February 10, 2008
The Inner Conflicts of the Christian Life
Romans 7: 14-25
A Sermon Preached by
Rev. Lou Snead
On this first Sunday in Lent I invite you to listen to a confession from one of the most well-known Christians of the first century. His name is Paul. Even though he was not one of Jesus’ original disciples, stories about his ministry in Jesus’ name and the words he spoke to the church in its infancy fill more pages of the NT than anyone else, including Jesus. You will notice when you hear this text that Paul’s confession is not so much a list of particular sins as much as it is an acknowledgement of his failure to live out the kind of life in Christ that he has said repeatedly that he wants to live. Some Christians have thought that Paul’s words here in his letter to the Romans are as true for us as they were for him. Listen and see if you resonate in some way with the kind of spiritual confession that Paul makes here in the 7th chapter of Romans (vss. 14-25).
One of the remarkable features of the church season of Lent has been the practice of confessing sins. Lent has stood for more than a thousand years in Christian tradition as a time for self-examination where we measure our ability to live up to the calling we believe that Jesus issued to us in God’s name. Such introspection has always been difficult for the Christian community. Most of us suffer already from some form of low self-esteem, so we don’t need our religious beliefs to compound this problem but having us get in touch with our moral failures or our tendencies to live with the idea that we are accountable only to ourselves.
In my 30 years of ministry we have never had anyone say they missed the confession of sin whenever I dropped this customary Presbyterian prayer from the worship service. In fact, I have heard more comments from members of the congregations I have served, including this one, about the inclusion of a prayer of confession in our worship. Good folks ask, “Why does the church have to focus on the negative aspects of our Christian living instead of accentuating the positive among us?” “Besides this”, they sometimes say, “the kind of sins we are asked to confess are not my sins.” When I come to worship I don’t want to feel like I’m at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting- “Hi. My name is Lou. I’m a sinner.”
I hope you realize that the church hasn’t been able to escape this practice of confessing our sins because the substance of this practice is woven into the biblical faith we have inherited. Jesus told a story about two men who went to the Temple to pray. One celebrated his justification before God and the other, the one Jesus commended, hung his head, beat his chest in anguish, and asked for forgiveness because he recognized that he was a sinner.
The classic Christian testimony to the pervasiveness and proclivity that we have to turn about from what we know is right before God and to do just the opposite, is this confession by Paul the Apostle in his letter to the church in Rome. Paul speaks for many of us in the church even today when he says, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He confesses that while he claims to abide in the laws of God, he is actually at war within himself because his life is so enmeshed in sinfulness, however we describe this- alienation from God, neighbor, or self. In this case, I hear Paul talking about the tendency within the best of us to place self-indulgence or self-deception over seeking the common good we believe God is calling us to embody or the realities we are living.
It takes a lot of spiritual maturity to make that kind of confession. Most of us come to church looking for some reassurance that we are OK as we are because we live in a culture that constancy tells us that we are over-weight, unattractive, without much sex appeal, in debt up to our eye-balls yet living way below the good life we deserve. A lot of churches today are trying to help ease the despair that people often feel about their lives by suggesting that having Jesus in your life will make things go better for you. The gospel starts to sound like the Army’s slogan- “Join us and be all you can be.”
I recently heard a church historian say that the popular expressions of Christianity that we see emerging all over America- the churches that preach a “prosperity Gospel” won’t last because they have stripped out in large part the long-standing Christian practice of confessing our sins and asking for forgiveness. He claimed that we cannot ignore that Jesus asked his followers to take up their crosses and follow him, and there was no guarantee that his path was going to make life easier or more successful in the world’s terms.
Frankly, confessing our sins is not an easy practice for any of us. It takes a lot of ego strength and courage to admit to ourselves or to anyone else that we might be wrong or to acknowledge our moral and spiritual failures. According to these biblical stories of Jesus and his followers, such humility about one’s ability to live as God would have us live is a critical spiritual discipline. Paul even states the complications that come when we seek to live according to the laws. Some people like to think that abiding by the law is the best way to achieve the kind of righteousness we ought to be seeking as human beings. But Paul sees the laws themselves, which humans often have a hand in constructing and interpreting for our own purposes, as being tainted with some form of sin and separation from God, neighbor, or self.
Let me give you an example of how complicated it can become when we try to live out the Christian life and follow Jesus. When I came here to my office on Friday I met Charlie Packard, one of our seminary interns, to put up a new message on our church sign out from announcing that our church will host on the afternoon of Feb. 24 a community forum on the issue of panhandling and homelessness. The Transformation Team of our church has decided, in what I think is the proper Christian attitude, that this forum should focus on developing caring responses to panhandlers and the homeless rather than simply get laws passed to criminalize their presence and activity or to run them off to some other parts of town or Texas. Whenever we want to change the sign we have to use a 2x4 piece of lumber to hold up the heavy plexi-glass covers that are hinged on the sign. So, I knew we had a 2x4 laying near the foundation of the Fellowship Hall behind the scrubs in front. When I went over to retrieve the board I discovered that some homeless people had set up a bedroom of cardboard and old clothes behind the scrubs. There was a mess of trash back there as well and some old clothes in a bag. And it smelled like urine. Do you know what I did as I prepared to put up a sign saying that our church wanted to talk about developing caring responses to the issue of panhandling and homelessness? I scooped up all the cardboard, the trash, the sack of dirty clothes and put it all in the dumpster. When I saw all that mess I immediately felt that respect for our church property had been violated by those choosing to make a bedroom under our scrubs without ever asking. My reaction was compounded by the fact that I heard several Sundays ago that while we were in here worshiping, homeless guy went into the fellowship hall and helped himself to a bag of food and to a cup of coffee and then left without saying anything to anyone. It wasn’t until we had put up the sign and was admiring how it looked and what it said that the contradictions, the inner conflict, between what the forum we had planned says and what my actions toward the homeless activity on our church property says.
Do you see why I appreciate Paul’s confession about the inner conflicts involved in living a Christian life? What about you? Are you aware of times or occasions when you want to do what is good and you find evil being close at hand? I read somewhere recently that Mother Teresa even acknowledged that she had a Hitler in her. As difficult as it is for us to admit, most of us who call ourselves “Christian” often have some inner conflicts going on within us around our desire to embody the love of Christ and our desire to live unto ourselves. In an era when Christians seem at times to talk as though we are closer to God than others might be, a little confession of our sins might go a long way toward recovering a healthier sense of humility.
This is why a willingness to confess our sins might be an important ingredient in living an obedient Christian life. Despite our natural resistance to admitting our own sins, the church has long insisted that such confessions can indeed be “chicken soup for the soul”. So, the question we ask on this first Sunday in Lent is simple- when you think about confessing your sins, do you want a cup or a bowl?
