Hebrews 1:1-4, Genesis 12:1-5a, July 26, 2020, Sermon

Third in the series, “What in the World is Going On?” 

“Is This the Only Way?” 

Pastor Randy Butler

The cultural landscape of America is changing. Like Abraham and Sarah we in the church find ourselves increasingly in a land that is not our own, a land that seems to be already occupied.

Researcher Mark Chaves says, “In the early seventies 62% of Americans identified with a Protestant church or denomination; by 2014 slightly fewer than half do. For the first time in its history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority.” There are other demographic changes in motion as well. The 2020 census is under way and when the results are published it will likely show an increase in non-white Americans. As many have pointed out, sometime around 2050 America will have a non-white majority.

We are becoming more and more diverse. And we are growing in our appreciation of diversity. In the seventies, 16% of married people had a spouse with a different religion. By the 2010’s that increased to 24%. Intermarriage has led our extended families to be more diverse and accepting. This has led to what researchers call the “Aunt Susan” principle. The Aunt Susan principle suggests that if you are Protestant but your Aunt Susan is Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or completely non-religious, and you love your Aunt Susan, it is more difficult to despise people whose religion is different from yours.

In middle America’s Muncie, Indiana, the percentage of high school students who agreed with the statement “Christianity is the one true religion and everyone should be converted to it,” dropped from 91% in 1941 to 41% in 1977. And today, three quarters of Americans say “yes” when asked if they believe there is any religion other than their own that offers a true path to God. So I say it again, the cultural and religious landscape is changing, quickly and dramatically, and it has a huge impact on churches around the country, including ours.

Now why is this? Well, studies and papers and books are written on that question. But we could point briefly to immigration, the ease of international travel, and certainly the internet, which makes it possible to be exposed to ideas and people around the world with the click of a button. We have more choices, more options than we have ever had. Some say that we are in a crisis of choice. Information is digital now, available in large quantities that don’t take up physical space. The amount of digital information created in the last decade was 487 billion gigabytes, or the equivalent 4.8 quadrillion bank transactions, or 162 trillion digital photos. It is estimated that in our time a person is subjected each and every day to more new information than a person in the Middle Ages was in his or her entire lifetime.

There are simply too many things to choose from. When I was growing up there were two, maybe three kinds of toothpaste – Crest, Colgate and Pepsodent. Now there are hundreds of kinds of toothpaste – with tartar control and tooth-whitening, with baking soda or without, white paste or green gel. White paste with sparkles….This is truly a crisis of choice. How do we make up our minds under such conditions?

And it is no wonder that the same conditions impact the church. I was with some friends recently who said that they were kind of enjoying their Sunday morning options during the COVID-19 pandemic. They take a look at our service, check out this service and settle on that one – all within one hour. They do not hesitate to change from church to church, or to mute what anyone is saying. They are in control.

This is leading many to say that we have moved from a culture of duty to one of discretion. When many of us were growing up we went to church because we were expected to – it might have been rewarding but it was still an obligation. Today, people choose to attend worship or not depending how it fits in with their lives. They have discretion and don’t bring a sense of duty or obligation to church attendance or involvement. This is the environment in which we live.

Now our text from the letter to the Hebrews proclaims the superiority of Christ, the uniqueness of Christ, the exact imprint of God’s very being who sustains all things. I believe that and most of us here believe that or something close to it. We see and experience the supremacy of Christ. He truly is, to us, the reflection of God, and the most reliable source and contact with God we know. So we look to him, seek him, and pray to him, knowing that we are somehow connected with God when we do so. He is truly unique. Jesus is central to our lives.

But your neighbors don’t necessarily see that. Your coworkers don’t agree. Many in your family think you are too exclusive, not making any room for other religions or ways to God. As we have already said, there are fewer and fewer people who see Jesus Christ as the unique son of God.

The church, our church, is no longer culturally established. We no longer have our place. Many are saying that the central challenge facing the church today is rediscovering who we are in a society that has in many ways rejected Christianity. We are now asking what it means to be a church in a culture that is increasingly hostile or indifferent to the faith we hold so dear.

So how do we respond? What should we do? Well first let’s just say that what is taking place in our church over the last several years – fewer and fewer children, declining attendance – this isn’t necessarily our fault. Sure there are things we can do to improve, but the cultural changes we are discussing this morning are deep and profound, and in many ways beyond our control. But this also means we can’t just apply a simple fix to the problem. We have to adapt to the changes taking place. The new cultural situation is here to stay.

If I were to break my ankle I would go to a doctor and the doctor would repair the break, put me in a cast and send me home, and a few weeks or months later I would be better. My broken bone is a problem that needs a technical fix. If however, I have an allergy to hay or something – well for most that can’t be fixed. It is a chronic condition, and I must adapt to the situation. What we are saying is that the new conditions of our culture and its relationship to the church and to the Christian faith is a chronic condition, it can’t just simply be fixed by having younger families or new people or a younger pastor. We can’t just turn this around. We are in a time that demands adaptive change on our part. As someone said, “Until we accept that ours is not a turnaround situation, it cannot be addressed as a move ahead situation.” I hope you understand what I mean by this. As Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.” This is how profound the change in our cultural climate is.

Now let’s not lose hope. When God called Abraham he commanded him to leave his country and go to a land that was not his. In the same way we find ourselves in a land, a society and culture, that is not entirely our own anymore. Yet God promises that Abraham will become a great nation. For us the promise perhaps means that we will be more than we had ever imagined even in this strange new landscape. And we are to be a blessing to others – that is the focus. The focus is not how we can get more people into our church or more children in our programs, good as those things are, but to be a blessing to our community, in the way that Backpacks and Open Door and our simple presence in the community has blessed Baker City.

Like Abraham and Sarah we are nomads, adventurers, pioneers setting out into a new world to make a place. We are Oregon Trail pioneers finding our way to a new land. We are invited to leave what is familiar, our kindred, and our fathers’ and mothers’ church to find what a new church will look like in the years and decades ahead. It will continue to be disorienting and uncomfortable, because that is what being in a new land feels like. Who knows what our descendants will look like, but God is present in this nomadic pioneer experience we find ourselves in.

In doing this we recognize the spiritual thirst in the people around us. Last week we discussed secularism, a worldview that suggests we are without God, left to our own devices. But it turns out that there is still a deep spiritual hunger in our time. We see it in our movies, our television shows, on the internet. And we are in a position to be in conversation with people in our community and our families and places of work. Not to force a message upon them, to force religion upon them but to invite them to the something more that they are searching for.

I read somewhere that there is an old tradition (maybe this is true in Eastern Oregon too) among Australian ranches located on often dry land, that there are two ways of keeping cattle on the ranch. One way is to build a fence; the other way is to dig a well. We live in a time when building fences around our tribe, our church, our religious position will not work. There is no us and them, in or out, this side of the fence that side. Instead we want to invite people to taste the life giving water of Jesus, who offers us all a spring of water that will gush up from within as we begin to walk with him. There seem to be many paths and journeys these days. But the way to the water of life is still found on the journey with Jesus.

Genesis 28:10-19a, John 1:10-18, July 19, 2020, Sermon

Second in Series, “What in the World is Going On?”

“What Does This Mean For Me?” 

by Pastor Randy Butler

I read recently about a Christian man who, while on a transatlantic flight, started talking with the man sitting next to him.  His fellow passenger talked about a long conversation he and his family had about whether to continue attending their local church.  He said between work, social commitments and the activities of their two children, they were exhausted and struggled to make it to the end of the school year.  He said that at end of their family meeting they decided to stop going to church.  “It’s just not that meaningful,” said the man.  “We go each week and finally realized we’re not getting anything out of it.  It’s hard to believe I’m saying this, our parents took us, and when we had kids we took them too.  But it just doesn’t connect with the rest of our lives, so we’re done.”  Many of us have heard similar stories, or seen the same things play out in our families and churches.  Our friends, family members, especially younger ones, simply aren’t seeing how church connects with the rest of their lives, so they don’t get involved.

     

The religious landscape of America is changing.  Recent studies show that the number of people who say that they have no religious affiliation has increased significantly.  In a 1957 government survey only 3% said they had no religious affiliation; by 2014 21% said so.  There is also a significant decrease in those who regularly attend religious services.  Today 20-30 percent of Americans are involved with a local congregation but that has been declining for the last sixty years.  The people who never attend religious services has doubled from 13% in 1990 to 26% in 2014.  That’s a short period of time for such a dramatic increase.  You can explore this in more detail if you like by reading “American Religion, Contemporary Trends,” by Mark Chaves.  Chaves’ summary conclusion is simple and clear: American religiosity has declined in recent decades.

So you know, and have known for years that when you get up in the morning and get in your car to drive to church that you are in the minority.  There just aren’t that many people driving to church on Sunday morning anymore.

Now this trend is part of a bigger development toward secularism, a view of life that excludes God.  The secular worldview has no room for the transcendent, for the religious.  According to the secular perspective we are on our own.  There is no God, there is no higher power – it’s all up to us.

But for many it’s not blatant secularism that keeps them from going to church.  It is irrelevance.  Church just doesn’t connect with their lives.  In recent years there has been extensive research into the religious beliefs and practices of teenagers and young adults.  And one of the common themes in interviews is, that with some exceptions, religion just wasn’t important and consequential to their lives.  It is not bad, in fact it is nice thing, religion, say young people.  They agree that religion makes people nicer.  But as one researcher said, “Teenagers tend to approach religious participation, like music and sports, as an extracurricular activity: a good, well-rounded thing to do, but unnecessary for an integrated life.”  Religion has become unnecessary, not relevant.

How do we face this challenge?  How do we respond?  Well, one of the things we need to continually emphasize is the relevance of our faith to everyday life.  We have to strengthen the Sunday-Monday connection, the tie between what we do here on Sunday mornings and the rest of the week.  We need to validate and affirm the call of God upon people other than priests, pastors and missionaries.  One pastor speaker tells it this way: When speaking to clergy gatherings I often ask this question: Who here prays for and commissions your youth when they go off on a mission trip?  Invariably all hands go up.  Who here prays for and commissions your Sunday school teachers in September as the new year begins?  All hands go up.  Finally I ask, Who here prays for all certified public accountants around April 15th, or for all the salespeople and those working on commission (educators, ranchers, farmers, store owners).  Silence.  Eyes drop to the ground.  Usually not a single hand is raised.  We must do a better job of affirming the calling of God upon the lives of all of you who are involved in the community and in your work, not as it relates to the church but for the work itself.

We also want to keep on affirming the presence of God not just in the church but in the beauty of God’s creation.  Now for many of you this is easy, living in the Baker Valley.  You appreciate and experience God’s closeness and presence as you gaze upon the Elkhorns and the lush valleys below.  That’s the easy part.  To discover, see and experience God’s beauty and presence in the grit and grime of daily town and city life is a little harder.

                                 

Lutheran pastor David Lose tells an interesting story.  On the morning of January 12, 2007, a team from a Washington newspaper conducted an experiment.  They placed a video camera in one of the stations for the Metro, the mass transit system that serves Washington D.C.  The camera recorded the reactions of the people who passed by a street musician playing the violin on their way to catch the subway for work or school or whatever.  Over the course of the forty-five minutes the musician played, a little more than one thousand people passed by the musician.  And almost no one stopped to listen.

That's probably no great surprise, but here is the amazing thing.  The violin player wasn’t your ordinary street busker.  It was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical violinists in the world, playing six of the most difficult and beautiful pieces of his repertoire on his 3.5 million dollar 18^th century Stradivarius violin.  And almost no one stopped to listen.  A week earlier he played the same pieces to a sold out audience at a concert in Boston, where the cheap seats were a hundred dollars.  Bell pointed out later that the acoustics in the subway were nearly perfect.  Yet no one stopped to listen.             

This brings up a host of issues worth exploring: are we too busy to notice beauty when it is right in front of us?  Further, have we become accustomed to seeing beauty only where we expect to see it?  Would the most beautiful painting still be beautiful if it were hung not in a museum, but in a local restaurant? 

So for us in the church the questions are these – are we too busy to notice God even when God is right in front of us?  Are we accustomed to see God only where we expect God to show up, in church?  Are we prepared to encounter and experience God in everyday life? 

One of the things I find helpful in everyday God detection is a centuries old practice called Examen, a review of the day or week or some period of time through a ten-fifteen minute inventory of the prior day’s activities, experiences, meetings, conversations, feelings, reactions, moods.  These last three are important – feelings, reactions, moods created by our various interactions, meetings, thoughts and conversations.  It is often in the emotional trace left behind by the project, person or episode that we find God at work, working at a deeper level than the event itself.  This is a really helpful way to see God at work in our daily life.  In our text Jacob sees a ladder with angels going to and fro from heaven to earth.  Where are those ladders in our lives that connect heaven and earth for us?     

The other thing that is important is that we see and experience the hope of the good news about Jesus.  If we are left to our own devices as the secular worldview suggests, that becomes hopeless very quickly.  If we are on our own our hope is limited and never takes off.  It is grounded.  People who believe that God is in our lives have hope.  Theologian Anthony Padavano wrote that those who pray raise the limits of what hope may be.  Prayer is our way of declaring that the boundaries of life and limits of hope are not drawn with the crayons of space and time.  The one who prays pushes hope into areas where people who never dream never venture.  Our faith, our prayer, our trust in God takes hope way past where the secular worldview can hope.  It expands the secular boundaries of hope.  That hope is what the world needs right now, a hope in God who as Paul says in Romans, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that do not exist.”

The story that we started with about the family who was done with church has a hopeful ending.  After listening to his disillusioned traveling companion for some time, the man who tells the story asked the other traveler if he had told his pastor what he was feeling about church.  The man said no, so the other encouraged him to do so.  About four months later the man received two emails.  The first was from the pastor of his traveling companion, and it simply thanked the man for encouraging the passenger to talk to him.  The other was from the man himself.  He said that after he shared how he and his family were no longer attending church the pastor asked if they could repeat the conversation on Sunday, during worship in place of the sermon.  After they did that on a Sunday morning the pastor bravely asked if others felt the same way, and several hands were raised.  And from that point on the pastor changed and the church changed, as they together explored what it meant for God to be part of their everyday lives in a relevant way.  The man’s email closed simply: “So that’s what we’re doing.  And you know what? We’re in.  We’re staying.” 

Friends, the gospel of John says that the Word of God became flesh and became one of us, or as Eugene Petersons’ translation puts it, “God moved into the neighborhood.”  You can’t get more relevant than that.  Jesus brings God down to earth.  Amen.        

        

Mark 2:13-22, July 12th 2020, Sermon

What in the World Is Going On? 

Sermon One of Three Part Series

Is This Really True? 

Pastor Randy Butler

We live in an age of radical doubt and skepticism. The stories, the scriptures and the institutions which used to provide a consensus and an underlying foundation and glue, for society and culture are no longer in place. There is no agreed upon value system, or story, or narrative that unites us in the western world, and in our nation. The stories which used to unite us, such as those that we are given in our scriptures, the Bible, have been largely dismissed, as stories of power and domination and oppression.

I don’t say these things in the reactionary sense, as if to suggest that because nobody believes in the Bible anymore that Western civilization is going down the drain. I don’t really believe that. It is more complicated than that. Besides, the institutions and narratives that used to unite us need to be reviewed, challenged and made relevant for a new time. What I am saying is we simply do not have a spiritual or moral consensus anymore, and it makes life very confusing. There are no longer shared universal truths. Each of us is left to determine our own truth.

Pastor Glenn MacDonald tells the story of a certain man, who on his way to work every morning walked past a clockmakers store. It was part of his daily ritual to pause long enough to gaze at the big grandfather clock standing in the shop window. One day the clockmaker, who had noticed his behavior, stepped outside and struck up a conversation. “This one’s a real beauty isn’t it?” he said, pointing to the clock in the window.

“I’ll say,” said the man on the street. “To tell you the truth, I actually have another motive for stopping here every day. I’m the timekeeper at the local factory. It’s my job to blow the whistle at precisely four o’clock. This wristwatch of mine is notoriously unreliable, so every day I stop and recalibrate it with this magnificent timepiece of yours. I set my watch by that clock.”

“Is that so?” said the clockmaker, who was beginning to feel a bit uneasy. “I hate to tell you this, but the reason this grandfather clock doesn’t sell is that I’ve never been able to make it work precisely right. In fact I readjust it every single day – right at four o’clock, when I hear the whistle go off in your factory.”

The question for our day is, what time is it right now and who has the authority to say so? And our culture has answered resoundingly “There is no Greenwich mean time when it comes to understanding the meaning of life. There is no final authority. Everyone winds their own watch and lives accordingly.” There are no longer shared universal truths, there are instead competing truths, competing story lines.

Now in one sense this provides opportunity. These tectonic shifts in the way we think and believe provide openings to explore and challenge. And we bring the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to this opening. But it is also an opportunity to re-evaluate our own truths, those things which we cling to. Many of these truths are social, cultural, and political. They will depend upon our upbringing and our environment. And they remain unquestioned until something shakes our own position and begins to loosen our own iron grip on reality.

One of the ironies of a time when we have no agreed upon universal truths is that many of us are quite sure of what is true and what is not true on the political and social scene. I don’t need to comment any further on this for now, except to say simply, watch the “other” station on occasion. If you think that your favorite news station speaks the truth, then maybe see on occasion what the other news outlet says. It may infuriate you, you will have to grit your teeth to get through the program, but it is good for us to expand our awareness and perhaps even risk changing our opinion. As someone said, “It is good for cats and dogs to live together, it broadens their minds so.” Followers of Jesus today ought to be always asking “Is what I hear really true or am I seeing things through my own set of glasses?”

We also might take the opportunity to reevaluate our own cherished opinions and beliefs about religion and our faith and the church, those things about church we never question. In Mark’s Gospel the religious leaders challenge Jesus on his new innovative ways, the way he associates with sinners and tax collectors and ignores the rules and norms of the church of his day. He challenges their long held beliefs, what they have always held to be true about God and their life with God. He even suggests that to put this new explosive gospel into old structures will destroy both that structure and the message. That’s why new wine needs entirely new wineskins. Jesus was quite radical at times.

What are the old wineskins of our day and our church? We are trying to ask some of these thought provoking questions during our current mission study. A couple of questions present it in this way: “Three things we must continue to do are…”, followed by, “Three things we could stop doing are…”.

How open are we to change, major change in how we go about our ministry? We have been generous with our building – would we be open to other shared uses of our space? Would we consider starting a new ministry that isn’t based in the church building? What are the creative and out-of-the-box ideas that meet the challenges facing the church in this time? What are the traditions that now inhibit us from moving forward?

Most of us grew up with aspirin bottles that had wads of cotton just under the cap. Well the Bayer Corporation, maker of Bayer Aspirin, had been putting those cotton wads in their bottles since 1914, until they finally stopped doing so in 1999. They realized that the aspirin would hold up fine without those maddening white cotton clumps in the top of the bottle. Cris Allen, Bayer’s Vice President of technical operations said, “We concluded there really wasn’t any reason to keep the cotton except tradition. Besides,” he added, “It’s hard to get (that cotton) out.” Sometimes tradition can get in the way of opening the bottle. Sometimes tradition can create more hardship than help.

Now we are asking, “Is the gospel really true?”. And of course those of us gathered here would answer “Yes, we believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news about Jesus. We believe in this good news and we believe that it provides answers for our lives and for the world that are not found anywhere else. So yes it is true.” The question then is not so much what we believe, but it’s how we believe. The question is how we hold this to be true. We don’t live in a time in which we can prove this truth. Besides religious faith isn’t in the category of scientifically verifiable things. Faith is the conviction of things not seen says the letter to the Hebrews. We live by faith not proof.

And yet we live with this conviction about our Christian faith. For centuries faith in Jesus Christ has been tested. It thrived in the pre-scientific age and it thrives today in the scientific age. Science has not disproved faith. What we believe as we gather today has been accepted by millions of thoughtful, even brilliant people. Our Christian faith has staying power and holds its ground in any serious conversation about life and eternity. In centuries past thoughtful men and women have believed the truth of our faith. And they were either delusional or they were onto something. In our current day, thoughtful, smart even brilliant people believe in the truth about Christ. They are either delusional or they are on to something. So it is real, it is true.

But we cannot prove it or force it. We can only bring our faith with confidence to the table and share it with others, as equals. As someone said, Christian truth can only be confessed and professed, it cannot be possessed. In this time when there are very few if any acceptable universal truths, we will not find agreement but we can continue to confess and profess what we believe with confidence. Our faith in Jesus has integrity and truth. We don’t have to convince anybody of that. We don’t need to convert anybody. God can do that. The truth speaks for itself. Trust that. Much in our culture and society will question that truth, but that doesn’t mean the gospel isn’t true.

So though our church is changing, though our world is changing and though we can’t fall back on the agreed upon truths of life when everybody went to church and grew up in church, we still have God. And we still put our bet on God, and the truth of God. We stake our life on God. There is much confusion in our families and our schools and society. But have courage – Preacher David Lose says we need the kind of courage that doesn’t have to be right, but rather is willing to risk our confession and profession of faith in the middle of this confusion; to make our wager about God’s commitment to this world, and then see what happens. We can’t hold back forever. We must put our money where our mouth is and see if what we say is true, throwing ourselves into living and striving in our neighborhoods, families and community and world. This is what our time calls for. Amen.

Romans 7:15-25a, July 5th 2020, Sermon

"Thanks be to God"

Pastor Randy Butler

“I do not understand my own actions,” says the apostle Paul in exasperation. Or as another translation puts it, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I obviously need help,” translates the Message. An astounding thing for the great apostle Paul to say. One of the most influential figures in world history, a giant of a man, and he says, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” In our day, as leaders are learning to be more vulnerable, we occasionally have world figures acknowledge their wrongdoing or mistakes, but only rarely, and with very carefully worded confessions and well chosen words. But in the ancient world, it was extremely rare, perhaps unheard of, for a leader to say such a thing, “I don’t understand my own actions.” An extraordinary confession, and revelation of vulnerability. To understand the impact, you might just ask yourself, when is that last time you said to someone “I really don’t understand my own actions,” or “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Yet this acknowledgement is critical in the life of faith. Humility is indispensable for spiritual growth. This is the genius of twelve step programs – they begin with the admission of powerlessness and the unmanageability of life. Everything starts there. We say I can’t do it, God can, I think I will let him.

A few years ago I fished one day with a guide on the Madison River in Montana. It was a good day, but at one point I had gotten my leader tangled in a terrible mess. And if you’ve ever tried to work with that clear skinny monofilament of fluorocarbon material in the wind you know what I’m talking about. And so I tried to untangle my mess, and finally the guide looked at me, and nudged me and said, “Give me that – it’s what I do.” It’s true, that’s what you pay a guide for, to help you catch fish and to untangle your mess. And it makes me remember that God is really saying the same thing to me. As God looks at the knots and tangles of my life, God is saying, “Give me that mess – I’ll untangle it. It’s what I do.” And the moment I turn it over, I am on my way to growing and learning. When I say, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” then God goes to work.

Now, what is Paul’s dilemma? He states it very clearly. “I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead, I do the thing that I hate.” He goes on, “I find as a rule when I want to do what is good, evil is right there with me. I gladly agree with the Law on the inside, but I see a different law at work in my body. It wages war against the law of my mind and takes me prisoner with the law of sin that is in my body.”

It reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon I read once. Charlie Brown and Lucy are playing football. Lucy is throwing the pass and Charlie Brown goes out for it, she throws, Charlie Brown looks and the ball lands right on his head, “BONK,” and he goes tumbling to the ground. Lucy comes up to Charlie Brown lying there dazed on the ground. And she says, “Coordination and communication are your problems Chuck. Your mind tells your body to do something but your body doesn’t obey…Your mind and your body have to work together.” Charlie Brown sits up and says, “My mind and my body hate each other.”

Charlie McCarthy, the talking dummy, complained to the ventriloquist Edward Bergen, “My trouble is I’m torn between vise and versa.” We know what Charlie McCarthy and Charlie Brown mean, and we know what Paul means too. That coordination and communication of the mind with the body. It is hard. Poet T.S. Eliot knows about it and writes more seriously, “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.”

And perhaps more than anyone else, an addict or alcoholic knows the meaning of those words, experiences the anguish and war within, “I don’t do what I want to do, instead I do the thing I hate…I gladly agree with the law on the inside but I see a different law at work in my body…It wages war against the law of my mind and takes me prisoner. ”

And at that, Paul, and anyone who has been through this experience - and we all have to one degree or another - Paul throws up his hands and says, “I’m a miserable human being.” Or as the NRSV puts it, “Wretched man that I am.” “I’m a mess. My life is a mess. Look at this tangle of knots that my life has become. I need help with this.”

Now we are going to be careful here. Because Paul is curiously careful himself. He says, “Now if I’m doing the thing that I don’t want to do, I’m agreeing that the law is right. But now I’m not the one doing it anymore. Instead it’s the sin that lives in me…If I do the very thing that I don’t want to do, then I’m not doing it anymore…it is sin that lives in me that is doing it.” Sounds a little like comedian Flip Wilson and his famous scapegoat – the devil made me do it. Paul is of course not evading responsibility here. It is still he himself who does what he hates. But as one commentator puts it, he is aware of “sin as a constraining power from which he has not yet fully escaped since he is not yet full redeemed.” He is aware of the power of sin as something other than himself. This doesn’t mean he is shifting responsibility, but it allows him to avoid the mistake of self-deprecation turning into self-loathing. There is an important difference. Paul does not hate himself, he is beloved of God, the recipient of God’s love and grace. Nonetheless he remains disturbed by this law at work in him which keeps him at war with himself. It is the same with us.

He perhaps anticipates here what scientists and psychologists have been saying about alcoholism and its nature as a disease. Without evading responsibility, the alcoholic or drug addict can still say with full conviction, I am sick, I have a disease.

Now Paul’s shout-out-loud solution to his dilemma is kind of short and left without much explanation. He asks, “Who will deliver me from this dilemma (this body of death)? Answer – “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He doesn’t have to elaborate here because elsewhere in his letter to the Romans he has said, “we are all justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.” And he will go on to say, “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.” Jesus Christ is the answer for Paul and his dilemma.

A few points worth reflecting upon. First, you may find yourself engaged in the kind of struggle which Paul describes, not doing what you want to do, but doing the very thing you hate. Do not be discouraged. The apostle Paul experienced the same struggle. The struggle is a sign of spiritual vitality. If you weren’t alive to God in Jesus Christ as Paul says elsewhere in Romans then you wouldn’t be having this struggle at all. As we give ourselves over to God, God through his Spirit does empower us to live as we truly want to live. You are not alone in your struggle.

Second Paul’s words encourage us to appreciate the flaws in our life and character, the contradictions, the failures. They are simply part of life. The flaws and the failures make us who we are. I once read that Navajo rug makers intentionally weave a clear imperfection into each of their carpets. It is believed that the imperfection is a kind of opening for the Spirit to move in and out of the rug. Our imperfections are a kind of opening for the Spirit to move freely into our lives. Jesus said, “I came for those who are sick not those who are well. He comes to be with people who are imperfect, who say themselves, “I am a tangled up miserable mess.” Paul didn’t say, “When we became perfect Christ died for us. No. He says, “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

Our wounds and flaws and failures are the holes, the cracks through which the light enters and illumines our interior darkness, and brings wholeness and healing. Even the resurrected Jesus still bore his wounds. His resurrection did not erase the marks – they remained. We will always have our struggles and our wounds but they can be the sources of growth and grace and love if we let them be. Julian of Norwich said, “Our wounds become our honors.” They are not our excuses, we are not victims, but they are embraced and accepted they are a vehicle of God’s grace.

Trust in these things as we join with Paul in declaring, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”