For years I have used Romans 6 as a practical way of specifically naming specific sin in my own life and encouraging others to do the same. I have also utilized this chapter of Holy Scripture many times throughout the decades of my Christian life to renounce group and/or national sins, both personally and publicly. Perhaps we need less explanation of sin’s pathology and more putting it to death. The following rendering of Romans 6:1-11 is really nothing new to me. Today I am just letting you in on my own use of the Bible in declaring to God the great practical import of Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross for us concerning a massive historical and contemporary sin – to bury it, unite to Christ, and experience freedom together….
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on disrespecting, dehumanizing, and destroying black men so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to racism; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life of solidarity and equity with our black brothers and sisters.
For if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old racist self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by structural and institutional racism might be done away with, that blacks should no longer be slaves to a white racist system—because anyone who has died has been set free from systemic racism.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since the Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to racism once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
In the same way, white America, count yourselves dead to racism but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
One day some Pharisees and teachers of religious law arrived from Jerusalem to see Jesus. They noticed that some of his disciples failed to follow the Jewish ritual of hand washing before eating. (The Jews, especially the Pharisees, do not eat until they have poured water over their cupped hands, as required by their ancient traditions. Similarly, they don’t eat anything from the market until they immerse their hands in water. This is but one of many traditions they have clung to—such as their ceremonial washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles.)
So the Pharisees and teachers of religious law asked him, “Why don’t your disciples follow our age-old tradition? They eat without first performing the hand-washing ceremony.”
Jesus replied, “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote,
‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship is a farce,
for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.’
For you ignore God’s law and substitute your own tradition.”
Then he said, “You skillfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition. For instance, Moses gave you this law from God: ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘Anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you. ’In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition. And this is only one example among many others.” (NLT)
As I read this Gospel text for today, I tried to imagine what emotions Jesus might have experienced when confronted about the lack of attention to tradition from his disciples concerning ritual hand washings – maybe frustration, anger, sadness, exasperation, disappointment, irritation, aggravation, or discouragement. Perhaps Christ felt all those emotions. Whatever Jesus was feeling at the time, I can easily see him taking a deep breath and exhaling a great big *sigh* over the religious leaders’ hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is a disconnect between the values we espouse and our behavior. When there is incongruity between what we say is important and how we really live, this is being two-faced and duplicitous. The men who came to see Jesus were plain old insincere hacks who practiced religious quackery. And Jesus saw right through their fake pretension of righteousness.
First off, this narrative is not a dig on rituals themselves but on using ritual to leverage an appearance of religious superiority over others. This type of motivation for engaging ritual ignores the ethical and moral intention of those rituals.
Sometimes folks can get so doggone wrapped up in how faith is represented that they lose sight of the faith itself.
Hypocrisy has to do with our motives – not so much what we do but why we do it. Rituals are good. Why we do them or not, or how we go about doing them, gets at the heart of our objectives for engaging religious practices. Are they truly a worship offering to God, or are they merely mechanisms for keeping up appearances of holiness?
Hypocrisy is acting a part which is not truly us. It is to live from the false self through the attempt of providing an idealized perfect person to the public instead of embracing the true self and realizing our common humanity with one another in genuine devotion to God and service to others. Religious hypocrisy is particularly insidious because it uses what is sacred for selfish purposes. It damages the credibility of the religion, creates idolatry, and covers hate with a veneer of pretentious piety.
The hypocrite is one who is a bundle of disparate parts in massive need of integration to a whole and real self. The cost to facing this is vulnerably exposing oneself as flawed, imperfect, even ugly. Many persons have no willingness to be viewed by others as such, so they maintain their play-acting and continue to seek the attention and accolades as a model religious person.
We all must come to grips with the reality that God cares a whole lot about why we do what we do.
When the forms of faith become tools of oppression and crushing burdens upon others backs, then those forms have supplanted the faith itself. Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, and from the heart the hands and feet move. Whenever we care more about being and appearing right than getting it right and becoming better, then we have a heart problem. The heart of the issue is the heart itself. Clean up the heart, and everything else follows – not the other way around.
The probity of today’s Gospel lesson is that we might misinterpret what is important to God. We may be playing the hypocrite yet have the belief we are genuine. The capacity for our hearts to enlarge with love is in direct relation to an awareness of the hidden motives buried within those hearts. Evil intentions and motivations are what separate us from God – not our race, class, age, gender, religion, ethnicity, behavior, rituals, or anything else on the outside.
“You can see the speck in your friend’s eye, but you don’t notice the log in your own eye. How can you say, ‘My friend, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you don’t see the log in your own eye? You’re nothing but show-offs! First, take the log out of your own eye. Then you can see how to take the speck out of your friend’s eye.” –Jesus (Matthew 7:3-5)
If we find ourselves being nit-picky of others, this is usually a clue that the unconscious self is trying to protect us from facing the pain of our own sins by projecting and focusing on another’s supposed missteps with tradition or ritual.
Fortunately, Jesus came to this earth full of grace and truth. Christ sometimes, maybe oftentimes, set aside niceness and decorum to go for the heart. In shining light on the motives behind the deeds of people, some repented and received the good news of the kingdom of God; and, others resisted to maintain their illusion of control and superiority. None could ride the fence with Jesus around. You either loved him or hated him.
The beauty of grace is that when we squarely and uncompromisingly face our sins and let go of things we consider so important, and turn to God with authenticity, we are welcome at his Table.
Most holy and merciful Father, we acknowledge and confess before you our sinful nature, prone to evil and slow to do good, and all our shortcomings, offenses, and malevolent motives. You alone know how often we have sinned in wandering from Christ’s way of grace and truth, in wasting your gifts of compassion and justice, and in forgetting your love. O Lord have mercy on us. We are ashamed and sorry for all the ways we have displeased you. Teach us to hate our errors; cleanse us from our secret faults; and forgive us our sins; for the sake of your dear Son, our Lord. Most holy and loving God help us to live in your light and to walk in your ways according to the commandment of Jesus Christ, our Savior, in the enabling of your blessed Holy Spirit. Amen.
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (NIV)
Humanity is spiritually hard-wired to do good in this world. Yes, from a Christian perspective we live in a fallen world and experience the evil of pandemics and poverty as well as personal and corporate corruption. However, this is not our original design.
In the Christian tradition, believers in Jesus are not delivered from sin, death, and hell so that they can idly sit in a worldly holding tank until Christ returns.
Deliverance is the initial dimension of God’s plan – and not the end game. We are saved for good works to be done in the here-and-now.
Christians know that they are saved from individual and systemic sin through the forgiving work of Jesus Christ. It’s an act of sheer grace on God’s part. A believer in Jesus is not spiritually reborn through her effort any more than a baby’s birthed because of her own doing. It is thoroughly the work of God. Even the faith needed to believe is a gift graciously provided by God.
This, however, is far from the whole story. God has plans and purposes in mind for his people. Christians were birthed into a new spiritual community with new commitments to do all kinds of good deeds. It’s as if sin is a weight or an obstacle that has been removed so that living a life full of goodness can now move forward and do its work.
To be “saved” is to be freed for a vigorous moral life deeply concerned with altruistic actions in a world full of need.
There is a profound spiritual wound which underlies the great problems of our world. Behind so many of our world issues are matters of the spirit. The unseen world is just as real as the world which is seen. Just as we know germs are present, they are real, and we must account for them – so there is spiritual world very much real and we ignore it at our great peril.
Thus, it seems to me that spiritual people, including Christians delivered for the purpose of good deeds, are to graciously, wisely, and lovingly agitate for earthly change. Expecting human governments or corporate systems to take the lead in moral transformation is like asking the fox to guard the hen house.
I will admit to you that I don’t much have the stomach right now for what seems to me to be a useless and emotionally energy consuming debate among some Christian communities about whether to gather on Easter Sunday, or not. As redeemed people, delivered for a purpose, I believe it is sage to put our focus on discovering how we can support and bless the essential services laboring to keep a pandemic at bay. God has raised us up for such a time as this, if we have the spiritual eyes to see.
Christians, churches, and spiritual communities must labor at the gates of hell for the lives of women caught in sex trafficking; provide uplift and the tools to a better life for those in grinding poverty and hunger; challenge the idolatry of a materialist culture; and, hundreds of other realities of living in a fallen broken world, including the scourge smack in front of our faces of disease and death.
As Christians, God has delivered us from sin so that we will do good in this world. God, in his sovereignty, has placed you and I in places and positions for just this time so that we will do good works, both big and small, tackling immense issues as well as little acts of kindness.
Doing good comes in all sizes, and all of us are to share our lives for the betterment of humanity.
After all, we really are our brother’s keeper.
God Almighty, I pray that your people may not lose heart in this world. May you strengthen your church with spiritual power so that the words and ways of Jesus will ground them for faithful service to this planet you have created. May Christians everywhere be rooted and established in the divine love which supports good works done in the humility of a gentle spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
“But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets,the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because… he himself is righteous and he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” (NRSV)
500 years is a long time. It was that long ago when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Church door. It sparked the flame of Reformation, a legacy we still live with today. Protestant Christians have a rich spiritual heritage in acknowledging and affirming the veracity of Holy Scripture and its central message of Christ’s good news of salvation.
8 words changed Martin Luther’s life, changed the course of history and Christianity, and can change our lives, too.
1. Law
The role of the law is not to save nor to sanctify, but to reveal the true state of our hearts. The law can only condemn; it cannot save you. Obedience is important yet cannot be done by sheer willpower. Deliverance does not come by turning over a new leaf; that approach only gets you caught in cycle of regret, promising not to do it again, and returning to it. Law makes us feel the great weight of our darkness. We need to feel and know what that darkness really is….
2. Sin
Sin means missing the mark, falling short. We must agree with God about what sin really is, without sugar-coating it. We tend to think of sin as some terrible action like assault or murder, yet sin is primarily thought of in Scripture as not giving God his due – of de-godding God and replacing him with something else. You and I need to be realistic about the bad news of sin before we can ever receive the good news of forgiveness. You can’t be forgiven unless you can admit that you have done, or not done, something that warrants needing to be forgiven. Moving forward in hope can only happen when we possess…
3. Righteousness
Righteousness means right relationships; unrighteousness means broken relationships. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right relationships. Like illegal aliens who cannot make themselves citizens, God grants us spiritual amnesty because we can’t make ourselves legal or righteous. Through righteousness God has made it possible for us to live in harmony. Holding onto bad relationships is like a dog returning to its vomit; there is no need for it because God has given us…
4. Justification
This term is a picture of the court of law. It communicates for us that righteousness comes because God justified us, that is, he did for us what the law could not do – he sent his Son to be a substitute for us. You can’t justify yourself by obeying the law or simply by being sorry. Without the next word, we will wallow in our guilt because we need this for our justification to really live….
5. Faith
Faith is a gift given by God. We do not generate faith within ourselves because sin estranges us from God. We need God to act. God’s righteousness can only become operative through faith. You must hold out your hands and receive a gift to possess it. You must come to the end of yourself to exercise faith. You need to see that your sin is bad enough to have made your life unmanageable and that you have dug yourself in a hole too deep to get out of yourself. If you think you can handle it, you are going back to the law, living in denial and not by faith. We also need…
6. Grace
Faith must have an object, and that object is the cross of Christ. It’s grace which gives faith and saves us. Our denial is so great about our sin that we can’t reach out to God unless God acts. Even while we were sinners, Christ died for us. Opening the gift given to us, we find that we are given…
7. Redemption
Redemption is a word referring to a slave market. We are slaves to sin. We need someone to purchase our freedom. The blood of Christ paid for my sin. He bought me through his death. Jesus has taken care of the sin issue through…
8. Propitiation
“Sacrifice of atonement” is the meaning of propitiation. It is the satisfaction of God’s wrath against sin. Because God loves, God has wrath; he is not okay with sin running amok in this world. We are forgiven through the blood of Christ. We are free to live into the gracious joyous life of God in Christ. Yet, not all of us do so. For example:
If the institution that gave me my car loan came along and forgave or satisfied the debt I have on my car, it would be weird if I kept making loan payments. But that is what many people keep doing with their lives because they don’t really believe they are forgiven and loved by God. We think God is constantly upset or, at least, agitated with us since we screw-up so often. So, we live by law hoping that God will applaud our sincerity and our effort, wishing that everything will be okay. But everything won’t be okay with that approach because God wants our faith, not our promises to be better. His question to us is:
Do you trust me? Do you trust me to deliver you from your sin? Do you trust me to work out the situation that you’ve made a mess of on your own? Do you trust me to provide for you everything you need?
Live into your spiritual heritage. Don’t return to the law. Bask in the gracious gift of your freedom in Christ. Live and enjoy Jesus because you have been made righteous, justified, and redeemed through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
Rev. Tim Ehrhardt 