Exodus

Romans 6

June 29, 2014

I think we need to stipulate that reading Paul is complicated.  For one thing, he wrote many letters, and just like authors of multiple books nowadays, they weren’t all about the same thing, and his ideas likely evolved over time. 

Also, Paul addressed controversial issues, and at any given time he may have been trying to teach, convince, challenge, chastise, or encourage.  His letters cover a lot of ground, and none of it is simple terrain.

Add to that Paul was complicated.  I don’t mean he was a complicated person with issues a therapist could help sort out – though that certainly may be true.  I mean his thinking was complicated … he was up to the task of thinking about the “big” questions and articulating intelligent thoughts about them.  God, Christ, sin, hope, faith, eternal life, the second coming.  We would no more respect Paul if he wrote about these things simplistically than we do Hallmark when they tackle the concept of love.  These things can’t be reduced to greeting cards, and thankfully Paul doesn’t try to do that.

Finally, it’s true that Paul was complicated in his day for his own people, but we are 2,000 years removed from his language, vernacular, contemporary references, culture, and religion, putting us at a serious disadvantage in understanding what he was saying.

All of that means we should always be suspicious of attempts to say exactly what Paul meant (especially in the space of one sermon), and we need to be very careful when we read Paul.  It’s difficult, dense material, meant for very specific audiences, set in a time we have to struggle to understand.  For instance, understanding what Paul is saying about sin, grace, righteousness, etc. in our passage today is challenging…maybe, possibly, just beyond our reach.

But, with all that in mind, I’m going to try – and here’s why:  We don’t talk enough about sin.  By we, I mean liberal Christians.  We leave all the sin talk to those who reduce it to moral codes and purity laws.  Sin is certainly one of those things that needs careful thought and is more complex than most people make it out to be.  Often talk about sin is reduced to whether you do or say the “right” thing in your personal life.  Some people buy into this simplistic definition, but many of us have rejected it because we know it is inadequate to making sense of God and the human experience, not to mention it often leaves little room for compassion and grace. 

So, we stop using the word “sin” because it has come to have a meaning that doesn’t resonate with us, and in fact has become hurtful to many.  But that seems to mean we have lost the concept of sin completely – sin as a theological, complicated, concept.  And the problem with that is when we concede it to the moralists, and even if “sin” is no longer a helpful word, there is suffering and pain that is caused by human brokenness, and part of the task of faith it to understand this suffering and brokenness and our relationship to it.

Paul had no difficulty talking about sin.  Not a problem for him at all.  Happy to do it.  And I’m glad he did, because he did not have a simplistic understanding of it.  He spoke of personal morality, but he went so much further.  And I think his understanding can help us talk about our world and our lives relative to the brokenness we see all around us. 

To get into Paul’s understanding of sin, we need to wade into tricky waters.  In talking about sin, Paul uses the word “slave” – slave of sin, slave of righteousness, even slave of God.  It is awkward for me to talk about being a slave to anything for any reason given our country’s history with slavery, not to mention the appalling existence of slavery in many places of the world today. 

I do not know the experience of being a slave, and I do not know the experience of living with the ramifications of my ancestors having been slaves.  I am the descendent of slave owners, and my position as a white person in the United States means I am probably part of the problem when it comes to current day slavery as well.  To talk about myself as a slave, much less anyone else, is problematic. 

Usually, to get around this, I just avoid using the word when I talk about my faith - maybe I say “servant” instead.  But if we want to understand what Paul meant by sin, not to mention grace, we have to use his word and think about how it applies to us, tricky though that might be.  Because for Paul – for any Jewish person at that time, and really since – the word “slave” had very specific, emotional connotations.  

Slavery was a part of their foundational story – their foundational story of the exodus.  When Paul uses the word “slave,” it cannot be understood apart from the story of the Hebrew people in Egypt.

Sin, for Paul, is something you can do…something you can choose to do.  This is the kind of sin we usually think about.  But for him sin is also an entity that can grab you…enslave you.  “Do not let sin have dominion over you,” Paul writes.  Dominion is a political word.  Sin is Egypt.  Sin is the systems in which we live that we can’t just make go away if we don’t swear or have sex.

Egypt and Pharaoh were symbols for the idea of a realm dominated by sin.  The ways of Pharaoh were the ways of slavery and human degradation.  The Hebrew people were stuck in that system, and there was nothing they could do to change it.  It literally took an act of God to free them…it was nothing they could have done on their own – no matter how moral they were.

At the heart of Pharaoh’s system was production…it’s why he needed slaves.  His goal was to produce more and more so he could build buildings and monuments as a testimony to his greatness, and so he needed materials, and like any good business person, he needed to get them as cheaply as possible.  The slaves had to make bricks – day and night with no rest, they made bricks to feed the desires of Pharaoh.  Slaves were the necessary outgrowth of that society. 

That is sin: a system that necessitates slaves – or an underclass, or outcasts, or poverty.  And it exercises dominion.  It has power and control over all those who are a part of it.  Everyone, in essence, is a slave to this system – people are driven by the need for more, and people suffer…people die…because of that.

We, Paul would certainly argue, are under the dominion of sin in this world. 

Now it’s a bit of a mental trick to understand how we are slaves to sin, because we are the Pharaohs of the story.  We have to move back and forth between understanding ourselves as metaphorical slaves to a powerful system, and understanding ourselves as part of the problem that creates literal slaves.

In ways we are not even aware of, we are captured in a system that destroys…the wages of sin, Paul says, is death…destruction.  We know this, actually.  We have all felt it.  Our world is messed up.  The powerful ones – including us – feed on the weak and vulnerable.  And too often we feel powerless/helpless to do anything about it.

Sin has power in this world – for whatever reason – and, at least in part, that feels totally outside our control.  It is an entity in and of itself, not just the sum of all of our bad actions.  We are powerless on our own to get out from under the dominion of it.  We are, in Paul’s language, slaves to sin.

Paul believes that God, through grace, can free us from this slavery.  Just as God freed the Hebrew people from Egypt, God can free us from our systems of destruction.  And Jesus – or Christ – plays a starring role in that freedom.  Jesus, for Paul, is the new exodus.  Jesus’ way offers a way out of Egypt.  Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are the parting of the sea. 

And this is where the choice comes in.  We are freed because Jesus / God gives us a way without us having to do anything.  That is grace.  But we have to put one foot in front of the other and follow.  We have to choose which realm, which kingdom, we are going to be a part of.  It is a paradox – the gift of freedom without us having to do anything, and the necessity of us choosing something for sin to longer have dominion.  This is what makes Paul’s understanding of sin so complicated…but that’s because it is that complicated, and we are always trying to live between those two.

But, as Paul points out, that choice is not between being slaves of Pharaoh and being freed to do whatever we want.  In order to be truly free, to escape our systems of destruction, we have to choose the dominion of God.  Or, as Paul puts it, become slaves of God.

Now, again, we move into very uncomfortable territory with the word slave, because we are right to recoil from the idea of God as a slave owner.  It is not a word I would choose. 

But the fact is, Paul believes, we will be slaves to something:  “You are slaves to the one you obey.”  The only thing we can do is choose to whom we submit.  As we know from our own experience, if we are not choosing to live in the realm of God, we are slaves to our own desires, and because of this we often sacrifice justice / righteousness.  We are back in Egypt.

Ours is a society of production.  And while we in the United States don’t have slaves anymore, in the technical sense of that word, we do have a system that depends on people working more and more, for less and less, so people can produce buildings and monuments, houses and airplanes, for themselves.  We produce more, we say, so everyone can have more.  But we know deep down that in a production oriented society, not everyone gets more.  There are those who contribute to the production, but never benefit from it.

I don’t know about you, but I often feel helpless in trying to extricate myself from this system.  I see that it is wrong, but I remain a part of the privileged class whose consumption and desires destroys others and creation.  I try to do little things here and there, but I am firmly planted in this world, and the system holds complete dominion over me.

We need to be freed from this – everyone needs to be freed from this…especially those who suffer most.  Yes, it’s good if I refrain from overconsumption, callous cruelty, laziness.  But sin is so much bigger than that.  I have to be willing to let go not just of individual behaviors, but of my entire way of life; I have to step out of the world in which I am enmeshed.  But I can only do that if there is something else to step into.

And there is; there is another realm – an alternative given to us freely by God.  And we see it in the life of Jesus…who came to bring the kingdom of God near that we might step out of our current, sin-dominated realm into a place where human beings and relationships are the center, not production.

This was the call of Jesus to his disciples, right?  We heard it last week:  Follow me, leave what you know behind, bring nothing with you, and give your life over to serving the least and the last – the ones who suffer most in a world dominated by sin. 

We are under the dominion of sin.  We need a mass Exodus.  And those of us who are Pharaohs need to do better than the one of so long ago – we need to follow God into the desert and learn what it means to live completely dependent on God.  I’m not saying it’s easy…I’m not saying it’s clear what it takes from God and what it takes from us.  Neither, I suspect, was Paul.  But we have to take it all on…we have to see sin as something bigger than our private morality and admit we are slaves to systems of destruction.  Only then can we open our eyes to what God offers us in the life of Jesus – freedom from all that destroys.  Then we can choose…then, led by God we can choose to not sin – to not be a part of sin – little by little, step by step, until we have crossed the Red Sea.  Amen.