Hilton Head Island, SC – August 4, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 51:10-17; Psalm 22:1-8; Romans 7:13-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. – Romans 7:20 (RSV)
A year from now, August of 2014, will mark the centennial of the beginning of World War I. It was called “The War to End All Wars,” although it most certainly wasn’t. It lasted for four years, and as a result of it, over 8,300,000 people were killed, mostly but not all soldiers, and there were almost 30,000,000 casualties among all the nations involved in the conflict.
Not surprisingly, countries which lose wars tend deliberately to forget the defeats. The United States never marks any anniversaries regarding the War in Viet Nam or the War in Iraq. Germany has no plans for a national day of remembrance to note the centennial of when the guns of August began firing after Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in the Balkans. Britain, France, and the US will probably have big hoo-hahs to remember both the start and the end of World War I. They were, after all, the primary winners. However, Germany, which is still going through mental tortures over World War II, has chosen to ignore World War I altogether. The Germans do mark what they call Totensonntag (The Sunday of the Dead). But that national day of remembrance goes all the way back to Prussian times and the Franco-Prussian War, the last major war the Germans won. The German newspaper Die Welt (The World) recently had an editorial promoting a national day to recall “the Great War” (World War I). The editorial observed, “No day on German TV passes without images of Hitler….The paradox of this intense focus on the Second World War is that it has overshadowed previous histories. No other country has such a diminished long-term memory.”
We are currently in the midst of the bicentennial of the War of 1812, but there hasn’t been much said or done about it. That’s because we didn’t win that war. We didn’t lose it either, but we certainly didn’t win it. If we had, the US would be larger than either Russia or the old Soviet Union, because we would consist of the US and Canada as one huge nation. If you wonder what such a nation might be called, you are naïve even to wonder. It’s an historical no-brainer. All we really got out of the War of 1812 was a national anthem.
Wars are always tragic examples of both “sin” and “sins.” Sin is the human failing which causes all of us to break God’s laws and the widely accepted principles of morality, while sins are the particular ways in which we breach those laws and principles. Likely there is some element of sin when victor nations chauvinistically remember dates which ultimately led to victory (July 4, 1776, for example), but deliberately ignore dates which indicated defeat (April 30, 1975, the day the North Vietnamese Army swept into Saigon, for another example. The day before was when that iconic image was forever etched into our brains as people scrambled up the ladder to the waiting helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy.) People whose nations lose wars remember their sins in those wars much more than do those from countries which win wars.
Americans were on the winning side in the American Revolution, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Gulf War. Therefore we recall those conflicts with great fondness and national nostalgia. The wars we didn’t win or we lost (1812, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan), we cleverly excise from our national consciousness. Thus we conclude, quite incorrectly, that we didn’t sin in the wars we won, and we didn’t sin in the ones we lost either, because we have deleted them from the popular memory, so how could we have sinned in what no longer exists between our ears?
Up to now, we have been considering “sin” in a “mega” sense, not a “mini” sense. That is, we have pondered it in national terms, not personal terms. Therefore let us now try to see how we consider sin in individual or personal terms.
Sin is readily perceived as sins when it is focused on individuals. We think almost automatically about the Ten Commandments, and about murder or stealing or adultery or lying (bearing false witness), and so on. Sin can manifest itself as deliberately hurting people either physically or emotionally, cheating, defaming, etc., etc., etc. Of sins there is no end.
Nevertheless, there is a strong tendency for powerful or self-satisfied people individually to delude themselves into thinking that they don’t sin. Little people sin – poor people, underemployed people, wage earners, the perennially ill, the psychologically warped – but powerful people, winners, the truly successful, don’t sin. Sin is for losers. Righteousness, and perhaps even rightness, and an honorable reputation, are for winners.
One night a policeman pulled over an elderly man who was driving erratically at 2 AM. The man told the officer, “I’m on my way to a lecture about alcohol and its effects on the human body, as well as the obvious detriments of smoking and staying out late.” “Really?” said the cop. “And who’s giving this lecture at 2 AM?” The old gent said, “That would be my wife.”
Losers sin. They are regularly reminded of it by the winners.
Since the end of World War I, Americans have lived in a nation which considers itself basically The World-Class Winner. We were perhaps first-among-equals up through the Second World War, and then the Sole Superpower for 5-plus years until the Soviets developed the hydrogen bomb in the early Fifties. After that there were two Superpowers until 1989, when the Berlin Wall, and very soon after the Soviet Union, collapsed. Then we became, again, the Sole Superpower. We are still that, although our power is inevitably waning, relative to the rest of the world, and especially China.
You may wonder why I go on about all this. I do so because our recent history as Americans in the family of nations strongly affects how you and I think about ourselves with respect to sin. Subconsciously, or even consciously, we think of ourselves essentially as winners, and winners don’t sin, or at least not so much, relative to losers. The fact that losers lose illustrates their sin, doesn’t it? Amy Grant doesn’t sin, but Janis Joplin did. Muhammad Ali doesn’t sin, but Mike Tyson does. Hank Aaron doesn’t sin, but Barry Bonds does.
Americans have an aversion to sin because, well, sin seems very un-American. How can such fine folks as Americans, who collectively have done so well for themselves, engage in sin? Certain individual Americans might commit sins, but on the whole, we think we are a noble people, and regard ourselves as such. We honestly believe most others also perceive us that way.
An American professor, Brian Abel Ragen, noticed that a new American hymnal, published in the early 1990s, changed a line in “Amazing grace.” Instead of saying, “That saved a wretch like me,” the sanitized version said, “That saved and strengthened me.” Prof. Ragen commented, “American culture, even in its churches, avoids the idea of real sinfulness. It nevertheless clings sentimentally to the idea of redemption. Our culture does not believe in wickedness – that is, in culpability. The ‘conviction of sin’ is hardly possible to us. We believe not in sin and forgiveness but in illness and recovery. It is the endless message of our culture that everyone is basically good and that most of our problems will be solved when we realize this – in other words, when we build up our self-esteem.”
Is the learned professor mistaken? Has he incorrectly assessed us? Or is he “right on”?
The hymn “God, be merciful to me” is a paraphrase of Psalm 51 by the 19th century evangelical hymn writer Richard Redhead. Part of Psalm 51 was our responsive reading. The fourth stanza of the hymn says, “Broken, humbled to the dust/ By Thy wrath and judgment just,/ Let my contrite heart rejoice/ And in gladness hear Thy voice;/ From my sins O hide Thy face,/ Blot them out in boundless grace.” Most mainline American Protestants in the early 21st century, indeed most Americans of any theological stripe, do not like such hymnodic lyrics. They seem too negative. Nor are we thrilled by “Just as I am, without one plea.” It was OK for Billy Graham and his crusades, but it’s too dark and upsetting for cultured folk such as you and I.
One of my Top-100 movies, maybe even one of the Top-25, is The Shawshank Redemption. It is the story of a New England banker named Andy Dufrain, played by Tim Robbins, who was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. He is sentenced to the Shawshank Prison for life. There he meets the man who becomes his best friend behind bars, the man everyone calls Red, played by Morgan Freeman. Red tells Andy that there are no guilty people in Shawshank, that everyone there is innocent. Red doesn’t say it, but he could have; avoiding guilt is the American way.
Early on in the movie, Andy asks Red why he is called Red. “It’s because I’m Irish,” said Red. If you know who Morgan Freeman is, you know Red can’t be Irish. But that’s part of Red’s charm, isn’t it? Later on, Red tells Andy about the terrible crime he had committed as a teenager. After describing what had happened since then, Red says, “That kid’s gone. This old man is all that’s left. I’ve got to live with that.” Still later (they were both in Shawshank for many years), Andy tells Red, “Hope is a good thing --- maybe the best of things. And hope never dies.” Then Andy plans one of the most clever, time-consuming, and hygienically revolting prison escapes ever, on celluloid or in reality. Later still, Red is pardoned, and he says to himself, remembering Andy’s words about hope, “Either you’re living, or you’re dying. I hope to see my friend again. I hope. I hope.” And in the end, breaking his parole and buying a bus ticket to Mexico, in the last scene Red walks along a beach somewhere in Mexico. Andy is working on an old boat, and he looks up to see Red striding toward him. This is the Shawshank Redemption.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is the most closely-packed set of classic Christian theology to be found anywhere in the Bible. For the first six chapters Paul wrote about how faith and the religious law were related to one another. Ultimately, said Paul, the religious law shows us how corrupt we all are. I don’t know why I sin, but I do, said the apostle. He concluded this section of the letter by saying, “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” We are all, as Paul said elsewhere, slaves to sin.
Does it seem that way to you? Do you seem that way to you? Or has Paul overstated it?
Walter Brook was a colonel in the British Army during World War II. After the war he was sent to Hamburg, where his superiors ordered him to live in the grand and spacious home of a wealthy German family. Colonel Brook brought his own family there with him. They had been separated during most of the war, and the war also greatly separated them psychologically afterward. Colonel Brook insisted the German family should also stay in their home, and the two families, the British and Germans, shared it. This was all historically accurate. But, as it turned out, it was, at best, a very uneasy sharing.
Rhidian Brook is Walter Brook’s grandson. He recently wrote a novel about his grandparents’ and his father’s experience in post-war Hamburg. It is called The Aftermath. It is a fictionalized account of what he had been told his grandparents and father went through in the years immediately following the war. Rhidian Brook describes how his fictionalized mother and fictionalized uncle were together during a German bombing raid in England, and the uncle, his grandmother’s son, was killed. Writing this about Mrs. Morgan, the mother in the story, he said, “Some spirit shrapnel lodged itself deep inside her, beyond the reach of surgeons, poisoning her thoughts and causing her to think with a limp.” What magnificent phrases: “spirit shrapnel” and “causing her to think with a limp”! Or, telling about the four main characters of the novel in her London Times review of the book, Helen Rumbelow writes, “(They) are unexploded bombs. Placed together in the house, they detonate each other.”
How terrible is the nature of sin! Even when we try with Herculian strength to overcome it, we may actually make things worse. We maul one another meaning to express love, we crush each other wanting to set all of us free. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” asked Paul (Romans 7:24). He answers his own pain-wracked question: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” We can’s save ourselves, or redeem ourselves, or liberate ourselves from the lethal clutches of sin, but God, through Jesus Christ, does it, Paul insists. However, we have to believe it for it to happen.
You may or may not accept that premise. I hope you do, but if you don’t, unlike Paul, I don’t think all is lost. However, if you refuse to recognize the power of sin in your own life, you may never be liberated, simply because sin will keep you in its adhesive web forever, and you may not even know you’re there.
It’s a sin to think we don’t sin. It really is. It illustrates sinful pride by the very existence of such a noxious manner of thinking. Everyone sins, even powerful, successful people, and yes, even powerful and successful American people. It cannot be otherwise, and to imagine it can be is to engage in dangerous self-delusion.
Leave the winning team. Join the losers. Only the losers can become winners, and the winners can only be losers for as long as they live if they insist they cannot and will not lose. And in all of this sad saga as it plays itself out to the last syllable of recorded time, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therein lies our best hope.