Romans 7:13-25a
July 3, 2011
We’re in week 2 of 5 weeks working our way through a portion of the letter Paul wrote to the Christians living in Rome. Paul, in these passages, is struggling with how to respond to the world he and the early churches faced, especially because that world included so much suffering and pain. And a big part of that struggle for Paul had to do with the tension between his belief that with God all things are possible and his awareness of his own significant, human limitations that make some things feel impossible.
Last week we asked what Christians should be doing in this world – what should our lives look like if we claim to follow Jesus – a question shared by the early Christians living in Rome. And we found out that Paul answered this question a bit oddly with one basic word: Grace. He talked about how there was no shortage of instruction manuals telling people what to do – including the list of 613 commandments found in the first five books of our sacred scriptures - but he knew these instruction manuals weren’t enough. We can’t live up to them, so we find ourselves awash in guilt for our shortcomings. And the tragic irony is that this guilt becomes a barrier to doing the very things we wish we could do. Given this set up, Paul reminded us that the only place we can start is with God’s unconditional Grace.
But, we left a question hanging last week. If we must start with Grace, what if we don’t know how to feel or find that grace?
Again, just like last week, Paul starts in an unlikely, even counter intuitive place…to experience this freeing grace – that which unbinds us and releases us to new life, new behaviors, new ways of being in the world – we must first become more aware of the realities of human limitations. We have to understand why it’s hard to change the dynamics that keep our lives from looking how we’d like them to if we are to find grace at the center of it all.
In this passage Char read, Paul brings the problem of human limitation into sharp relief, and he talks so honestly and personally about how painful it is. If last week was somewhat comforting as we face this issue of how to change our lives, this week is the uncomfortable part. But, I would argue, the discomfort is important, because, the problem Paul so clearly articulates is as serious and as painful today as it was then.
It’s tempting to read this passage and make Paul into a caricature, imagining him kneeling on the ground with a long whip in hand, flogging himself over and over saying, “I am wretched.” We distance ourselves from his talk of sin and evil, wretchedness, thinking he was a fairly over-the-top guy that either exaggerated or was an extremist religious zealot.
But, it’s possible that the words and the images Paul uses don’t point to someone who sees things totally different from us, but rather to someone who was deeply in touch with things we live with day in and day out. He looked around at the world and saw suffering, pain, sorrow, bloodiness, war, oppression; and he knew that faith – that following Jesus – meant changing our lives and actions in this world so that we might alleviate that suffering. That’s what Jesus did, and Jesus gave us the gifts we need to be faithful – to change our lives completely. But Paul felt how small he was in the face of all this, he realized that change was hard and suffering continued unabated.
This led Paul to ask those deep questions of life and faith…the questions, in our most honest moments, we ask ourselves…What difference does Jesus make to my life? How can a good God be worshipped in a world so full of pain and darkness? What hope is there for humankind if this is the best we seem able to do?
We cannot simply will ourselves to do what we want to do all the time. Paul knows this; “I can will what is right,” he says, “but I cannot do it.” And though I admit it’s not there in the text that’s been handed down to us, I’m just sure Paul must have ended that sentence with some Greek equivalent of “ugh!”.
Paul’s not just talking about wishing he could choose the apple instead of the chocolate covered raisins. This is a cry of pain because he keeps doing things that contribute to his own suffering and the suffering of the world. This reality of human nature and the world we produce does drive him to his knees and causes him to call out, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?!” But it’s not the cry of a lunatic – it’s the cry of a human being just like us. In the depths of his heart he wishes he could change his life, his actions and behaviors so that he and others might suffer less. But, he has found, as so many of us have, that just wishing doesn’t make it so.
So why is this true? Maybe if we can figure out why this is true, why it’s so hard to do what we know is right, we could fix the problem, move on to living lives exactly as we want to, and the world would be a better place. We have some advantages Paul didn’t in understanding why we are limited as human beings. We are learning more and more every day, it seems, about the human brain, which controls behavior, through science, technology, studies, and experiments. And to Paul’s credit, when we look at what we’re learning, his description of human nature is pretty darn close to many conclusions being drawn today…he just uses different words to describe the same reality.
For Paul, the cause of the problem was what he called, “the sin inside of him…working death in him.” “It is the evil that lies close at hand.” Paul talks about the sin that dwells in him that impacts how he behaves and says that he can’t do away with that sin – no matter how hard he tries. We don’t always like to call it sin, but we do think humans have a subconscious – or unconscious – that dictates much of our behavior day in and day out, and some of that behavior is less than desirable. And we’re learning that this subconscious is basically unknowable, inaccessible to us no matter how hard we try to see it. This subconscious was built largely by early experiences in our lives, and its deeply imbedded in who we are and how we act in the world, yet no amount of navel gazing, no amount of trying to remember these early experiences and piece it all together will reveal what’s in there and how it works on us. Worse, no amount of thoughtful reflection will change the basic workings of this subconscious.
Paul talks about being captive to his sin – we are learning that in significant ways we are captive to our unconscious. This is because with every action we take, every decision we make – already informed by something out of our conscious control – we are wearing a neural pathway in our brain. And every time we repeat an action, a response, or a thought pattern, that path grows more and more ingrained – we are less and less able to forge new paths – new behaviors – no matter how much we want to. These pathways are deep – and there seems to be a magnet at the other end pulling us down that path over and over, making it nearly impossible to start building a new road. This happens no matter how much we detest the final destination of this path we know so well.
One example I think illustrates this well isn’t directly about actions we take – rather it’s about beliefs we have: Study after study is now revealing something about ourselves that we can’t afford to, but pretty much always do, ignore. When people believe something strongly they are incredibly unlikely to change their minds. Now, that might be obvious. After all, we craft our beliefs based on what we know, our experiences and our values. They are rational – these beliefs – so it would be irrational to change them, unless there was a very compelling, logical reason to do so.
But therein lies the problem: these studies show that all people, or at least a statistically startling number of them – don’t change their minds when presented with incontrovertible contradicting evidence – in other words, a very compelling, logical reason to change our beliefs. Our subconscious is are programmed by years of asserting our beliefs over and over again to either ignore or bend the evidence and information that it receives so we don’t have to change our beliefs, or the actions that have flowed from these beliefs day after day, year after year.
We tend to be happy to point this out in others. How can they not believe X, Y, or Z, when the science so overwhelmingly disproves what they believe and cling on to? But we don’t see it in ourselves. We just don’t. When our subconscious does this editing of hard information, we’re not aware that it’s happening. We won’t let go of our beliefs. This is an equal opportunity problem – none of us are immune. We think we are, because we don’t see how our unconscious is acting – how it’s distorting and editing incoming information behind the scenes to fit our deeply ingrained beliefs – but statistically we might as well all assume we are as guilty as the next person. We are not wired to change, and if we are not wired to change beliefs, nor are we wired to change actions, behaviors, and long standing habits.
Paul says he is captive to the law of sin that dwells in him. That’s the unconscious, the maladaptive neural pathways in us. There is “stuff” in us that affects us, controls us, makes us behave in ways we don’t want, and given the tenacity and complete inaccessibility of this stuff, we can feel captive to these forces…trapped in habits we wonder if we will ever break free of.
We all contribute to our own and others suffering in some way. Some neural pathways in our brains are programmed to produce unhealthy, even hurtful, behaviors…over and over. And the persistence of those pathways is what leads us to exactly where Paul was. Because, as long as those pathways persist…no matter how hard we seem to try to change them with our wills…people suffer. This can at times bring us to our knees where we call out, “what kind of set up is this…how, oh how can I change this reality?! UGH!”
We come to church, we read the bible and listen to sermons, because we’re trying to figure out what we are supposed to do as Christians. We want to be faithful, and there are times that being faithful means significant changes – means making hard decisions…changing beliefs and worldviews. Living the life of faith is about transformation – transformation of who we are, and transformation of the world as we know it. But, if the neural pathways are set and resilient, if many of our actions are dictated by forces outside our conscious, what is the hope? And where is the Grace in the middle of it all?
Paul is not a defeatist – we know this if we know nothing else about Paul. He believes a new world is possible – that we are not just capable of transformation, we are destined for it! But, to feel the grace of God, so that we can move forward when it seems no matter how hard we try we just can’t – the odd suggestion of Paul is that we start by admitting the painful reality, and fully admit our lack of control.
People I’ve known who have struggled with addiction seem to understand this well. It’s why the first step of the twelve step program in AA is to admit one’s powerlessness over the addiction. They believe that you will never change your behaviors, you will never move beyond the destructive habits, until you admit you can’t do it alone by sheer force of will.
“Step 1,” someone in the program writes, “is the first step to freedom. I admit to myself that something is seriously wrong in my life. I do things that I later regret doing and tell myself that I will not do them again. But I do. I keep on doing them, in spite of my regrets, my denials, my vows, my cover-ups and my facades. The first step is to admit the truth of where I am. Step 1 calls us to do less, not more - to yield, to surrender, to let go.”
There is incredible grace in that, because in the end, the solution to how to change something we can’t change isn’t in our head, in our trying harder, or thinking better, so we can give up the ghost – yield…surrender…and let something else take over.
Paul knew it, science is proving it, real change happens only when we find something outside ourselves that can break in and start us down new paths. What that something is and how it works? – well there are lots of opinions about that. Come next week to find out what Paul thinks that something is. Amen.
