Friends, this should be the last of the mailed sermons during our Covidity! Next week, unless the Governor changes it, we can resume our in-person worship with all safety precautions in place. Thanks be to God!
Today’s scripture seems a little unusual at first glance for a 4th of July weekend. But bear with me, because I believe the Spirit has something to say to us about that through Paul’s “riddle” of life.
We know life has its riddles and unanswered questions. Some are serious, some are fun: If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of Congress? Why are there interstates in Hawaii? I asked our good friend Dave Eastlack: If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2? Dave replied: “Because it can’t get the lead out!”
I remember reading a best-seller called Rule of Four. It is about students at Princeton wrestling with a message hidden within an ancient document that can only be uncovered by answering a series of riddles. Today we turn to another ancient document with a message behind a riddle: why is it that what I want to do I do not do? As Paul said, …what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.
Many great minds have tried to answer this riddle. Socrates blamed it on ignorance. Aristotle concluded that we just can’t help ourselves. St. Augustine recalled the story of how he and some friends decided to steal pears from a neighbor’s tree for the thrill of it. They weren’t hungry and just threw them to the pigs.
Augustine revealed something about Paul’s riddle. He confessed that he enjoyed his evil deed. Evil is more than a moral lapse of judgment. Evil is not just a convenient way to instill guilt. It is not our parents’ fault or somebody else’s fault or something else to blame. It is a darkness behind the human condition.
Back to Rule of Four. In the book, one of the characters explains that whereas other artists begin with a white canvas, Leonardo DaVinci began every canvas with a backdrop of black. He believed that everything in the world is dark except when exposed by light. In Paul’s terms, behind good intentions is a backdrop of darkness that follows its own law hard at work, right there with us.
A dark backdrop is great for fireworks, but leading up to this holiday weekend, we have also seen this human backdrop in interesting ways. Where some will give thanks for people like Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln who rescued us from forms of oppression, others want to topple their statues. Where some will stand for the pledge, others kneel and call for a new anthem, Imagine, by John Lennon – that imagines no heaven, no religion. That will solve our problems, they think, and we can live in harmony, they would claim.
So, should we be surprised that there are calls to take down Jesus? A newspaper article cited an activist saying that depictions of Jesus must come down, because if Jesus were depicted as he really was, he would be hung from a tree. Well…guess what? He was!
This gets us to the heart of the riddle. Time to get the lead out, so to speak, and join the apostle in giving thanks to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord! Because Jesus was hung on a tree – falsely accused and mocked as King of the Jews – he answered the riddle’s follow-up question: who will rescue me?
One of the things we celebrate on 4th of July weekend is the free exercise of religion. Our founders, flawed human beings that they were, worked to secure for us the freedom to give thanks to God for the Jesus who rescued us flawed human beings from our own oppression and slavery to sin.
What is important about Paul’s confession is how it helps us understand what we do not fully understand either, that a war continues to wage against good sense and grace, trying to make us prisoners to evil’s work. This evil wants us to feel wretched, guilty, discouraged, impotent, incompetent and irrelevant when it comes to doing what is good. But because Jesus, depicted as he truly was, was hung from a tree, God holds before us a beautiful picture filled with light, a portrait of life and peace, a tableau of the Spirit living in us, enabling us to please God, because Jesus bought our freedom.
This is the picture that led Paul to exclaim, Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord! It is the same portrait that we are to show the world with confession and humility. We aren’t claiming to be perfect. We do not always understand why people do the things they do, including us. We don’t have all the answers. But we know the answer to life’s most important riddle, that there is a choice between being prisoners to the riddle of sin or being rescued from it. This is the real freedom behind what the 4th means to me, and why I celebrate it, flaws and all. Happy 4th of July!