St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church

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Romans: Being Free Slaves

Romans 6:12-23

June 26, 2005

1. I suppose the NRSV is straight-forward enough, but there are some words in it which we hear so much that we become a bit de-sensitized to their meaning, and hearing it in different words is like listening with new ears. I would rather read it straight from Paul, unencumbered by difficulties in translation, but none of us knows that language well enough to understand, so I’ll do the next best thing. I’ll read the same passage from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase called The Message. He uses the kind of speech we use every day. Paul is wrapping up what he said earlier, what Chuck covered last week [thank you very much!]. He asked the question, "Should we continue to sin, so we can enjoy more of God’s grace that we know in the death of Jesus?" The answer, of course, is "No way!" In verse 12 Paul continues, "So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom! I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing – not caring about others, not caring about God – the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different it is now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness? As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end. But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master."

2. Or, said another way, quoting my favorite organist, "If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten." If people only look to the Law of Moses to tell them how to live their lives the right way, for ‘righteousness’ as Paul calls it, they will only focus what they should not do, focus on sin, because most of the Law is written in negative form – don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t touch a bleeding body. God’s people became more concerned about themselves than they were about another person who needed help. Before Christ came, the Law of Moses was all God’s people had, and they always came up sinful. But once Jesus redirected that same Law, the best decision people could make is to put themselves alongside God and obey the Law of Love – love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. As one of my granddaughters is fond of saying, "I’m going to turn off the TV and see if I can make myself useful." Paul says "Turn off the Law of Moses, and make yourselves useful."

3. "Making ourselves useful" is not as easy as it sounds! There was a movie made in 1958 called "The Defiant Ones." I think it illustrates the attempt to make ourselves useful, to forget about ourselves and focus on the other. It’s about two convicts, chained together, riding in a truck that is transferring convicts from one prison to another. One of them is Johnny (played by Tony Curtis), and the other is Noah (played by Sidney Poitier). Johnny is white, Noah other is black, and neither one has much regard for the other. Their prejudices fill them with loathing. They hate each other, to put it bluntly. But there they are, bound together by one chain, 29 inches long. Suddenly, the truck runs off the road, and in the confusion, they run away, escape. They manage to stay ahead of the bloodhounds and a lynching mob, finally making their way to a farmhouse where the "lady of the house" takes them in and helps them cut the chain. She convinces them they would have a better chance of escape by splitting up, tells Johnny to come with her in the car, and tells Noah to head north through the forest where he can hop a train. As soon as Noah leaves, she turns to Johnny and says, "The forest is full of quicksand. He’ll never make it." Johnny, much to our surprise, leaves her and the freedom she promises, and runs into the forest after Noah. He finds him waist-deep in the quick-sand and tries to pull him out. Noah says, "Go on, go on!" But Johnny refuses, holds up his wrist, and says, "Remember, we’re chained together." These two men who once used their fists to fight each other had been chained together long enough to begin to love each other. Johnny pulls Noah out of the quicksand. They hear the train approaching, and make it to the train track just in time for Noah to hop aboard, but Johnny’s not strong enough. Noah reaches for him, but cannot pull him up. Instead of letting Johnny go, Noah sacrifices his own freedom and tumbles down the embankment with him. Their freedom is short-lived, for they hear the barking of the blood-hounds getting closer. But even though they will soon be locked up again, they are free in a way they have never been before.

4. Between the Bible with Paul’s words to the Roman Christians, and "The Defiant Ones" with this chain, there are two lessons for us to take with us this week. The first lesson is the same lesson I taught the children – God has given us all our body parts, and we are free to use them to hurt or to heal. Johnny and Noah first used their hands to do what was wrong, which is what got them in prison, and then they used them as fists to hurt each other. By the end of the movie, they had learned how to use their hands to help each other. God says, "They are yours to use as you wish." Paul says, "Don’t use them for wrong; use them for right." Whether they’re our hands or the words formed by our mouth and tongue, the places we go on our feet, or the ideas we concoct with our brains, let’s use them to help God. That’s the first lesson.

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