These Deadly Bodies--July 7, 2020

These Deadly Bodies--July 7, 2020

"For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" [Romans 7:19-25a]

One of the most formative sentences of theology in my life is a one-sentence punch-line from the comic strip Pogo.  You have likely seen it before--Walt Kelly's comic strips ran from the late 1940s through the 1970s--and you may well have heard these words from my mouth (or keyboard) before. And the punch line goes simply like this: "We have met the enemy... and he is us."

Let me say that again. We have met the enemy--and he is us.

The line is, of course, a riff on Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's famous declaration after the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, "We have met the enemy, and he is ours."  Perry's sentence certainly has gravitas to it, but Pogo's tells an important truth about us.  The problem isn't simply "out there"--you know, with other people (people not like me, of course).  No, the problem is in me as well as outside of myself.  So if I am going to go on a moral crusade to rid the world of unrighteousness (and good luck with that), then I need to start with me.  I need to recognize the ways I am part of the problem... the ways I am my own worst enemy... the ways I am complicit and entangled in all sorts of evil things, whether I had been aware of it before or not.

Christians have been talking this way for two millennia--or at least, we were talking that way at the start of our movement.  In the New Testament writings, and then running in a strand of theologians and preachers over the centuries, this is what our talk of "sin" was really all about.  Instead of treating "sin" as simply a synonym for the individual and isolated bad actions I choose, the New Testament see it (rightly, I believe) as something more insidious--as something we are both participants in and held captive by.  

Sin isn't just the one-time act of stealing the last cookie from the cookie jar--it's the gluttonous hunger that wants to keep eating more than I need... and the mean-spirited impulse to take a cookie from my brother or sister... and the self-centered mindset that assumes my whims for cookies matter more than someone else's needs.  That means it's in attitudes and assumptions, not just actions.  It also means that if I grew up having the last cookie taken away from me by my older siblings, and then I learn that same habit of stealing cookies from my younger siblings, that sin has a way of passing itself down across generations like a virus--copying itself over and over again as new people duplicate the crooked actions, ideas, and habits in new situations and people.  It infects us, and we infect others with it.  Sin affects us from the outside, and then our sin affects others beyond us as well.  It's not just one bad action, or one bad actor--it's all of us, and it's everywhere.  All of that is to say that sin is systemic as well as individual, and it has its tendrils into all of us.

I know that's not very happy news to consider, but we can't get to the good news until we face the bad news.  And the bad news is that what's "wrong" with the world isn't just locatable "out there," as much as we want to find someone else to make into the villain.  I can't just say, "Well the problem with our society (or our state, or our country, or our planet) is THOSE PEOPLE..." while waving a finger at whatever people we want to turn into scapegoats.  I'm part of the problem.  I'm a part of the brokenness.  I have met the enemy--and it's me.

That doesn't mean I should go beating myself up, or hating myself, or belittling myself all the time. But it does mean that I bear responsibility for looking at the ways I am entangled in (and sometimes invested in) the rottenness of the world.  And it means that when I see those ways I am both caught in and complicit with the sinfulness of the world, I have to name them as part of my sin, and then once it is named, it can be faced, repented of, forgiven, and turned from.  As Maya Angelou's words put it so well, "You do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, you do better."

So, for example, I may not directly be forcing some child to labor in a windowless factory somewhere and half-starve while they sew garments for 15 hours a day, but if my attitude on life is that I am entitled to cheap novelty t-shirts and should be able to buy them whenever I want, I have to acknowledge that I'm part of a system that does harm to neighbors half a world away--a system that keeps running, in part, because of my entitled sense of greed that wants things on whims and doesn't care about the cost to other people.

Or maybe I'm not a white-hood wearing, cross-burning Klan-member (I'm not), and I've never called someone a racist name (I haven't), but when I'm quiet in the presence of others who make racist comments (oooh, I've been there), or when I've benefited because of the color of my skin without questioning why that is (ouch), or when I've assumed that the things I've gotten in my life were MY achievements but that other people whose skin color is different must have had their successes HANDED to them because they couldn't have achieve them on their own without favoritism (yikes, that hits close to home), well, what do you know--I realize that I am entangled in the particular sin of racism.  (Side note: this is part of why it is EXTREMELY unhelpful to say things like, "We don't have a skin problem--we have a sin problem," as it is can be tempting to say, because that makes it sound like racism isn't a form of sin.  That's like saying, "We don't have a cancer problem--we have a death problem." Well, yes, death is a bigger issues, but cancer deaths are a subset of the bigger issue of death in general, and yet, we should still be spending time and resources on curing cancer.) 

Maybe I've never cheated anybody in business, used shady accounting, mistreated my employees, or cut corners on safety for workers... but if the money in my investment portfolio makes me money for retirement from companies whose profits come in part from that kind of crookedness, I have to admit it: I'm entangled in that system of sin, too.  And at that point, I can either stick my head in the sand and ignore it... or decide that my money and profits are more important than doing the right thing... or I can change where my money is invested.  But the honest thing is to change what I do with my money, even if my small action and my small pile of dollars doesn't make a change in the business practices of the companies I had invested in.  

If all of this seems kind of overwhelming, well, that's how Paul felt.  In those words from Romans 7 Paul sketches out how it feels to want to do right... and then to discover how many ways each of us is complicit in sin that is both bigger than our individual choices and yet also directly connected to those choices.  And it's maddening, isn't it?  We want to do good in the world.  We want to be just and kind and compassionate and loving and decent.  The trouble is, well, there are some ways we are already waist-deep in rottenness and have had voices around us tell us it's OK... and there are some ways we simply can't recognize that we are complicity in sinful systems until someone else helps us to see it.  And there are also times when we are fully aware that we are entangled in systems of sin... but they benefit us, and we don't want to lose the benefits.  We don't want to lose our positions of comfort.  We don't want to lose the proud feeling that comes with the illusion of thinking I'm better than someone else.  We don't want to lose access to the cheap novelty t-shirts.

When Paul thinks about all the ways he is entangled in systemic sin like that, he breaks down and just shouts to the sky, "Who will rescue me from this body of death?"  It's the question-form of Pogo's punchline, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."  And that's just it: the problem isn't just "out there" in "those people." It's in me, too, and specifically in the ways I am complicit in a lot of rotten things. A lot of my comfortable way of life depends on keeping a lot of terrible things happening to other people.  If I want to pretend ignorance of that, I can, I guess... but if I want to be honest, I'll find myself like Paul crying out to be free from this deadly body of mine and these deadly systems of ours that we feel stuck inside of.  And I'll have to face that a lot of what keeps this physical body of mine comfortable, from the cookies in the cookie jar to the booming pension investments to the cheap t-shirts, is built on things that bring harm to lots of other bodies that God calls beloved.

So what we need to be freed from is not simply one or two bad habits, but a whole system of crookedness in which we are all entangled. What we need is not simply for God to zap a select "few bad actors" with a flick of a divine finger, but for healing in each of our souls ... and eyes... and pocketbooks... and appetites... and our bent-in-on-self hearts.  The enemy isn't just out there in the faces of people I don't like or don't look like or don't agree with.  The problem is festering, too, in the face I see in the mirror, and in these deadly bodies of ours.

All of that has to be in the background for us to be able to hear Paul's climactic word of praise, "Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ!"  Jesus has made possible, not just a few helpful self-help strategies, but rescue and transformation of all the systems we are tied up in.  Jesus doesn't just give me a Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free card for my personal use, but is freeing all of us from the systems that have us all bound.  Jesus didn't come just to give me a pass on stealing the last cookie from the jar--he came to make me into a new creation that doesn't keep wanting to hoard cookies.  All the ways I'm entangled in systems of sin are ways that I am a little bit dead inside, and Jesus has come to bring me, and all creation to life again.  That's why there's hope--for me, for Paul, for you, for all of us in these deadly bodies of ours.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ indeed.

Lord Jesus, you have freed us... and yet we keep selling ourselves into sinful servitude and getting tangled up there.  Keep freeing us, so that all creation may be made new.  Keep raising us to life, so that all your beloved will experience your resurrection grace.