Freedom From Sin

  

Text: Romans 6:12-23

Focus: justice

Function: to help people see how doing justice brings salvation.

12-14 That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.

15-18 So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

19 I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?

20-21 As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.

22-23 But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.

Good morning to God’s beloved children! Remember, the world entire is beloved of God.

I find this passage of scripture to be very interesting and very often taken out of context and then exaggerated in importance.

Part of the exaggeration is preaching the focuses on avoiding sin rather than preaching the focuses on the power of the Holy Spirit to live the way Jesus wants us to live, in freedom from the power that sin has over some people’s lives.

We have the passage without a description of sin. Growing up for me it was cussing, smoking and drinking. But that is not what sin is.

My theology professor at my conservative Bible college described the root of sin as selfishness.

When I read that passage and I read slaves of sin, or, instruments of unrighteousness, depending on the translation, I take it to mean slaves of self.

We are called to live in community and selfishness destroys the bonds necessary to make community foster.

And he speaks of righteousness often in the English versions of this passage. However, the word of righteousness should be translated as justice. Or doing the justice that the prophet Micah said should hallmark the believers life. (Micah 6:8) It is one of my life’s verses: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: Do justice, love mercy and walk with God in humility.”

I mentioned how this passage gets taken out of context and misused. And it has to do with that Greek word, Diakonos, the word for justice but translated in the English bibles as righteousness.

There are two different ideas contrasted in the erroneous interpretation and the way it was written in the original language. If we are slaves of righteousness, then we are slaves of what we believe. If we are slaves of justice, then we are slaves of doing justice, or doing the right thing: always. It is consistent with the gospels. Christ preached about what to do, not what to believe.

That is why we Brethren focus on the sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7. In the sermon, Jesus outlines how the righteous, or just, people live. He tells us what to do.

Jesus, and the early Church focused on proper action, not proper belief.

Their first action was to give up everything they owned and form a commune so that no one lacked the basic necessities of life.

And that demonstrates their level of commitment to purging selfishness from their lives.

Now, I’ve been scared by the preaching of this passage because there was another misbegotten idea associated with the concept of being righteous and what he means by death.

When he says that the wages of sin is death, he is not talking about hell here. Let me say that again. He isn’t talking about hell.

He is talking about how selfishness destroys. He is talking about a path to a whole and healthy lifestyle by living the way of Jesus. It is the way that Jesus commanded us to teach to others so that generosity would spread into wholeness and restoration. Death is the opposite of that wholeness and restoration.

Selfishness destroys the common good. Jesus condemned the rich fool for hoarding his grain, which would drive up the price of grain and make him more wealthy while others suffered. The way of the world says that is smart business. But it is selfish.

Look at the planet and the lack of concern for the environment.

I vividly remember visiting lake Erie as a young child and the beach was covered with thousands of dead fish killed by a giant algae bloom and seeing the damage of corporate pollution. I asked my mom about it and she said that the Bible says that in the end the land will be filled with pollution and this was the sign of Jesus coming but we didn’t need to worry about it because we would be raptured before it happened.

It was a vivid example of how Greed caused death.

You know that I am green, I drive an electric car and I installed solar panels and don’t use straws at restaurants and all that stuff. But it isn’t because I am a liberal. I learned in my conservative Bible College biology class that God has given the planet to us to tend, not exploit, and we sin by ruining it.

And it gets ruined for the sake of the greed of the few over the health concerns of the many.

It is unjust and unrighteous. That is the sin he is referring to. Most of the evil described by Jesus is systemic evil. Systems meant to keep the poor in poverty so that the rich can enjoy their own greed.

So when he talks about sin, he is talking about things that destroy the good that God wants for all of humanity since Christ came for all of humanity.

The death referred to is us losing out on the abundant life that following Jesus brings.

God doesn’t want us living by focusing on avoiding sin. Don’t worry about it. We are free indeed. God wants us living to do good for others. Doing that destroys the selfishness that hinders the beloved community Jesus died to create.

By the power of the Holy Spirit we learn to overcome our selfish tendencies and live for the good of the world.