Romans 5:12-21

I have a friend who simply will not sing “Amazing Grace.” If you’re one of the many people of faith who counts “Amazing Grace” as one of your favorite hymns, you may find that surprising and even a little baffling. I always found somewhat peculiar. But as it turns out, my friend is not alone. I found out this week, as I was doing some background reading on today’s text from Romans, that she is one of a number of Christians who find this familiar and oft-beloved hymn to be problematic and even offensive.
The objection that my friend and others, as it turns out, have against the hymn has to do with the opening line: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” It’s the “wretch” part, my friend says, that gets to her. “I’m not perfect, by any means,” she says, “I mess up all the time! But calling myself a wretch? It seems like self-flagellating! I may not be a saint...but I’m also no Hitler!”
To be honest, I think I can understand where my friend is coming from. We try, don’t we, to live good lives, to follow Christ’s commandments, to love our neighbors as ourselves. And we fail, to be sure. We fail every day. But are we really wretched, hopeless, so sinful that we on our own are completely incapable of making ourselves better people?
These age-old Presbyterian ideas like “Original Sin” and “Total Depravity” make us uncomfortable and even bring up some resistance inside us. We find ourselves asking, “Why do we have to keep talking about how broken we are? I don’t feel particularly broken – I’m doing all right!” Over the years, I’ve had folks come to me and say, “Why are we focusing so much on sin? It’s so negative! That’s not going to make people come to church! Aren’t there some more uplifting things we could talk about?”
I’m not trying to poke fun at the people who say these things – I’ve said them myself. In fact, I’m impressed by their honesty when folks make these statements or express their discomfort with the theology of a particular hymn. Because I think that all of us, consciously or unconsciously, get uncomfortable when we talk about sin. When asked to name their favorite passage of Scripture, I doubt many people would point to the readings from Genesis or Romans that we heard this morning!
Sin can be a prickly subject. Often we, self-included, struggle to acknowledge our darker sides, our brokenness, even to ourselves. Naming it before God and one another? Forget it!
Which is why for Presbyterians, the liturgical season of Lent, which began on Wednesday, can sometimes feel awkward to us. If we must, we’ll give up chocolate, or some other pleasure. But do we really have to spend 40 days focusing on how we’re broken and sinful?
In my church in Louisville, a teenager – we’ll call her Denise – came to me one day feeling frustrated. “I don’t understand why we have to get up and say a Prayer of Confession every week,” Denise said. “It just seems like we’re always talking about how we’re doing everything wrong, and we’re supposed to be doing everything right. I feel like God can’t really expect us to be perfect – we’re human! Why does God want us to always be talking about how bad we are?”
I think Denise is asking some fair questions. And, believe it or not, I think that this morning’s text from Romans contains some good news for Denise, and for my friend who won’t sing Amazing Grace, and for any of us who get uncomfortable when we start talking about sin.
You see, in all these instances, it seems to me that we’re talking about sin with a lowercase s – particular things we do that are “bad”, that does not serve love. And that is one way
to think about sin. But if you listen carefully, it’s not how the Apostle Paul describes it in our text from Romans this morning. For Paul, Sin is Sin with a capital S. It’s not just about our individual wrongs. No, from Paul’s perspective, Sin is much bigger than that: Sin is a cosmic power, a force in the world that works against God, and love, and all that is good.
Sin, he says, entered the world through Adam’s disobedience, in the story we heard from Genesis this morning. Now, while, the historical accuracy of that story is dubious – which is another sermon for another day – it does express some pretty fundamental truths: namely, the ever-present reality of Sin in our world, and the fact that something deep within us knows that this is not right, this is not how things are meant to be. Sin enters our world, and, having established a base of operations, Sin and Sin’s partner Death unleashed their power over our whole world, enslaving each of us to the Dominion of Sin.
This capital-S, personified Sin manifests its power in our own lives in the individual sins and wrongs we commit, yes, but the battle that Paul sees sin waging in our world is much bigger and has much less to do with us. It may help to think of capital-S Sin as a disease, a sickness with which each of us is infected. The late Professor James B. Nelson, a Presbyterian theologian and recovering alcoholic, wrote about how his experience with addiction changed his understanding of Sin, how it made the words of the Apostle Paul make much more sense to him. For like addiction, sin enslaves us, controls our will, makes us act in ways we do not want to, or perhaps do not even understand. Paul describes this strange enslavement a few chapters later in Romans, saying, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
Others have compared Sin to diseases like anorexia or bulimia. Sin distorts our entire perspective of reality so that what we feel compelled to do ends up, in fact, destroying us. Others have described Sin like a parasite, or malignant, cancerous cells that eat away at us, body and soul, taking that which is good in us and converting it into something toxic and evil. Another Professor, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, invites readers to take a look at what she calls Sin’s “resume” as Paul describes it – Sin entered the world, established dominion, enslaved all of the creation, and unleashed the power of Death among us – and she concludes that Sin might be best described as a sort of “cosmic terrorist”, wreaking havoc on the world that God created and loves, and calls good.
All right, Ginna, I can hear you thinking. I thought you said there was going to be some good news. Fair point. And yet, I think you might already know what the good news is. It’s there in the text. It’s in the story that we tell and rehearse each and every liturgical year. We’ve heard it already in worship this morning, following the prayer of Confession, in the Assurance of Forgiveness.
The good news, friends, is that even as Sin came into the world and established Dominion over our thoughts, our actions, and our very selves, there’s another cosmic power, another Dominion at work in this world, and that is the Dominion of Grace. Surely the seeds of God’s grace have always been in the world; surely God’s love for all of Creation has been there, even as God has grieved over seeing that beloved Creation enslaved to Sin. But finally, Paul tells us, in the person of Jesus Christ, the one we call Lord and Savior, the Realm of Grace has entered the world in full. The power of Grace is set loose in our world through Christ’s faithful, loving, obedience to God, all the way to the cross. Where Sin exercises its death-dealing power in our world, Grace exercises a power of righteousness and fullness of life through Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, Paul spares no effort in our text this morning to show us that the Grace that entered the world through Christ is far more powerful than the Sin that entered the world through Adam. That the battle is already over, the victory is already won. Paul says that the grace and power and love of God in Christ are far greater than the separation and destruction waged by Sin and Death. That ultimately, in this cosmic battle, God is on our side.
Friends, this is why we come to worship each week and share together in the Prayer of Confession. This is why we name our brokenness out loud, uncomfortable as it may be. This is why set aside the forty days before we celebrate Easter to observe the liturgical season of Lent. This is why it matters that we understand Sin not just as a laundry list of the things we’ve done wrong, but as a disease, a cosmic power that enslaves us – and yet, a power over which God has already won the final victory in Jesus Christ.
For only when we acknowledge and come face-to-face with the sheer power of Sin, and evil, and brokenness in our world and in our lives, only then can we begin to grasp and experience the enormity of God’s Grace and love for us. When we understand Sin and Grace writ large, on the cosmic level, we come to see that power of the Gospel is not just the power of God to forgive the individual wrongdoings of people who agree to a certain set of beliefs about a person named Jesus. That’s a pretty lousy Gospel, if you ask me – or if you ask Paul, for that matter. No, my friends, the power of the Gospel is God’s victory over the Dominion of Sin, God’s own power to redeem all people – and in fact all of Creation! – from the grasp of the principalities and powers in this world that have tried – and failed – to destroy the goodness that God created.
The scandal, the impossibility and yet the certainty of the Gospel is the bold proclamation that while our world is still broken, while Sin remains in this world, it does not have the final say. As impossible as it may seem, the only thing stronger than the fist that knocks us to the ground is the hand extended to help us back up. The only force more powerful than the grief that tears our heart in two is the slow, determined needle that knits us back together.
So friends, sisters, brothers, let us gather today at this Table of Grace, where we remember that in Christ’s own body broken and given for us, we are made whole. In Christ’s own life poured out for us, we receive life abundant and eternal. For gathered around this Table, where the cup of Grace never runs dry, we can truly proclaim the good news of the Gospel: that goodness is stronger than evil; that love is stronger than hate; that light is stronger than darkness; that life is stronger than death. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor thing present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Thanks be to God. Amen.