s talking
about?
Paul is speaking for
all of us, to all of us, when he describes the agony of our human
weakness. We are not so sophisticated in the 21st century that we do
not know “the weakness of the flesh,” as Paul says. But Paul goes on to say
that we who are in the Spirit are free from sin and death, free from the
bondage of a life of the flesh.
And so, for us who
know Jesus Christ and the Spirit who sustains us, but who also know the power
of sin, we wonder how we ought to hear these words. Are we among those who walk
according to the Spirit, or walk according to the flesh? Are we among the sinners
or among the saved? The answer is we are both. This is a hard answer for us to
accept.
Elsewhere in the New
Testament we read, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the
truth is not in us.” Yet looking at our sinful hearts, unflinching, is a hard
thing to do. We often choose to set our sight elsewhere. It is not hard to look
around and find sin in someone else. And when we do, we are often mystified as
to how that someone else can be so sinful.
A recent conversation
brought this to mind for me. It seems that everywhere I go there are conversations
about the current opioid epidemic. And most of us not only distressed, but also
bewildered about it. A woman I know said, “Most of these people are poor. I
don’t understand how they can spend the money on drugs.” This was not the first
person who has said this, and surely not the last. But I don’t think any one of
us should be incapable of understanding that a person will go to any lengths to
feed an addiction. A person will beg, borrow, lie, or steal to feed an
addiction. Now, you and I might feel contempt for that behavior. We might even
feel contempt for that person. But do you know that person feels just as much
contempt as you do? Most likely, he feels contempt for himself.
It is as Paul says, “I
do the very thing I hate…I know that nothing good dwells within me.” This is,
my brothers and sisters, a terrible and tragic place to be. It is a place
without hope.
You and I want to be
as far away from this place as we can possibly get. You and I want to erect a
barrier, a wall, between ourselves and this place of despair where there is
nothing good and no hope. You and I want to create the idea of a world in which
there are two kinds of people: those who would do such inexplicable things, and
those who know better; those who are possibly irredeemable, and those who are
like us.
The thing we so often
hate is twofold: to acknowledge the very humanness of those we see as broken,
and to acknowledge the very brokenness of ourselves.
We cannot move off of
square one without that knowledge. In the film Changing Lanes, Doyle has found
himself at a new low point and his AA sponsor says something beautiful to him:
“You saw today that everything decent is held together by covenant. Truly, you
cannot legislate goodness; goodness comes only from a promise we make to one
another and God, and that God makes to us. By the end of the day, Gavin and
Doyle had become truly unnerved by the thoughts and actions they were capable
of. They were forced to acknowledge their own brokenness; they had both reached
rock bottom, which is actually a place of opportunity. In that place, they had
the choice of taking a step in a new direction. And so do we.
The life of the
Spirit gives us hope and new life, the hope that comes from Christ, the new
life that comes from the Spirit who dwells within us. We are, essentially,
still the same broken souls we were before. And it is truly only in knowing
this that the healing can begin, where we become able to enter into the new
life that God is offering us.
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