Tag: Justification

Liberated and Devoted

Psalm 78:3-4 That which we have heard and known, and what our Elders have told us, we will not hide from their children. We will recount to generations to come the praiseworthy deeds and the power of God, and the wonderful works God has done.

Introduction

The paradox of faith is that it’s both private and public, it’s big and small, it’s dynamic and restrained, it’s orderly and chaotic, it’s strong and weak, it’s life and death, it’s liberation and devotion.

The journey through Romans collides into this paradoxical faith that refuses to be categorically defined by one set of rituals or dogmas; in fact, it suspends ritual’s and dogma’s feeble claim to define or contain it. The reason for this paradoxical substance is that faith reflects the substance of God: faith is from God and faith is for God and is directed (back) to God. Neither faith nor God can be confined to human assumptions and intellectual concoctions. With faith and God, every day is a new day—every day presents and offers God’s mercies that are ours by faith, and this day will not be like the last one or like the one that comes next. You wake up and you are thrust—once again—on to God in faith, trusting that God loves you today as God loved you yesterday and will love you tomorrow.

So, our activity from day to day is defined not so much by our schedules and lists—although those can be so helpful with daily demands—but by what may happen. We have no control how God will summon our faith to manifest as love in the world to the benefit of the neighbor. Maybe the day will be quiet as you care for creation—weed the garden, water the plants, walk the dog, pet the cat, make dinner, rest and relax. Or maybe the day will present with neighbors (literally) knocking on your door, a phone call summoning you, an email needing your complete presence, or a random encounter with a stranger at the store.

Paul has worked hard to demonstrate how we are to discipline our outer nature to come in alignment to our inner nature, where our deeds are in alignment to our faith. Thus ,these actions take on the genetic and chromosomal likeness of our faith: loving, life-giving, and liberating. Faith orients us to God but that is not all, faith orients us to God through our neighbor and to our neighbor through God.  And this liberating faith will manifest itself in loving devotion to the well-being of the neighbor. And this may even mean, says Paul:

Romans 14:1-12

Now, welcome the ones who are weak in faith, but not for the reasons of plotting judgments. Indeed, some people believe in eating all things; but the one who is weak eats vegetables. The one who eats must not treat with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat must not judge the one who eats; for God welcomes [that person]. Are you, you the one who judges the household servant belonging to another? [They] stand or fall to their own Lord, but [they] will be made to stand for the Lord is able to make [them] stand.[1]

Rom. 14:1-4

At the end of the disciplined outer nature is a return to the inner nature: do not judge. Literally. Are you, you the one who judges the household servant belonging to another? It’s here where Paul unifies the believer as a whole person: we are justified by faith apart from works which makes us love our neighbor in word and deed thus we do not judge our neighbor by their works, for their inner nature is the thing that is in line with God (or not!). Thus, they will express themselves into the world as they are so lead and as they can handle according to their conscience.[2] So, welcome the neighbor in but not to force them to become more like you or to fight with them about how they are (self) expressing their faith in love. The only thing that is necessary is love (remember 13:8, the believer is to be indebted to the neighbor in love).[3]

Driving the point home, it’s not necessary everyone eat the same way, dress the same way, view the day the same way—all these things are liberated from condemnation.[4] The only thing essential and necessary is love, divine love for the beloved, calling the beloved unto God and into the well-being of the neighbor (mutually). In this way, the believer is freed up from two very exhausting things: judging and controlling the neighbor. Letting the inner nature, of the neighbor be that which is between them and God is to give your own attention to yourself. For those who feel comfortable and called to eat and dress in a certain way should do so without judgment—whether another person agrees with them. Ultimately, the Spirit is at work in the conscience of the neighbor, especially the ones who share in the faith.[5] Why spend so much energy trying to get everyone to look the same, eat the same, be the same…wouldn’t this fly in the face of the singularity in plurality that is at the heart of Abraham’s call to be the father of many nations? Not one, but many (remember Romans 4?); so, too, should each gathering of the beloved reflect plurality and multitude…

Paul rounds out the discussion by bringing it all back to Christ and the love of God.

For not one of us lives for themselves and no one dies for themselves. For if we live, we live to the Lord; if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live and we die, we are of the Lord. For to this [end] Christ died and lived, so that also he might be Lord of the dead and the living. Now, why do you, you judge your sibling? And why do you, you treat your sibling with contempt? For we are all placed beside the tribunal of God…

Rom. 14:8-10

The goal here is to live liberated in love with the fullness of life; but not just for you, for your neighbor, too. You are pleasing to God as you are right now; so, too, is your neighbor/sibling—whether they act like you or not. If you feel led and called to freely participate in this or that ritual, this or that tradition, this or that act of worship, to dress this or that way, or eat this or that, you are free to participate; but, says, Paul, do so freely and according to your conscience which is the divine location of encounter with God in the event of faith.[6] You are enveloped in the grace and mercy of God and not held hostage by your ability to conform to the status quo or another’s expectations, not even society’s expectations, not even parents’ expectations; you are free to be you to the glory of God and the well-being of your neighbor.[7]

Conclusion

Two words of caution by way of remembrance:

  1. Remember we don’t live for ourselves; we don’t live alone, work alone, exist alone; rather we are intimately and profoundly connected to others be it family (immediate and extended), to our neighbors, to others in society (work and play), and even connected to those who have transitioned into God before us by means of our remembering-love. The glorified self-autonomy perpetuated in the mythology of the post-modern and western conceptions of human existence must be captured and put to death. If not, liberation will take on isolating and divisive characteristics. This means that any notion of liberation that is for you and you alone is a lie; in Christ’s economy it is sin. Putting ourselves first and foremost is the number one way to miss the mark when it comes to divine love and the neighbor.
  2. And with this emphasis on the other and divine love, remember that our encounter with God in faith is a return of God’s love for you with love for God. To love another is to love whom they love (1 Jn 4:19-21[8]). As my mother loves me, she loves my children because I love them; as a mother, I love those whom my children love because I love my children and they love these. As it is with us who are so basic, so it is with God. God’s love for me is never to be used as a weapon to abuse or threaten my neighbor or to cause them neglect and isolation. It is always liberative love making itself known in devotion to the neighbor.

Luther, at the very beginning of his treatise on The Freedom of a Christian, writes,

A Christian person is a free lord above everything and subject to no one.
A Christian person is a devoted-peer servant of everything and subject to everyone.[9]

The Freedom of a Christian

This paradox expresses the thrust of Romans in the best way. The believer is absolutely and positively free—above everything—a queen and priestess. But in this true and real freedom, the believer is so free she can and will serve her neighbor. Liberation fosters devotion; freedom is oriented toward justice. For the truly liberated person is free to put herself aside, like Christ who, to quote Philippians,

…though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death–
even death on a cross.

Phil. 2:6-8 NRSV

[1] Translation mine unless otherwise noted

[2] LW 25, 485. “…understanding the term ‘weak’ as referring to people who are overly careful or still superstitious in some respect, who think they ought to do what they really do not need to do.”

[3] LW 25, 486. “Thus the meaning of the apostle is that in the new law all things are free and. Nothing is necessary for those who believe in Christ, but love is sufficient for them, …”

[4] LW 25, 487. “For every day is a feast, all food is permitted, every place is sacred, every time is a time of fasting, every kind of apparel is allowed, all things are free, only that we observe moderation in their use and that love and the other things which the apostle teaches us be practiced.”

[5] LW 25, 492-493. “For the strong man has his own opinion and is moved by his own reasons, and likewise the weak by his…leave him in peace and let him be satisfied with his own motives (or to say it in more popular language) let him stand secure and immoveable in the directions of his own conscience.”

[6] LW 25, 495. “Thus the whole error in this idea is that we fail to consider that if we are pleasing to God, all of these things must be done not by the compulsion of necessity or by the drive of fear but in happiness and a completely free will.”

[7] LW 25, 499. “But the apostle has something special in mind in this verse, namely, that he wants each person to be content in his own mind, or as it is commonly phrased, in his own thinking, and not judge another man in his thinking, nor should the other spurn him in return, lest perhaps he who is weak in faith, having his own mind, thinking, or conscience, but being disturbed or offended at the ‘mind’ of another person, begin to act contrary to his own ‘mind’ and thus conclude one thing and do something else and so be at odds with. Himself.”

[8] The NRSVUE has “19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

[9] WA 7, 21; LW 31, 344. Translation mine from the medieval high german

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Inwardly and Outwardly: loved and liberated

Psalm 138:7b-9 Though God be high, God cares for the lowly… Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you keep me safe; you stretch forth your hand against the fury of my enemies; your right hand shall save me. God will make good God’s purpose for me; God, your love endures for ever; do not abandon the works of your hands.

Introduction

One thing I find fascinating about how Paul speaks of the encounter with God in the event of faith is not only the robust conception of union with God in our inner person, but the ramifications of that event of faith working out in love through our bodies. We are not only inwardly changed as if it’s just about where my soul goes when I die; we’re outwardly changed, as well. Our outer posture in the world changes as our inner posture is brought into alignment with God through faith, grace, mercy, and love. This change makes sense: anyone who feels safer, loved, accepted, secure, exposed but not rejected, the more that person will begin to behave similarly in the world.

So, last week I told you that Paul was about to make a shift from a profound and robust discussion of the event of justification with God by faith alone in Christ alone by the power of the Holy Spirit alone apart from any works to an even more enriching discussion (read: exhortation) about how that encounter with God in faith will work itself out in love in the world, especially toward the neighbor. Chapter 12 marks the beginning of that shift, and Paul starts with the mind, by saying,

Romans 12:1-8

I exhort you then, Siblings, through the mercies of God to bring your bodies as a holy and living sacrifice, well-pleasing to God, your reasonable service. And do not conform to this present age, but be transfigured by the renewal of the mind so that you prove the will of God—the good and well-pleasing and complete. (Rom. 12:1-2)[1]

If the Romans believed that there was a narrowing of the mind and its thoughts, that presumption is denied by Paul. The juxtaposition Paul is making here is the way “this present age” thinks and the way the believer will now think as a result and consequence of the encounter with God in the event of faith. One is stiff and dead, and the other is flexible and alive.[2] One is narrow; the other broad. One is set on destruction, the other on building. Our bodies are not dead sacrifices but living ones. Bring your bodies as holy and living sacrifices, well-pleasing to God. Harkening back to the prophets of old Hosea (6:6), Isaiah (1:11), and Samuel (1 Sam 15:22), this means the desire of God’s heart is not the sacrifice of animals, but of us; not of things dead but of things living, beating, hearing and seeing, acting and doing, laughing and rejoicing, weeping and having solidarity with those who weep. In this way, writes Paul, the believer proves the will of God; not that it’s true or not as in recourse to apologetics. Rather, God’s will is proved into the world by lively and dynamic life believers live out into the world; thusly, God’s will is proven as real.[3]

And before we get caught up in the narrow (this present age) definitions about what God’s will is—the definitions bent on excluding people from the presence of God—we must keep in mind the very big and broad notions of what it means to participate in the will of God in the world. Micah can help us here,

God has told you, O mortal, what is good,
    and what does God require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
    and to walk humbly with your God? (6:8)

By means of living unto God the believer lives as a holy and living sacrifice[4] that is well-pleasing to God and this living and acting and doing is in the world among and before the neighbor. This is Christian being and existing. [5] Christian existence is not about being closed off and up, terrified of missing the mark (sin), stuck for fear of trying to be righteous and good[6] but rather living boldly and fully in the reality that you are righteous and good by the word and declaration of God. Then, from here, living into the world and in this way—walking humbly with God, doing justice, and loving kindness—the world and its inhabitants—flora and fauna, human and animal kind—benefit because God’s will (love, life, and liberation) are further released into the world. And the fun part is that this is what is reasonable service unto God, the well-pleasing, the thing that puts a smile on God’s face: when we live into the world as those who are loved and who then love in word and deed.[7]

And this may mean (and it definitely will) that living in the world and proving the good and loving will of God demands our actions in the world will be different.[8] Where there is injustice, we will bring justice; where there is unrighteousness, we will bring righteousness. Where there is hiddenness, we will bring exposure; where there is lying, we will bring the truth; where there is ill will, we will choose good-will; where there is vengeance seeking, we will bring trust in God; where there is destruction and death, we will bring healing and life. There is no promise that this road will be easy; in fact, I can only promise you it will be hard. Even still, it is our calling so that God’s life, love, liberation are brought further and deeper into the outermost edges of the entire world, seeking to release the beloved from captivity.

The next stop is having a sober and humble opinion of ourselves—without this, we will be unable to live as God so wills us to live. We must first embrace our equality in the eyes of God, none of us is above the other, even if we carry different burdens and demands, or have different responsibilities and vocations. Paul presses us further than equality among individuals, he refers to the community of believers as the one body in Christ with many limbs/organs. Just as the limbs and organs—as various and many as they are—do not have a hierarchy among them, each is dependent on the other, so, too, are we to be toward each other in our various roles. Let us not forget every part of the body is impacted when one limb/organ is impacted.[9] Herein is part of the proving of God’s good will starting with our own body: hurting when one of us hurts, surging to the locus of pain to heal, carrying a bit more burden to lighten the load on the part that hurts, protecting the one who hurts, and celebrating when there’s healing, experiencing relief all over, being awash in happy endorphins and hormones.

Conclusion

To close, I want to quote from Luther about Romans 12:6,

“[Paul] has shown above how we ought to conduct ourselves toward God, namely, through the renewal of our mind and the sanctification of our body, so that we may prove that is the will of God. At this point, and from here to the end of the epistle, he teaches how we should act toward our neighbor and explains at length this command to love our neighbor. But it is remarkable how such a clear and important teaching of such a great apostle, indeed of the Holy Spirit [God’s self], receives no attention. We are busy with I don’t know what kind of trifles in building churches, in creating the wealth of the church… in multiplying ornamentation and gold and silver vessels…and in other forms of visible display. And the sum total of our piety consist of this; we are not at all concerned about the things the apostle here enjoins, to say nothing of the monstrous display of pride, ostentation, avarice, luxury, and ambition….”[10]

As we proceed through the remainder of Romans and as you leave here, ask yourself: what looks like the will of God? What looks like love? Life? Liberation? What do you see bringing encouragement, wholeness, and comfort to this humble body of Christ? Whatever that is, press into it without reservation. But don’t stop there, also be on the lookout for what disproves the will of God…  What is stealing from others and from the body of Christ? What brings destruction? What brings death? What tears apart? What causes division? Whatever it is, do not succumb to it but walk differently, and let the light of Christ expose that which is false and destructive, that which is not of God.

As the body of Christ, we are only as strong and healthy as each limb and organ; may we be known for bringing health and life to all our limbs and organs so that we can be the means by which God’s will is further proven into the world for the beloved.

[1] Translation mine, unless otherwise noted

[2] LW 25, 437. “Therefore, those ‘who are led by the Spirit of God’ (Rom. 8:14) are flexible in mind and thinking.”

[3] LW 25, 433. “This comment is made by reason of progress. For he is speaking of those people who already have begun to be Christians. Their life is not a static thing, but in movement from good to better, just as a sick man proceeds from sickness to health, as the Lord also indicates in the case of the half-dead man who was taken into the care of the Samaritan.”

[4] LW 25, 435. “The true sacrifice to God is not something outside us or belonging to us, nor something temporal or for the moment, but it is we ourselves, forever…”

[5] LW 25, 434. 5 stages of Aristotle redefined, “…so also with the Spirit: nonbeing is a thing without a name and a man in his sins; becoming is justification; being is righteousness; action is doing and living righteously; being acted upon is to be made perfect and complete. And these five stages in some way are always in motion in man. …through his new birth he moves from sin to righteousness, and thus from nonbeing through becoming to being… and when this has happened, he lives righteously.”

[6] LW 25, 436. “For it is nothing that we perform good works, and live a pure life, if we thereby glorify ourselves; hence the expression follows acceptable to God. He says this in opposition to vainglory and pride which so often subvert our good deeds.”

[7] LW 25, 437. “…‘Present your service which is reasonable, that is, your bodies as a living sacrifice.’”

[8] LW 25, 438. “For whenever God gives us a new degree of grace, He gives in such a way that it conflicts with all our thinking and understanding. Thus he who then will not yield or change his thinking or wait, but repels God’s grace and is impatient, never acquires this grace.”

[9] LW 25, 444. “For although there is one faith, one Baptism, one church, one Lord, one Spirit, one God, nevertheless, there are various kinds of gifts in this faith, church, lordship, etc.”

[10] LW 25, 444-445.

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According to the Spirit

Psalm 119: 105, 111-112 Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path. Your decrees are my inheritance for ever; truly, they are the joy of my heart. I have applied my heart to fulfill your statutes for ever and to the end.

Introduction

Paul is faithfully walking us through the depths of divinely gifted grace, mercy, and faith—the material expression of divine love. Faith surges forth from God’s love, plumbs the depths of human existence and returns to God’s love, carrying with it God’s beloved, you. There’s nothing you can do to fracture that love because it’s not yours to fracture and you didn’t cause it; you are the beloved because God declares you to be the beloved, because God loves you without a why or wherefore. When you believe this love is for you, this is faith: faith accepts God’s promise as true, bringing glory and honor to God, proving God truthful—worthy to be trusted. This is loving God for God’s self. Just love… pure, unrestricted, uncalculated, unconditional love. This is the type of love noted by the popular Mumford and Sons song, “Sigh No More”,

Love, it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
There is a design, an alignment
A cry of my heart to see
The beauty of love as it was made to be[1]

Love is the great alignment; love aligns us to itself because love liberates. Love aligns us to God because God is love and the source of love; and in this alignment we are aligned to our neighbor and ourselves. We love others and we love ourselves. Blemishes and all; meager attempts to change and all; hot beginnings and tepid endings (or the reverse) … love, God’s love, bears all things. This is why Paul can say in Romans 8,

Romans 8:1-11

So then at this very time [there is] not one punishment following condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life liberated you in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. [2]

(Rom. 8:1-2)

There is, in other words, no condemnation for those who trust God, who consider God trustworthy. This means that the person and being of the human being who misses the mark, isn’t categorically worse than one who has not missed the mark. It is not that those who trust God by faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit are now without sin as if they do not sin. Rather, it’s about being exempted from condemnation for sinning; because the believer is justified by faith apart from works, even bad ones…even good ones! While there still maybe be “horizontal consequences” for missing the mark, with God, with Love, it is not determinate of being God’s beloved. Thus, Paul continues,

For the powerlessness of the law by which it was weak according to the flesh, God sent God’s own son in the form of sinful flesh and on behalf of sin condemned sin in the flesh so that the commands of the law might be fulfilled in us, not for those who walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

(Rom. 8:3-4)

The law, according to Paul, is not able to grant the necessary strength to fulfill it (to do the law); the law is powerless to make one obey its commands. In this way the law is made weak, exposed as weak according to flesh—our inability to do it. The law can only declare what’s to be done and what’s not to be done, but the law cannot cause the law to be fulfilled and upheld. Only love can do that.[3] Even if the law is fulfilled in deed while the heart and mind grumble—lacking love—this is not fulfilling the law because there is no love and it’s dry, heartless service to the law. We are in the thick of serving ourselves, and only ourselves.[4]

So, if the law is placed as a door granting access to God only if it is completed or fulfilled, then there’s no access because not only can we not do it rightly and fully, but the law cannot grant the power to do so. Thus, it can only deny entrance. However, God’s love exceeds the law, herein is mercy, grace, and freedom from the demand to do anything else but just love in response. Mercy and Grace eclipse the law because God’s love can move around the law to the one being commanded and usher that one into God’s love as the beloved. This is what Christ did: God sent God’s Son, Jesus, to be the representation of God and God’s love in the world, to be the door (the way, truth, and life) to God and God’s love, to show those who walked according to the flesh how to walk according to the Spirit.

How did Jesus’s life and death demonstrate this? By his resurrection. Here’s the key: Paul writes,

For those who exist/live according to the flesh, they judge/observe the things of the flesh, but the ones who [exist/live] according to the Spirit, [judge/observe] the things of the Spirit. For the aspiration of the flesh [is] death, but the aspiration of the Spirit [is] life and peace. On the very account that the aspiration of the flesh [is] hostility toward God, for it is not submitted to the law of God, indeed it cannot; now those who exist/live in the flesh are not able to please God.

(Rom. 8:5-8)

First, what is God’s law? To love God and to love the neighbor (these two are one; the ten break into these two). Working all the way back to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, what happens? Jesus’s baptism. Who speaks? God. What does God say? “This is my son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (or some rendition). Fast-forward to Jesus’s trial: whom do we release and whom do sentence? Barabbas and Jesus, respectively. Thus, in this moment it is highlighted that the law is not kept in two ways: we sentenced God’s son to the cross—the one who spoke to us about love—and we clearly did not listen to him. We chose our own wisdom over God’s and determined who was in and who was out, who was to live and who was to die—this is judging according to the flesh, and the aspiration of the flesh is death.[5] Judging according to the flesh, we forced the law to do the very thing it was not supposed to do: condemn to death an innocent man who was our neighbor and condemn God. In this, Christ bore our sinfulness (fully) took it into himself, took on the guilt that was not his[6]—the Sinless one became the sinful one, identifying fully with all those oppressed and marginalized by the judgment of the flesh and the worshipping of law at the expense of God and neighbor—to the point of blatant hostility toward both.[7]

But God! Exclaims Paul:

But you, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so then the Spirit of God dwells in you…Now, if Christ [is] in you, then the body is dead concerning sin, and the Spirit is alive concerning righteousness. Now if the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ form the dead will make [you] alive…

(Rom. 8:9, 10-11a)

What happens after Jesus died? God resurrects Jesus. This is the vindication of the righteous life of Christ that becomes (mercifully and graciously) ours by faith alone. It is in this crazy story of Christ being resurrected where we see the ultimate act of divine love, mercy, and grace: we are exposed, yet we are summoned forward into God’s love and not into God’s condemnation. Not only did we not get what we deserved (mercy) we received something we did not deserve (grace); this *is* the epitome of the actuality of divine love for you, for us. By divine mercy and grace calling us forward out death and into (new) life, how do we do anything but run to the very arms of God, and throw ourselves against Abba, loving God for God’s sake because we were first loved? [8] And here, in the lap of God, embraced by and embracing God, the law is done.[9] It is silenced; it has no stake here because love is bigger than the law and love is the point. Here, the law returns to its rightful spot: a means by which we serve our neighbor in love, mercy, and grace (sometimes by obeying it and sometimes by breaking it).

Conclusion

We are called to walk according to the Spirit and not according to the Flesh. This is not about “not sinning” this about showing mercy and grace and love to those who are held far off, those who cannot do right by society, those who are condemned already, and those who are oppressed and ostracized. The law is not bad, but when we use it defend our desires or mold the world or other people according to our judgment according to the flesh, it becomes bad and a means to exacerbate our sickness of othering, casting out, eliminating, condemning, determining the livelihoods of bodies not ours.

Walking according to the Spirit is not about elevating this or that commandment or decree; it’s about love, it’s about mercy, grace, forgiveness and absolution. It’s about loving God and loving our neighbor just because.[10] It’s about seeing the other person standing—vulnerably and humbly—before you, and giving them space to just be. Love will always liberate. Mercy will grant life. Grace will provoke love. And there we go around again.

Beloved, you are loved. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Loved. And when you forget look to the cross, because Christ died and rose again to bring you the fullness of new life. And then go love as you’ve been loved.

[1] Mumford and Sons “Sigh No More” Sigh No More 2010.

[2] Translation mine unless otherwise noted; “Sin” is also “missing the mark”

[3] LW 25, 345. “Therefore, unless faith gives the light and love makes us free, no man can either have or do anything good, but only evil, even when he performs the good.”

[4] LW 25, 346. “But nature set for itself no object but itself toward which it is borne and toward which it is directed; it sees, seeks, and works only toward itself in all matters, and it passes by all other things and even God Himself in the midst, as if it did not see them and is directed only toward itself.”

[5] LW 25, 345. Human nature “…in particular cases human nature knows and wills what is good but in general neither knows nor wills it. The reason is that it knows nothing but its own good, or what is good and honorable and useful for itself, but not what is good for God and other people. Therefore it knows and wills more what is particular, yes, only what is an individual good.” And, “This curvedness is now natural for us, a natural wickedness and a natural sinfulness. Thus man has no help from this natural powers, but he needs the aid of some power outside of himself. This is love, without which he always sins against the Law ‘You shall not covet,’ that is, turn nothing on yourself fand seek nothing for yourself but live, do, and think all things for God alone. For then a man will know the good in every way along with all particular good things, and he will judge all things. Thus the law is impossible for us.”

[6] LW 25, 349. “For the sin by reason of which sin in the flesh is condemned is itself the penalty of sin which Christ took into His own flesh which was without sin, yet for the sake of the penalties of sin He took on the likeness of sinful flesh. Therefore sin which is in the flesh of all other people is condemned because of the sin of Him in whose flesh there was no sin.”

[7] LW 25, 344. “It is certainly true that the law of nature is known to all men and that our reason does speak for the best things, but what best things? It speaks for the best not according to God but according to us, that is, for things that are good in an evil way. For it seeks itself and its own in all things, but not God. This only faith does in love.”

[8] LW 25, 346. “For grace has set before itself no other object than God toward which it is carried and toward which it is moving; it sees only Him, it seeks only Him, and it always. Moves toward Him, and all other things which it sees between itself and God is passes by as if it had not seen them and directs itself only toward God.”

[9] LW 25, 348. “Thus the law is fulfilled because God alone is loved. For he who does not fear death because of God, likewise does not love this life more than God, and therefore he inwardly hates himself but loves God above all things. For he who loves God more than himself, surely loves God above all thing, since a person loves nothing as much as himself. But this is impossible for the flesh; for the wisdom of the flesh makes a person love himself above all things, even more than God.”

[10] LW 25, 350. “To be sure, the Law in itself is very good. It is as with a sick man who wants to drink some wine because he foolishly things that his health will return if he does so. No if the doctor, without any criticism of the wine, should say to him: ‘It is impossible for the wine to cure you, it will only make you sicker,’ the doctor is not condemning the wine but only the foolish trust of the sick man in it. For he needs other medicine to get well, so that the then can drink his wine. Thus also our corrupt nature needs another kind of medicine than the Law, by which it can arrive at good health so that it can fulfill the Law.”

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Free to Love

Psalm 13:5-6 5 But I put my trust in your mercy; my heart is joyful because of your saving help.  I will sing to God, for God has dealt with me richly; I will praise the Name of God Most High.

Introduction

Let’s review what’s transpired thus far in our journey through Romans:

In Romans 4 we learned that justification, according to Paul, is by faith alone apart from (any) work. Faith anchors into the promise of God (which was given before the law). According to Paul, Abraham trusted the promise of God, and this is what justifies Abraham. Faith in the promises of God justifies because believing God’s promises ascribes to God the honor due God: trustworthiness and worthy to be believed. From faith comes the doing of the law—remember, the law was given as means to assist God’s people in the world toward their neighbor, it was never meant to be worshipped. However, eventually the law eclipsed love in that it ceased to serve the people and the people began to serve the law—love was held in captivity to law. Thus, according to Paul, the law’s impact is known in its wrath, because we only feel the law when we break it—because the reward won’t come until the law is completed/fulfilled (thus, why we cannot be justified by our works because we need to do them all the time). However, Paul says, “[Jesus] was handed over on account of our trespasses and was raised up for the sake of our justification” (v.25). Thus, it is all by faith and trust; and in this way Abraham becomes (truly) the elder of many nations and through him they are blessed (no matter their culture and context, time and tense).

In Romans 5 we saw that, for Paul, being justified by faith yokes the believer to God’s peace. This peace comes with faith and is eternal because it is assured and secured by God and not by our actions and works. Thus, we can come close to God, be one with God, love God for God’s sake and not love God or use God as a means to an end. Also, God’s peace brings us peace with our neighbor whom we can love without a why or wherefore (without using them). And, finally, by faith and God’s peace we are given peace with ourselves because we are loved by a God who has demonstrated God’s deep solidarity with us in our worst plight: condemnation and death. When we should’ve received what we deserved because of our inability to judge rightly—the reason Jesus went to the cross—God loved us and demonstrated it through Jesus’s resurrection which secured for us the knowledge that God loves us no matter what and will not forsake us even when we do the worst! (I.e., try to kill God).

Now last week we looked at the first part of Romans 6, and we discussed our liberation from the condemnation of sin.[1] If Jesus was handed over on account of our trespasses, then for us to return to sin’s domination (whether by means of obeying to achieve something or by means of breaking it just because we can or by ignoring sin) is to deny Christ his work on the cross, it is to side-step the event of the cross and to tell God that God isn’t needed (this is the opposite of bringing God honor and glory, the antithesis of declaring God to be trustworthy). Also, in focusing on our sins, we forsake our justification by faith because we do not trust God that God has dealt with it. Thus, according to Paul, we are to be “dead” to sin… not that we do not sin—Christians sin until the end of time, says Luther—but that it does not exert control over us. And as we discussed last Sunday, there are two ways sin can re-exert control over us: by focusing on it by means of strict obedience (as if it is the only word) and by breaking it just ‘cuz. So, instead, Paul exhorts, just live, live as those liberated from sin and are imperfect, because otherwise we will return to being closed in on ourselves.

Now, this week…staying in Romans 6, Paul writes,

Romans 6:12-23

Therefore, let not sin reign over your mortal body (σώματι) in order to obey its inordinate desire, and do not present your limbs as weapons of injustice for sin, but present yourself to God as the living out of the dead and present your limbs as weapons of righteousness for God. For sin will not have authority over you; for you are not under the law but under grace. What therefore? May we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it not come to be! [2]

Rom. 6:12-15

As Paul moves through chapter 6 of Romans, he brings the discussion of the law and sin down to a personal level: our own bodies. So, if you’re feeling a bit attacked, don’t worry… you’re being attacked. Once again, we are confronted with the problem of intention, but this time it’s bodily intention. Last week we were looking at the inner intention, and now we are looking at outer intention. What we do with our bodies matters, says Paul. Just as we are to be dead to sin—not letting it have control and condemnation over us—we are also not to actively let sin reign over our bodies causing us to obey sin’s inordinate desires. We are not to spend our intellectual/emotional/spiritual time consumed with sin—by being consumed with not sinning, intentionally sinning, or ignoring it completely as if one does not sin. And we’re not to submit our bodies to sin, either. So Paul exhorts us to allow our bodies to become not only a site of liberation (for ourselves) but also the site in which faith manifests itself in love in service to the neighbor which is glory to God.

The juxtaposition of “under law” and “under grace” is important. Harkening back to what was discussed in chapter 4 of Romans, the believer is no longer under the law but under grace because the believer is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Thus, as we serve our neighbor it is done out of faith manifesting in love for the neighbor as the neighbor rather than as a means to fulfill the law—this would be putting primacy of place to the law.[3] So, Paul exhorts us to bring our body (the outer nature, corporate and personal) in line with our souls (inner nature, corporate and personal) in service to the neighbor for the neighbor’s sake which does, in fact, bring glory to God. As we know from Jesus, to love the neighbor is to love God and to love God is to love the neighbor, and not merely abstractly or confessionally but in practical reality, materially (orthopraxy born of orthodoxy). Thus we love as we have first been loved.

Once again, though, Paul reminds us about our intention: do we allow our limbs to be used as weapons of injustice just because we can? Should we use our limbs as weapons of injustice by focusing on ourselves and our adherence to the law at the expense of the neighbor? Should we just ignore our limbs, pretending they are useless considering we’re justified by faith? (This is another way to serve injustice through our inactivity toward justice.) Μὴ γένοιτο! For Paul, this intention leads to death; to serve the law for the law’s sake keeps one in the grip of sin, which is (bluntly) being turned in on the self. If you are trying to make yourself right or justified or good through obedience to the law, you are of no use to your neighbor because you cannot see them through the demand of the law and desire to make yourself right by your actions. Being concerned with only yourself is not freedom because you cannot be free when you are trying to serve the law for the law’s sake because you are held captive by the law and thus also by condemnation of sin; you are stuck (dead) in your trespasses. You might as well be dead man walking.[4]

However, says Paul, we were recreated in the event of justification by faith in God (trusting in God and believing God’s promises) through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. So, where we were once slaves to the law, sin, and (thus) death, we are now slaves to promise, righteousness, and life (Rom 6:17-18). However, this does not mean we are without the law (lawless, τὴν ἀνομίαν), rather the law is in our service, in service to love and not the other way around. We must use the law to guide our bodies, to bring them in alignment to our inner nature, and to spread God’s love, life and liberation to our neighbor,[5] especially those who are still held captive in unjust and death dealing structures, systems, institutions (visible and invisible), and ideologies. This is Christian sanctification: to love God and to love the neighbor in freedom and responsibility to the benefit of the cosmos.[6]

Conclusion

I will close with a quote from Gustavo Gutierrez’s text A Theology of Liberation,

…St. Paul asserts not only that Christ liberated us; he also tells us that he did it in order that we might be free. Free for what? Free to love. ‘In the language of the Bible,’ writes Bonhoeffer, ‘freedom is not something [one] has for [themself] but something [they have] for others….It is not a possession, a presence, an object,…but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means ‘being free for the other,’ because the other has bound me to [them]. Only in relationship with the other am I free.’ The freedom to which we are called presupposes the going out of oneself, the breaking down of our selfishness and of all the structures that support our selfishness; the foundation of this freedom is openness to others. The fullness of liberation—a free gift from Christ—is communion with God and with other [people].[7]

Gutierrez, Theology of Liberation

[1] Remember that the word translated as “sin” can also mean “missing the mark”.

[2] Translation mine unless otherwise noted.

[3] LW 25, 316. “For those people understand the expression ‘to be under the Law’ as being the same as having a law according to which one must live. But the apostle understands the words ‘to be under the Law’ as equivalent to not fulfilling the Law, as being guilty of disobeying the Law, as being a debtor and a transgressor, in that the Law has the power of accusing and damning a person and lording it over him, but it does not have the power to enable him to satisfy the Law or overcome it. And thus as long as the Law rules, sin also has dominion and holds man captive.”

[4] LW 25, 317. “Sin is the sting or power of death, through which death is powerful and holds dominion, as above in chapter 5:12 ff.: ‘death through sin’ etc. But the Law is the power or strength of sin, through which sin remains and holds dominion. And from this dominion of the Law and sin no one can be liberated except through Christ…”

[5] LW 25, 317. “For the wisdom of the flesh is opposed to the Word of God, but the Word of God is immutable and insuperable. Therefore God, but the Word of God is immutable and insuperable. Therefore it is necessary that the wisdom of the flesh be changed and that it give up its form and take on the form of the Word. This takes place when through faith it takes itself captive and strips off its own crown, conforms itself to the word, and believes the word to be true and itself to be false.”

[6] LW 25, 321. “For through the terms ‘sanctification’ and ‘cleanness’ he is trying to convey the same concept, namely, that the body should be pure, but not with jut any find of purity, but with that which comes from within, form the spirit of sanctifying faith.”

[7] Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Trans Sister Caridad Inda and john Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973. Ed 5th. Original: Teologia de la liberacion, Perspectivas Lima: CEP, 1971. (p. 36

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Go and Live!

Psalm 86:10, 16-17 For you are great; you do wondrous things; and you alone are God. Turn to me and have mercy upon me; give your strength to your servant… Show me a sign of your favor … you, God, have helped me and comforted me.

Introduction

In seminary, when I was given the opportunity to assist a professor with their teaching and grading, I was often struck by how many students were focused on eliminating sin. So many conclusions to systematic and pastoral papers ended with exhortations toward living sinless to the glory of God—exhortation directed at both the author and the audience of the paper. I never commented on these exhortational confessions decorating double-spaced, four-page papers, but I remember being very aware of their presence and their frequency. It struck me as odd because weren’t we exhorted by both Jesus and Paul to live, but this focus on the cessation of sin seemed the opposite of life, it felt like—and I wasn’t even that far into reading Luther at this point—a return to incurvatus in se, being curved in on oneself. In other words, it felt like the antithesis of living and life; it felt like stagnation and death.

I’m not without accusation and guilt. I spent my earliest years as a Christian focused on being sinless so I could be, once and for all, holy and righteous, perfect like my heavenly parent is perfect. The result didn’t make me relate to my neighbor more, but less; it didn’t make me love God for God’s sake, but less and worse: it made God a means to my end of being “sinless”. It didn’t make me freer in Christ, but less; it didn’t make me more dependent on the Spirit but less. It made me less loving and more judgmental. With sinlessness as my focus, I was not liberated from but enslaved to sin.

When Paul declares, “In this way also you, you consider yourselves to be dead truly to sin/missing the mark, and [truly] living to God in Christ Jesus” we must put the emphasis on the right syllable. Keeping in mind what we’ve covered so far, we must proceed with these two things in mind: 1. The Christian is justified by faith clinging to the promise of God and not by works of the law because the law cannot be satiated and will not grant the reward unless done perfectly; and 2. Because the Christian is justified by faith (alone) they have peace with God, with their neighbor, and with themselves because they are no longer trying to serve the law as the mediator. This then leads us to what Paul says in in Romans 6…

Romans 6:1b-11

Shall we persist in sin so that grace might abound? May it not come to be! Whoever died to sin, how can we still live in [sin]? Or do you not know that as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?…For [the death] he died, he died to sin once for all; now [the life] he lives, he lives to God. In this way also you, you consider yourselves to be dead truly to sin/missing the mark, and [truly] living to God in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 6:1b-3, 10-11)[1]

About this passage, Martin Luther writes, “We are in sin until the end of our life.”[2] Christians will continue to sin and miss the mark their entire lives; you cannot avoid that fact, no matter how much missing the mark brings pain and suffering. So, when Paul exhorts his audience not to persist in sin, it is not with the intention of not having sin, but not intentionally seeking it out with the goal to demonstrate how far being justified by faith and grace will go. Because, for Paul, such a mindset is not liberation from sin, but the very return to being controlled by it, being controlled by your actions, thus ultimately still giving the law too much power and authority over you. It’s less about the deeds of sin and more about the orientation of the believer in relationship to sin thus to the law. If it’s all about not sinning, about not missing the mark (ever), then we are all back at square one: consumed with our deeds and our actions and, thus, the law. If you focus on your sins—your individual actions and deeds that break the law (either God’s or your own)—you are still being controlled by the law and are not free. Μὴ γένοιτο!

Paul is telling us here in Romans 6 that we are truly! liberated from sin unto life. So, returning to a singular focus on sins, on our deeds and actions, is a return to the tyranny of the law—something the law is not supposed to have. So, what does it mean that we should not persist in sin or that we are dead to sin? It means that we are dead to sin, as in liberated from the controlling accusation and condemnation of sin because it’s been dealt with in Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Because, as Paul has already told us in Romans 4, “[Jesus] was handed over on account of our trespasses and was raised up for the sake of our justification” (v.25). This then is the foundation of our life and liberation from death and from sin/trespasses; if we have been baptized into Christ’s death, then we are resurrected into his life (our justification). Said another way, “the death he died, he died to sin once for all; now [the life] he lives, he lives to God.” To focus our energy on our sin is to deny Christ this once-for-all-ness and to declare his sacrifice as deficient or, even, non-existent because it still depends on the law and on us. If this is so, then even as we live, we are dead because sin’s power and control live on, commanding all our energy and attention. [3] We are dead in our trespasses.

Rather, says Paul, it’s all on Christ, so…Go! Live! Go and live neither by pressing into sin, because that is still sin controlling you and thus is still death, nor by ignoring it and pretending you don’t have sin or you don’t miss the mark, for that is also not a living liberated but living controlled by sin thus death. Rather, go and live knowing you are going to miss the mark; and (good news!) when you do be sure to admit you’re fault and error, seek forgiveness, but just keep moving, keep loving, keep living, keep liberating. Go and live, live like those who are liberated from the oppression of the wrath of the law, of sin, of being curved in on yourself; live like those who are justified by faith and those who have peace with God thus with their neighbor and thus with themselves. Just live. Do you not know that you are alive in Christ and dead to sin?[4]You have died to sin because you have died with Christ; you have been raised unto life because you have been given life in Christ to live; why are you still consumed with death, with sin?[5] Why are you acting like the dead (controlled by sin) when you have been recreated to be the living (controlled by the loving, living, liberating Spirit of God)?[6]  As Paul writes later in Romans, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to again return to fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption, by which we cry, ‘Abba Father’” (8:15).

Conclusion

Two comments by way of closing.

First: You will miss the mark (sin). This knowledge that you are going to miss the mark (sin) is not an excuse to trample about without care for your neighbor. Just because you are justified by faith (fully and truly) does not mean you get to isolate yourself off from your neighbor, treating them as inferior to you and your needs. Too often people have used their faith to prop themselves up and above their neighbor, making themselves more important than their neighbor, and using their neighbor as a means to an end. But this isn’t liberation; this is as much enslavement to sin as is being obsessed with it. Liberation always includes the neighbor; it is never for you alone. For the one who can see and serve the neighbor without losing themselves in that action is the one who truly is free and liberated.

Second (is like the first): You will miss the mark (sin). You are not above it or below it. But if this fact becomes our focus, it will become a big stumbling block hindering both our ability to love God and to love our neighbor. We will never love perfectly because we can’t; plus, what even is perfect love? Isn’t the most perfect love the love that just wants to love for no other reason than just because (without a why or wherefore)? But if we become consumed with loving perfectly, living perfectly, acting perfectly we will slowly close ourselves into our cages, the same ones we’ve been liberated from. So, we live as messy and odd and weird and awkward and clunky as we can; but the goal is to live as loved and liberated human beings in the world, oriented toward bringing God’s love, life, and liberation to all people.

[1] Translation mine unless otherwise noted.

[2] LW 25, 308.

[3] LW 25, 311. I’m applying the following quote with a bit of demythologizing, “The other kind of death is eternal and very terrible. It is the death of the damned, where sin and the sinner are not the ones to die, while man is saved, but man dies, while sin lives on and continues forever.”

[4] LW 25, 311. “Because for death to be killed means that death will not return, and ‘to take captivity captive means that captivity will never return, a concept which cannot be expressed through an affirmative assertion.”

[5] LW 25, 314. “The meaning is that we must undergo this spiritual death only once. For whoever dies thus lives for all eternity. Therefore we must not return to our sin in order to die to sin again.”

[6] LW 25, 315. “He has Christ, who dies no more; therefore he himself dies no more, but rather he lives with Christ forever. Hence also we are baptized only once, by which we gain the life of Christ, even though we often fall and rise again.”

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Peace be with You

Psalm 116: 10-12 How shall I repay God for all the good things God has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of God. I will fulfill my vows to God in the presence of all God’s people.

Introduction

Last week I talked about the law and that, according to Paul in Romans, the law brings wrath. The law is felt (principally) in its discipline and rarely in its reward because to get the reward one must keep the law perfectly forever. According to Paul, in Romans 4, the law is not the medium through which Abraham was the father of many nations; this was done through faith, specifically faith and trust in the promise of God that God will do what God said God will do. If access to the promise of God is by the law, then the promise ceases to be a promise and becomes a threat because no one can keep the law all the time and perfectly. Thus, Paul told us, to be justified requires faith first and not law obedience first because faith clings to the promise of God while our deeds and works cling to the law.

Is the law bad? No, not at all. The law has its place but not as the mediator between God and people; it is secondary to the promise and is to serve the promise because the promise existed before the law. This means that the promise is this mediator—or the one who fulfills the promise. This means, for Paul, that faith—trust that God will do what God says God will do—justifies believers with God, bringing them into divine righteousness. Further, for Christians, justification is defined by faith in Christ as the divine fulfilment of the divine promise uttered all those years ago to Abraham. It is by faith solely in Christ alone by the power of the Holy Spirit the believer is justified before God. In this way, the law cannot be a means of justification. According to Paul, it is by faith or nothing because no one can become perfect by the law because of the law’s incessant hunger and demand for obedience. Thus, that the believer is justified by faith alone, the law is rendered powerless to condemn and judge the believer as wanting. Here the law is returned to its role in serving the believer in her pursuit of loving God by loving the neighbor—the reversal of the believer serving the law, which becomes self-serving and at the expense of both God and the neighbor.

But there’s even more to this concept Paul cultivates here in Romans. By faith, the believer is justified and declared righteous, but also the believer has peace, divine peace, with God, with their neighbor, with themselves because of the love of God that is now resident in the believer’s heart by the Holy Spirit.

Romans 5:1-8

Therefore, since being declared righteous out of faith we have peace with God through Jesus Christ our Lord through whom we also have obtained access by faith to this grace in which we have stood and we boast on the basis of the hope of the glory of God…Now hope does not disgrace because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given to us. (Rom. 5:1-2, 5)[1]

Paul extends his conception of justification into the divine love of God that brings with it God’s peace surpassing understanding. The peace that Paul speaks about here is the peace of God and peace with God.[2] This peace is not dependent on obedience to the law; in law obedience there is no peace because you must always do the law, and here assurance and rest are (at best) momentary. Thus, what Paul is speaking of here is the peace that comes with trust in God that God is faithful, and God will do and has done what God has promised God will do (this is the soothed conscience).[3] And herein the believer has rest and assurance because she is at peace with God by faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What is interesting here is that we’re declared righteous before we have peace; we have faith before we have peace.[4] Why? Because being told you are loved right here, right now, as you are and wherever you are solicits a request for faith, of trust and confidence in the lover proving the lover to be truthful; in this proof there is peace because you realize you do not have to perform to be accepted and loved. If the lover proves themselves to love without condition—apart from the law and despite it—then the lover is worth trusting, worth believing, worth having faith in. Thus, Paul explains, Christ died on our behalf while we were still stuck and missing the mark (sinners). God not only said that God will bless all the nations through Abraham, but God has also now, through Christ’s death and resurrection and by the power of the Holy Spirit, blessed all the nations. The lover is worthy to be trusted because the lover went into the deepest parts of human existence in solidarity with humanity, identifying with humanity and, by divine love, overcame humanity’s inability to judge rightly. Thus, God is—100%—for us, in the good, bad, and ugly.

This is why at a Christian church it is crucial to talk about Jesus the Christ. It is not biblicism or literalism, it is all geared toward reminding the beloved they are the beloved and pointing to the representative event declaring to the entire cosmos that God loves the beloved (truly) no matter where they find themselves. To sidestep around Christ and the proclamation of Christ crucified and raised, is to demand that people trust and believe in an abstract conception of God who has not demonstrated and does not demonstrate love and trustworthiness.[5] It is also crucial to speak of Christ because the beloved is prone to defaulting back to their own habits of works righteousness and obedience to the law to assure themselves that they are okay with God.[6] But this is to seek peace before being justified by faith, it is to fabricate peace from one’s own works and not receive it as a gift of God by faith, by the pouring forth of love into our heart by the power of the Holy Spirit who resides with us, among us, and in us, confirming to us that God is truly and utterly for us, provoking us to love God for God’s own sake just as we have been so loved by God.[7]

Conclusion

Beloved, Paul tells us that the peace of God comes as a result of faith in God. This means that as we’re lovingly brought to the full exposure of who we are as we are we see God there with us, not far off as if God cannot be near but close, with us, even in the worst. And in seeing God with us as we know we’re loved and, in this knowing and being loved as we are, we have peace with God because there is no mediator between God and humanity but God’s self: Jesus the Christ and the Holy Spirit. Here, you are given yourself back to yourself: you are liberated to be you, fully, quirky or run of the mill, too much or too little, intense or laid back, energetic or lethargic, even absolutely positive or completely negative. And as you know—deep down in your hearts—you are you and you are loved by God, you love yourself, and as you love yourself you can give yourself to your neighbor willingly and securely, without recourse to the law and works to justify yourself to God, to your neighbor, or to yourself. And isn’t this stabilization of self, this presence of self, this confidence of self the fruit of peace? Isn’t peace being completely present without a why or wherefore (sunder warumbe[8]) with yourself, with your neighbor, and with God?

This divine peace gifted to us has an eternal quality that will not wear out or fade away because you always have access to it: in the proclamation of Christ and in the event of faith in a space dedicated to the encounter with God. And because this peace is from God, riding on the coattails of faith, given to you by the resident power of the Holy Spirit in your heart, no one can take it from you, no trial or tribulation, says Paul. It is yours, over and over again, day in and day out, it is yours because God is always for you, over and over again, day in and day out, God is for you.

[1] Translation mine unless otherwise noted

[2]LW 25 (Luther’s Works “Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia (1515/1516)” Ed. Hilton C. Oswald. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1972. 285. “This is the spiritual peace of which all the prophets sing. And because this is the case, he adds the words with God. And this peace is prefigured in every peace which the children of Israel enjoyed in the days of old.”

[3] LW 25, 285. “And this is the real peace of conscience and trust in God. Just as on the contrary a spiritual disturbance is the lack of a quiet conscience and a mistrust of God.”

[4] LW 25, 285.

[5] LW 25, 286. “In the first place, the statement is directed against those who are so presumptuous as to believe that they can approach God without Christ, as if it were sufficient for them to have believed, as if thus by faith alone, but not through Christ, but beside Christ, as if beyond Christ they no longer needed Him after accepting the grace of justification. And now there are many people who from the works of faith make for themselves works of the Law and of the letter, when having received faith by Baptism and penitence, they now think that they are personally pleasing to God even without Christ, when actually both are necessary, namely, to have faith and also always to possess Christ as our Mediator in this faith.”

[6] LW 25, 287. “So at sunset the rays of the sun and the light of the sun go down together. But he who is needs the sun, rather he wants to have both the sun and the light needs the sun, rather he wants to have both the sun and the light at the same time. Therefore those who approach God through faith and not at the same time through Christ actually depart from Him. Second, the apostle is speaking against those who rely too heavily on Christ and not enough on faith, as if they were to be saved through Christ in such a way that they themselves had to do nothing and show no evidence of faith. These people have too much faith, or actually none at all. For this reason it is necessary to emphasize both points: ‘through faith’ and ‘through Christ,’ so that we do and suffer everything which we possibly can in faith in Christ.”

[7] LW 25, 294. “Thus the apostle asserts that this sublime power which is in us is not from ourselves, but must be sought from God. Thus it follows that it is poured into us, not born in us or originated in us. And this takes place through the Holy Spirit; it is not acquired by moral effort and practice, as our moral virtues are. Into our hearts, that is, into the depths and the midst and center of our hearts, not on the surface of the hart, as foam lies on water. This is the kind of love that the hypocrites have, who imagine and pretend that they have love. But a period of testing only proves the pride and impatience which lies deep within them.”

[8] Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry.

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Justified by Faith

Psalm 33:4-6 For the word of God is right, and all God’s works are sure. God loves righteousness and justice; the loving-kindness of God fills the whole earth. By the word of God were the heavens made, by the breath of God’s mouth all the heavenly hosts.

Introduction

When the law becomes all encompassing, human beings suffer. When the law is Lord, no one is safe. When the law is king, his ministers become executioners. If living life is all about obedience to the law, then we have no choice but to enter into an agreement with an oppressive state wielding threat and punishment. Ironically, in this situation, living life is the last thing you do because when the law becomes too heavy and controlling it suffocates human living and falsifies true, loving obedience. In this locality relationships fall apart because I begin to resent the one I am being forced to serve by appeasing the law rather than loving the person—and in all actuality, the person falls secondary in that equation, right? What is primary: the law or the person? The law. This is why controlling relationships—if you’ve ever been in one—are so tremendously destructive: human beings are lost for the sake of an inanimate thing that is being given the status and honor of a living, breathing entity, served as if it is God.

Law conceived in this way brings animosity, it creates division between people: those who uphold the law and those who do not, those who enforce the law and those who do not. Herein is the crux of Paul’s claim, in Romans 4, for the law is brought about by wrath/anger (v. 15a).So far I’ve only been speaking about a heavy handed civic use of the law, but Paul is speaking about what happens when law becomes the lord of people in relation to God. Paul says further,

Romans 4:13-25

By this [reason it is] from faith so that in order to secure the promise according to grace for all the offspring, not only to those of the law but also to those of faith of Abraham–who is the father of us all, just as it has been written that ‘I have established you as the father of many nations’—before God in whom he believed, the one who makes alive the dead and calls that which is not being as being…Therefore it was reckoned to him to righteousness. Now it was not written for him only that ‘it was reckoned to him,’ but also to us… (Rom. 4:16-17, 22-24a)

Access to God is bigger than law-obedience. Thus, Paul tells the Romans that it is not by the law they are saved and brought into union with God. The promise of God is not a command it’s a calling; Abraham, explains Paul, is summoned unto God, to follow God, to believe in the grand promise that Abraham—at his ripe old age and yet without heirs—will become the father of many nations. That Abraham follows God (obedience to the summons) is a result of Abraham believing God, having faith in the promise of God to bless Abraham not only personally (receiving an heir) but also that this blessing will be a for the whole world. It is Abraham’s trust and faith in God that brings God glory because God is trust-worthy and worthy of the honor of faith. The reality of Abraham’s faith as that which credits to him the righteousness of God extends to Abraham’s heirs who also believe in and trust God’s promises to be true.[1] For Paul, righteousness either comes by faith or it is null and void if by the law. It’s not by a little bit faith and a little bit law; to bring God glory is to first declare God to be truthful, by believing God’s promise, by faith, and then from here obeying God.

Why? Is the law bad? No. But the law cannot be satisfied, ever. It can never be a point of surety, it cannot give you the fullness of righteousness because it must be done every day, all the time, every minute, forever. Being righteous according to the law means that it only lasts as long as you obey the law, and all of it. This is why, for Paul (and Luther) the law works wrath because when broken it condemns—it does not praise you for a job well done, that praise comes in the medium of silence. In this way wrath comes because not only is the law giver forced to punish the lawbreaker, but the lawbreaker is forced to endure punishment for breaking the law. Wrath, here, is not just a tyrant God stomping about, here that the law brings wrath is more about that fractured law is fractured relationship, herein is wrath on both sides. Thus when the relationship with God is founded strictly on law, the law becomes threat: do this or else, don’t do this or else. But Paul is saying that the relationship with God is founded not on law but on promise believed, taken to be true, and this demands not obedience of law abidance but of faith and trust, obedience (or following) comes after the faith and trust. Otherwise, if the promise is first met with obedience to the law, as if the promise is only yours if you do x, y, or z then it isn’t a promise, it is a threat because it becomes law, stripped of its ability to bring anything beneficial, it will bring punishment and fracture, and if the promise is fulfilled by obedience before faith, the faith is superfluous and rendered false.[2]

And if faith is false, according to Paul, then the heirs of Abraham are only those who perform the works of the law or those who are born of Abraham which means that you and I (most likely) are condemned where we sit because we have no hope of being righteous before God by the law or by physical genetic similarities.[3] But yet Paul makes it clear that Abraham is and will be the father of many nations, thus this demands faith because Abraham could not bear many nations from his own body and the obedience to the law would demand not many nations but one. In this way faith renders those who are not related to Abraham literally—those who exist in different eras and times, those who are of different cultures and contexts—to be a part of the grandness of God by faith in God’s promises.[4] Those who trust God, believe that God will do what God has promised, are those who participate in God’s righteousness and become the children of Abraham, rendering the promises of God true and right, confirming that God is the God of the living and not of the dead!

Conclusion

A major theme in Protestant Christianity is the concept of justification, specifically that the righteousness of God comes to the those who are justified through faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit apart from works of the law. But we forget this, and we reach for the law to verify our relationship with God, to secure it. But this then renders the law more powerful than it should be, and we become consumed with obedience to the law for fear of letting the law down—forgetting God and ourselves. We will do whatever it takes to obey the law even if it means stripping ourselves and our neighbors of dignity, sacrificing everyone on the altar of the law. The law cannot ever be the sole means by which order and structure are maintained; when this happens we have a dire situation: the law is an idol we’ve allowed to dethrone God.

Without love, the law will become a ruthless tyrant set on death and destruction; the irony of law run amok without love. For it is in love where mercy can find ground and the law can become, once again, a means through which human beings serve each other, putting each other first, remembering that we live in communities that need order and structure. The law is to serve human beings; human beings are not meant to serve the law. There is more to life than obedience to the law because with only obedience to the law as the guide there is only fear and terror of threat and punishment and these hinder life and do not stimulate it.

You do not need to do anything to get God on your side, make God love you, demonstrate your love to God; you just need to dare to believe that God is on your side, that God does love you, that God knows you love God. And then, from here, let God in you, the Holy Spirit, cultivate that love so big that it spills over into the lives of other human beings lost in the shadow of the law.

[1] Martin Luther Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia (1515/1516) LW 25 Ed. Hilton C. Oswald. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1972. 278-279. “For not through the Law. Again he proves that righteousness does not come from the Law but from faith, according to the fruit and merit of both. For the Law and faith deserve opposite things. That is, the Law merits wrath and the loss of the promise, but faith deserves grace and the fulfillment of the promise, as if to say, if you do not believe the Scripture and its example, at least believe your own experience. For through the Law you have deserved wrath and desolation, but through faith grace and the possession or the whole world, as is clear in the case of the apostles, who reign with Christ in all the world. Thus also the promise was not given to Abraham through the Law but through faith, and the same will be the case with you who are his seed.”

[2] LW 25, 279. “Thus the Law works wrath, that is, when it is not fulfilled, it shows the wrath of God to those who have failed to provide for its fulfilment. Thus the Law is not evil, but they are evil to whom it was given and to whom it works wrath, but to the others (that is, the believers) it works salvation; actually it is not the Law that works this but grace. Therefore, it the promise were through the Law, since it works wrath, it would follow that the promise is not a promise, but rather a threat. And thus the promise would be abolished and through this also faith.”

[3] LW 25, 280. “The promise to Abraham and to his seed that they should be the heirs of the world was not through the Law nor through his seed but through the righteousness of faith. For if they are heirs through the Law and because of their physical relationship, then faith is done away and the promise annulled. ‘For the Law works wrath’ (4:15).”

[4] LW 25, 282. “Now ł ask, was he their father according to the flesh or according to the spirit? He cannot be so according to the flesh, because there were then and there were going to be many nations always who were in no way descended from him. And yet he was given the promise that he would be their father. But if you say that all the nations at going to be destroyed so that only the sons who are descended from him will reign throughout the world, then he will be the father of only one and not many nations. On the other hand, if all the nations will be reduced to slavery and live in servitude, then he will no longer be their father nor these nations his sons, for they will be slaves and he the lord of the nations; in this case fatherhood is eliminated, and oppression and violence are indicated.”

Posted on by laurenlarkin 0

“Nothing Seems to Satisfy”: Craving Relationality

(for part 1 click here, for part 2 click here, for part 3 click here)

Psalm 95:6-7 Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, and kneel before God our Creator. For God is our God, and we are the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of God’s hand. Oh, that today you would hearken to God’s voice!

Introduction

Have you gotten out of the habit of communing with other people? I think I have. Well, to be honest, being social is very low on my list of things I regularly think about. When we first lived in Grand Junction in 2014, it took about ten months before I realized that the looming feeling I had was something called “loneliness.” Have you heard of it? I don’t get lonely; I can go for a very long time without any social interaction. A. Very. Long. Time. So, when I had this weird sensation and finally realized that there’s a term for it and that it there’s no drug to take to eliminate it, I struck out to make a friend. Just one. And I did! Lyuda and I have been friends since late 2015.

But this story feels like a distant memory of eras long gone. I’m reminded it’s been awhile since I’ve done something like that: gone out and made a new friend. I think it’s something to do with what we’ve suffered over the past few years. Now, as I said, it takes me a long to get “lonely”, but three years in? It feels especially tangible right now, right on the surface. Do you feel lonely? If you do, you are not alone. We’re all lonely. We’re just now starting to pull together and peek heads out of our shells…three years later. For three years, we’ve been bombarded with the fear of a virus that is very contagious, making it impossible to share place and space with others. Not to mention the caustic socio-political environment, tearing friendships apart, families asunder, and drawing thick lines in the sand. So, we’ve became pros at shutting down and closing off because our lives depended on it; we’ve become experts at speaking vapidly to stave off emotional outbursts, or worse? So, the coming back is hard… at times, too hard; isn’t it just easier to stay in, stay closed, stay distant, stay safe? I’m fine on my own, …right?

I fear we’re losing our relationality and nothing seems to satisfy.

Romans 5:1-11

For if while being hostile to God we were reconciled to God by means of the death of God’s son, much more since being reconciled we will be saved by his life. But not only [that] but even boasting in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom we now received reconciliation. (Rom. 5:10-11)[1]

At the core of what Paul is saying here in Romans, is that by virtue of the believer’s relationship with God through Christ, they are given space and time with God and with each other. Paul begins by explaining that in being justified we have peace with God and not only with God but with the world even in the midst of not having peace with other people.[2] During Advent I mentioned, “Peace exists because God is and God is within us.”[3] Herein is the foundation of that peace, according to Paul: God reconciles us to God through God’s son, Jesus. If this peace is done by works, we do not have a guarantee that peace with God exists. However, if it is by God’s doing, it’s secured and constant because it’s promised and God fulfills God’s promises. Every day we are justified and made right with God, every day we have union with God by faith because it’s by God’s mercy and not our own actions and even in spite of them.

By faith in Christ we have peace with God because by clinging to the promises of God we declare God to be truthful and true, rendering to God the things belonging to God: honor, delight, and trustworthiness (this is what it means that we “boast on the basis of hope of the glory of God”). In this way our relationship with God is aligned by our union with God; and if the relationship with God is aligned so, too, is our relationship with the world. In this new alignment with the world born from being children of God by faith,[4] we have peace with the world, because reconciliation with God allows us to interact with the world and with other people in a liberated way unencumbered from the burden of using the world and other people as means to an end (i.e. to secure a good relationship with God).

Paul anchors suffering and endurance in this union with God that we have by faith in Christ. Because we stand (“we are established”) in the grace of God, we have hope because we receive the love of God having been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit having been given to us. According to Paul, our union with God is the means by which we endure tribulations, for where we are God is, so, too is God’s love for us and the world. Therefore, our hope does not disgrace or shame because God promises to be present in our afflictions and sufferings and God is trustworthy and honest, because by Christ we have seen God suffer on our behalf.[5]   

Paul reminds his audience that if they received all of this while they were hostile (ἐχθρὰ ὄντες) to God and still missing the mark (ἔτι ἁμαρτωλῶν ὄντων ἡμῶν), then how much more will they receive in their reconciliation and union with God. Now God establishes God’s love for us, yet while we still missing the mark, Christ died on behalf of us. It is our missing the mark that brings Christ to the cross, for our ability to determine good from evil runs askew, as promised back in Genesis 3. Yet, even though we put Christ to death, God resurrects him meeting our demand for death with God’s gift of life.[6] This is love, this is grace: not giving someone what they deserve but giving them that which they do not deserve. Where we had the right to be judged and condemned for Christ’s death, we are given life, love and liberation.[7]

Now, receiving this divine grace and love while we were still hostile to God, how much more do we receive as those reconciled? We receive God, we receive the whole world, we receive ourselves in right relation with God and the World, thus with others.

Conclusion

We are rightly timid to derive our relationality from our own strength, trying desperately to reduplicate past experiences. We are right to be nervous to venture outside and commune with others, putting ourselves in physically vulnerable situations beyond our control. We are far from being out of the woods of the pandemic, and there are new bugs around, putting precious lives at risk. It is right to be cautious with whom you share your dreams and wishes for the world; the caustic socio-political climate that started back in 2016 is still percolating—for many people things are continuing to go backwards, away from what they had, or thought they had. Relationality right now is intimidating: with neighbors, with friends, with family, maybe even with ourselves.

So, if nothing seems to satisfy, how do we reverse this trend of losing relationality, this threat of loneliness? We must look beyond ourselves and our deeds. We must be awakened to our deep-seated need and hunger for relationality.

As those who have been encountered by God in the event of faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are those who have been given life, love, and liberation. We are given union with God, we are given solid ground to endure the hardest tribulations with the most amount of hope. We are not given hope founded on false expectations for the future; rather, we are given hope that is present tense, that calls to mind what God has done, thus remembering what God said God will do. This type of hope is here, it is now, it is in spite of the world, transcends the world, and is for the world.[8] In our union with God we do not need to run away from chaos of multiple relational fractures or cling to what is behind denying the disordered relationality at hand. Rather, we can stand here, where we are, in the chaos and tumult, in the trial and tribulation, and know we are not alone for God resides with those whom God loves, with those who suffer, with those who have the audacity to experience their awakened hunger for God.

In this way, beloved, we are not alone; through God’s love for us we are not alone for we are with God. And if we are with God then we are with each other. It’s here where we’re brought further out of ourselves and our desperate attempts to keep ourselves from the difficulties of this life, from the anxiety of what lies outside the security of our homes, and from fear of the other. It is here, in the midst of the divine hope and love where I find relationality with you, because you are the beloved of God and God is where you are; God is where we are in the hunger.

[1] Translation mine.

[2] Martin Luther Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia (1515/1516) LW 25 Ed. Hilton C. Oswald. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1972. 43. “Since we are justified through God’s imputation, therefore by faith, not by works, we have peace the world and with God, although not yet with men and the flesh ….”

[3] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2022/12/04/peace-even-now/

[4] LW 25, 43-44. “Through whom , as our Mediator, we have obtained access, to God by loving and knowing and delighting in Him, by faith, because there will be no salvation through Christ without faith, to this grace, of peace, remission of sins, and justification, in which we stand, through the firm confession of faith, and we rejoice, not in a present thing before men but in our hope of sharing the glory, the exaltation, that is, the glorification in the future life of the sons of God, those who are of God.”

[5] LW 25, 44. “And endurance produces trial that we might be proved by God and found without deceit and guile and hypocrisy, and trial hope, that is, of ‘the glory of God,’ as has been said (v. 2). 5. And hope does not disappoint us, because it neither deserts nor fails us. All these things, I say, happen because the love, etc.,’ because the love, which creates an insuperable attachment, of God, that is, from God, has been poured, freely poured out, not received by merit, into our hearts, because love performs its works voluntarily; for works done unwillingly and by force do not endure, by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us, through Christ from God the Father”

[6] LW 25, 44-45. “For hardly, it is extraordinary, I say, to die for the ungodly, for what is righteous, that is, for the sake of righteousness and truth, will one die—though perhaps, it is customary to die, for what is good, for its usefulness and desired features, one will dare even to die. 8. But God, the Father, shows, He makes it more commendable and worthy of love than all these things, His love, with which He loves us, for us, that is, the love which has been given to us, because on His part, in that while we were yet sinners, which he earlier (v. 6) expressed with ‘while we were still weak,’ at the right time (an expression which is not in the Greek at this point but only above) Christ died for us, the ungodly, so that we might not die in all eternity.”

[7] LW 25, 45. “For if, while were enemies, because of our sins, we were reconciled, so that we were not deserving of perdition, to God, not by our own merits or those of anyone else, except by the death of His Son; much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we, as His own, be saved by His life, in his resurrection to eternal life. 11. And not only  so, do we rejoice in tribulations, but we also rejoice in God, that is, because we have a God and He is our own God, because He has given Himself to us, through our Lord Jesus Christ, our Mediator, through whom we have now received our reconciliation, the remission of sins, so that we may receive God Himself, through One. I say. Christ.”

[8] I’m reminded here of similar tones in this post by J. Scott Jackson, http://derevth.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-peace-that-disturbs-berrigans.html

Posted on by laurenlarkin 4

Are You Free?

Sermon on 1 Cor 8:1-13

Psalm 111:1-3 Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation. Great are the deeds of the Lord! they are studied by all who delight in them. His work is full of majesty and splendor, and his righteousness endures for ever.

Introduction

I was taken with the idea that love never participated with law. I was deeply invested in pursuing what seemed a clear and eternal divergence between divine command and promise, following closely to a specific reading of Martin Luther’s theology—the distinction between law and gospel. In this scheme, to be in a loving relationship with someone else means never making any demands on them. Here, Love is about creating space for that person to be as they are wherever they are whenever they are; this was the liberty of God’s grace, the freedom in Christ: true rest from the demands to “perform” and “people please” and “earn righteousness through work” and thus “true life”. While some of these ideas find some grounding (albeit with intentional nuancing), the underbelly of this theology wasn’t rest, freedom, and life but increased suffering, burden, and death. Well, it was rest for one group and toil for everyone else not in that group.

Then one day as I stood in a large church auditorium like sanctuary, watching a video of people talking about the liberative experience of this specific interpretation of God’s love and grace, I saw it. It was the last video. A married couple was sharing their story. The husband spoke about how wonderful this conception of grace was because now he comes home from work and there is no expectation on him to help with the kids or other events, he can rest if he wants to—fall back on the couch, kick shoes off, grab a beer, and watch some tv. Then the camera turned to the wife. “Yeah…,” she said half-heartedly. “It’s great because now when he helps, he wants to.” While her words affirmed her husband’s experience, her face and her eyes told me everything I needed to know. She was not free. She was not rested. She was exhausted, burdened, and suffering by being stripped of any ability to ask for help and to confess pain and discomfort because it would be “law” to him and thus “condemnation.” She was dead. When you see death, you can never unsee death.

That image—her face, her desperate eyes—fuels my academic and pastoral pursuits now as I’ve walked away from that destructive theology.[1] Liberty and freedom in Christ brings liberty and freedom to all and not at the expense of another’s body, mind, soul, and spirit. A relationship is only loving and free where both people in the relationship are mutually engaged in each other’s thriving not in turning a blind eye to things. Where both step into the exposing light of love calling a thing what it is and are willing to do self-reckoning work.

1 Corinthians 8:8-13

Now, “food of any kind will not prove us to God.” Neither if we do not eat are we lacking, nor if we eat are we over and above. But discern carefully this power to act of yours does not become a stumbling block for the weak.

1 Corinthians 8:8-9, translation mine

Paul proclaimed that the believer is justified by faith in Christ (ευαγελλιον) apart from works of the law. She need only faith in Christ, and this becomes the sole foundation of her justification and righteousness with God—there are no works of the law that can justify or make righteous as completely as faith does. Thus, the believer is liberated from the threat of condemnation and death that leads to death and is now free to love God and neighbor. There is nothing that can or will separate her from the love (presence) of God—not even hell. This is the freedom Paul proclaims to his fledgling churches: freedom inherent in the event of encounter with God in faith liberating into life and living. God in Christ comes to the believer, calls her, and rescues her from death into new life in the Spirit. This is grace.

In chapter 8 of 1 Corinthians, Paul pumps the freedom brakes. He details guidelines for the Corinthian believers finding themselves in a conundrum. Some believers are fine eating meat “associated with offerings to pagan deities.”[2] They are whom Paul refers to as “the strong”—a phrase referring to both those confident in their faith and who were wealthy and had access the occasions to eat such meat.[3] Paul writes, while it is true that neither eating nor abstaining from this meat has an impact on their presence before God, it may have an impact on those “weaker” brothers and sisters—those who were both insecure in their faith (unsure about what is okay and not okay) and lower in social status.

Paul challenges the knowledge (γνωσις) of “the strong” resulting in their liberty to eat what they want and do what they please. Paul declares that knowledge (alone) puffs up and inflates and lures toward being an imposter; but paired with love it builds up authentically edifying both the beloved and the lover (vv. 1-2).[4] In other words, “the strong” should keep γνωσις yoked to αγαπη (love): even if they are free to eat, they should care more for their “weak” brother or sister who didn’t have the same access to such food and security in the liberty of their actions.[5]

Paul makes it clear that this love isn’t self-generated but imparted in the encounter with God in the event of faith (v.3). To love God is to be loved by God and known by God; this becomes the foundation for the love fractal. As we are loved by God, we love that which and those whom God loves seeing and knowing those whom God loves by seeing and knowing them, too.[6]

Paul’s point isn’t to side with the “strong” Corinthians or the “weak”, but to say: the composition of the conscience (secure or insecure) can lean toward a miscalculation about what is right to do and what is wrong.[7] Operating out of fear is as problematic as operating out of abundance of confidence. Paul warns “the strong” that their supposed liberty isn’t a reason for autonomous activity without considering the effect on others. [8] It’s not strictly about intent for Paul, these Christians may truly believe they’re free. Impact must also factor in here. For Paul, this is done with freedom wedded to love. Just because you can, says Paul, doesn’t mean you should because it may cause others to be polluted by being tripped up by your actions. [9] For Paul, a future forward ethic keeping in mind the potential impact of one’s actions/words on other brothers and sisters is the definition of freedom

Conclusion

For those who have followed Jesus out of the Jordan and for those who have ears pricked and heads turned hearing Christ call them by name, what is freedom for you? To follow Jesus as disciples means that freedom is going to take on an orientation toward the other. A cruciform freedom puts “weak” brothers and sisters before us. This is not to the loss of our freedom as if we lose ourselves, but in that we have received ourselves in the love of God in the encounter with God in faith, we enter into the plight with our brothers and sisters. True freedom for me is actualized only in freedom for you; if you are not free, am I free? [10] It becomes about mutuality. Mujerista theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz explains,

“Commitment to mutuality is not a light or easy matter. It involves all aspects of one’s life and demands a lifelong permanency. The way in which the commitment is lived out may change. From time to time one maybe less passionate about carrying out the implications of mutuality, but somehow to go back and place oneself in a position of control and domination over others is to betray others and oneself. Such a betrayal, which most of the time occurs by failing to engage in liberative praxis rather than by formal denunciation, results in the ‘friends’ becoming oppressors once again and in the oppressed losing their vision of liberation.”[11]

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz Mujerista Theology p. 100

If I in my strength cannot tame my liberty and walk with you so you can have your liberty, then I’m not free. If I cannot deem the liberties and freedoms of others as important as mine, then I have not freedom but bondage. If I am threatened by you having as much liberty and freedom as I do, I’m not free. If my autonomy must eclipse and ignore your need; I’m not free but captive.[12]

To be free, to be truly free isn’t to claim your rights as absolutes and acting on them no matter what. To be free, to be truly free is to say with Christ: into this I can enter with you. (This is solidarity.) Freedom can both break the law and obey it because it knows when to do which. If we’re free, then we are free–free to share in the burden of existence while trying to alleviate the yoke of suffering without losing our freedom. If stepping into the anxiety, fears, and concerns of our neighbor means we’ve lost our freedom then we didn’t have freedom to begin with. If we are unable to hear the cries of the weak, to listen to their stories of suffering, and affirm their lived experience, we’re not strong. So, beloved of God, you who are sought and called and loved by God: Are you strong? Are you free?

[1] I give credit for the start of this journey to two colleagues: Dr. Dan Siedell and Dr. W. Travis McMaken.

[2] Anthony Thiselton The First Epistle to the Corinthians TNIGTC 620

[3] Thiselton “ε`ιδωλο’θυτα And the Scope of the Corinthian Catchprhases” 617  “…if Theissen and the majority of specialist writers are correct in their sociological analysis of the identities of ‘the strong’ and ‘the weak,’ the issue of eating meat, together with its scarcity for the poor and the variety of social occasions for the rich, has a decisive bearing on Paul’s discussion.”

[4] Thiselton 622 In re γνωσις Gardner “[compares] the contrast between ‘knowledge’ and love in this verse with the parallel contrast between 13:1-1 and the two chapters on ‘spiritual gifts’ which provide its frame. He sis that γνωσις is practical; but its nature and its relation to love can profoundly determine what kind of practical effects it set in motion.” And, “Love, by contrast, builds solidly, and does not pretend to be what it is not. If it gives stature to a person or to community, that enlargement remains solid and genuine.” “knowledge inflates” “φυσιοω suggests the self-importance of the frog in Aesop’s Fables, or something pretentiously enlarged by virtue of being pumped full of air or wind.”

[5] Thiselton 622-3 “Rather than seeking to demonstrate some individualist assertion of freedom or even victory, love seeks the welfare of the other. Hence if ‘the strong’ express love, they will show active concern that ‘the weak’ are not precipitated into situations of bad conscience, remorse, unease, or stumbling. Rather, the one who loves the other will consider the effect of his or her own attitudes and actions upon ‘weaker’ brothers and sisters.”

[6] Thiselton 626  “The kind of ‘knowledge which ‘the strong’ use manipulatively to assert their ‘rights’ about meat associated idols differs form an unauthentic Christian process of knowing which is inextricably bound up with loving.” And, “…it is part of the concept of authentic Christian knowing and being known that love constitutes a dimension of this process.”

[7] Thiselton 640, “Paul sides neither entirely with ‘the weak’ nor entirely with ‘the strong’ in all respects and in relation to every context or occasion. For the self-awareness or conscience of specific persons (συνεδησις αυτων) does not constitute an infallible guide to moral conduct in Pauls’ view….someone’s self-awareness or conscience may be insufficiently sensitive to register negative judgment or appropriate discomfort in some context…and oversensitive to the point of causing mistaken judgment or unnecessary discomfort in others.”

[8] Thiselton 644, “Paul is not advocating the kind of ‘autonomy’ mistakenly regarded widely today as ‘liberty of conscience.’ Rather, he is arguing for the reverse. Freedom and ‘rights’….must be restrained by self-discipline for the sake of love for the insecure or the vulnerable, for whom ‘my freedom’ might be ‘their ruin.’ This ‘freedom’ may become ‘sin against Christ (8:12).”

[9] Thiselton 654 “By projecting the ‘weak’ into this ‘medium” of γνωσις, the ‘strong’ bring such a person face-to-face with utter destruction. What a way to ‘build’ them!”

[10] Thiselton 650-1, “For in the first case, ‘the weak’ or less secure are tripped up and damaged by the self-assertive behavior of the overconfident; while in the second place it is putting the other before the self, manifest in the transformative effect of the cross, which causes the self-sufficient to turn away….True ‘wisdom’ is seen in Christ’s concern for the ‘weak” and the less secure, to the point of renouncing his own rights, even to he death of the cross.”

[11] Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996. 100.

[12] Thiselton 657-8, “Chrysostom comments, ‘It is foolish in the extreme that we should esteem as so entirely beneath our notice those that Christ so greatly cared for that he should have even chosen to die for them, as not even to abstain from meat on their account.’ This comment captures very well the key contrast through this chapter between asserting one’s own ‘right to choose’ and reflecting with the motivation of love for the other what consequences might be entailed for fellow Christians if self-centered ‘autonomy’ rules patters of Christian attitudes and conduct. It has little or nothing to do with whether actions ’offend’ other Christians in the modern sense of causing psychological irritation annoyance, or displeasure at a purely subjective level. It has everything to do with whether such attitudes and actions cause damage, or whether they genuinely build not just ‘knowledge’ but Christian character and Christian community.”

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Absurdity of Faith

Albert Camus and “The Myth of Sisyphus”

What if there’s no reason or purpose to anything? What if being alive necessitates an awareness that life is rather pointless? What if all there is, all we can actually know is the absurdity of our existence? And, what if that’s okay?

“What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But , on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divest of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his stetting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.”[1]

I have an entirely new respect for the absurd after reading The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus. In fact, Camus gave me words to identify something what has followed me most of my conscious life: what is the purpose? Not merely: What is my purpose? But: What is the purpose of anything? There are times I contemplate beauty and question its reason for being. Think of the multitude of flowers–the vast variety of not only classification but of variations of color, form, size, and smell within each classification—there’s some absurdity there. I get that there’s something explanatory embedded in the theory of evolution, but at the same time the sheer multiplicity of variation betrays that not even the theory of evolution can address why this rose is this way and that one that way any better than just cuz.

Even all of our best efforts to explain all the nuances of creation (of our and the world’s) through the apologetic of the existence for God have never satiated the question. Every apologetic for God and for our purpose has consistently left me with my question still in tact and on my lips, …but why? The only explanation that has ever made any sense was that none of it makes any sense. Even with the notion that God is love and God loves and thus that love–being dynamic and creative–created this world as an object of God’s love, and all that is in it and of it is representative of that love…the reason for God’s love movement is still baffling and doesn’t make sense. It’s alway and everywhere: just because.

One of my very bright and capable of students made reference in one of his papers to the idea and the certainty of the Christian claim that God is love and loves us specifically: why would an almighty being like God deign to care about puny humans? He’s right; it’s rather absurd to think and to make this claim as true. But maybe the underbelly of God’s activity and presence is less about sense-making, but absurdity. Maybe God is absurd. The gift of God’s grace to people who do not earn it (justification by faith in Christ alone)[2] and the righteousness of God that is righteousness that makes righteous,[3] are absurd. The gospel is offensive because of its absurdity and not because it makes sense.

“Any though that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life. Detached from it, the work will once more give a barely muffled voice to a soul forever freed from hope. Or it will give voice to nothing if the creator, tired of his activity, intends to turn away. That is equivalent.”[4]

Rather than being the fodder of an existential crisis, absurdity, as Camus presents it, is the stuff of radical living. It’s like being able to give up all of your coveted doctrines that you cling to as reason for believing in whatever God you believe in and just believing in that God. It’s scary as hell, but once embraced the freedom is unparalleled. The dark night of the soul is the wrestling with the pointlessness of life and the nonsense of existence and finding in that moment sense and point: just because. The question shifts from …but why? to …why not? The former slows to numbing slumber upon slumber while the later propels into existence upon existence (in quantity[5]). The way Camus plays his philosophy out, the person who sees and performs the absurd of existence is the one who is liberated and thus the one who is given a present defined through revolt, freedom, and diversity. The mundane and banality of the everyday becomes glorious, because that’s the paradox of the absurd, the paradox of grace.

“All that remains is a fate whole outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics—in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the territorial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.”[6]

 

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays Trans Justin O’Brien. New York, NY: Vintage International, Vintage Books (Random House) 1955. Le Mythe de Sisyphe France: Librairie Gallimard, 1942.

[1] Camus 6

[2] Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians vol. 26 LW pp. 113-4, “I am saying this in order that we may learn the doctrine of justification with the greatest diligence and distinguish most clearly between the Law and the Gospel. On this issue we must not do anything out of insincerity or yield submission to anyone if we want to keep the truth of the Gospel and the faith sound and inviolate; for, as I have said, these are easily bruised. Here let reason be far away, that enemy of faith, which in the temptations of sin and death, relies not on the righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness, b of which it is completely ignorant, but on its own righteousness or, at most, on the righteousness of the Law. As soon as reason and the Law are joined, faith immediately loses its virginity. For nothing is more hostile to faith than the Law and reason; nor can these two enemies be overcome without great effort and work, and you must overcome them if you are to be saved. Therefore when your conscience is terrified by the Law and is wrestling with the judgment of God, do not consult either reason or the Law, but rely only on grace and the Word of comfort. Here take your stand as though you had never heard of the Law. Ascend into the darkness, where neither the Law nor reason shines, but only the dimness of faith (1 Cor. 13:12), which assures us that we are saved by Christ alone, without any Law. Thus the Gospel leads us above and beyond the light of the Law and reason into the darkness of faith, where the Law and reason have no business. The Law, too, deserves a hearing, but in its proper place and time. When Moses was on the mountain speaking with God face to face, he neither had nor established nor administered the Law. But now that he has come down from the mountain, he is a law giver and rules the people by the law. So the conscience must be free from the Law, but the body must obey the Law”

[3] Eberhard Jüngel, Jüngel, “Living Out of Righteousness: God’s Action—Human Agency.” Theological Essays II. (Ed. J.B. Webster. Trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and J.B. Webster. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). 243. “What follows will therefore try to explain the extent to which the message of justification brings light and life not only into our hearts and our church but also equally into our world. It is no doubt for this reason that the synod has placed its work under the title: ‘Living out of Righteousness: God’s Action—Human Agency’. Yet already at this point I stop short. The subtitle of this theme can potentially blind us to a decisive point of the message of justification at the outset. For it suggests that human agency directly and exclusively corresponds to divine action. Thus one is given the impression that the relevance of divine action for humanity is ethical and only ethical. But thereby something decisive of what the gospel of justification of sinners has to say is lost. If God’s righteousness brings forth life, new human life, then the question of our being has priority over the question of our agency. And prior to both questions is certainly the question of God himself.”

[4] Camus, 116.

[5] Ibid, 72ff. I’d argue that it is both quantity and quality as long as quality doesn’t mean scarcity but substance. I see quality playing out with the reference to Don Juan. And quality is not antinomy to quantity.

[6] Ibid, 117-8

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