Sermon for Sunday, June 25, 2023 || Proper 7A || Romans 6:1b-11

Every once in a while, I like to do what I call “nuts and bolts” sermons. These are teaching sermons about a particular element of our lives of faith, and today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans gives me the opportunity today to talk about a word we use a lot in the church, a word that I don’t think we understand very well. That word is “sin.”

But before I talk about sin, let me just say that the other two readings today are both quite challenging. I went back to look at my previous sermons, and I preached about the Gospel lesson in 2014 and the reading from Genesis in 2020. I can direct you to those sermons if you’d like to hear more about the other lessons today.

Okay, so today’s sermon is a teaching sermon about sin. “Sin” is a quintessential church word. But it’s a  challenging word because, depending on what kind of church you grew up in, the idea of sin played either a large or small role in your formation. If you grew up secular (or Episcopalian), there’s a good chance that you didn’t hear much about sin at all. If you grew up Roman Catholic, you heard about it more, especially in the context of going to Confession. If you grew up in one of the more conservative evangelical churches, you heard about Jesus dying on the cross for your sins because we “have all sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.”

In the churches where sin is talked about a lot, sin is most often discussed in the terms of an individual’s behavior. If Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior, then he redeems your personal sins. If you go to Confession, you need to have personal stories to share about what you have done wrong. Now, neither of these understandings is inherently wrong, but they are incomplete.

And this is where we need to begin thinking harder about the concept of sin, so we can understand how it applies not just to our own lives but the life of the world. The Catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer says that “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.”

Sin, then, is a distortion of the way God created things to be. God created the universe to exist in a balanced dance of myriad relationships, all springing from the perfect loving relationship God has within God, which we name the Holy Trinity. When a lion kills a gazelle, that’s not sin because that’s nature working the way God designed nature to work. But when a human kills an elephant to harvest its tusks to make piano keys, that is sin because the human is working against the design of creation. This is the difference between indigenous people using the whole buffalo and the colonizer shooting thousands of buffalo for sport.

So, sin is a distortion of relationships due to the seeking of selfish desires. Individual willfulness is certainly part of this, but notice that the definition of sin is plural: “the seeking of our own will…our relationship with God.” The Book of Common Prayer defines “sin” in the plural because sin is a really big concept that encompasses all the systemic ways the world works against the designs of God. Killing the elephant for piano keys is part of the larger sin of valuing consumer products over the sustainability of creation. Screening out applicants of color from job searches is part of the larger sin of not honoring the human rights and dignity of all people. Maintaining a society that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few is part of the larger sin of allowing disparities to exist when there are resources enough for all to thrive.

Societal sins move us toward death: death of the body, death of the spirit, death of our capacity to care. Sometimes I use the shorthand of “the death-dealing ways of the world” to talk about these sins that are so big that we have trouble grasping the shape of them. To counteract these death-dealing ways, God urges us to come fully alive – alive to ourselves, alive to the calls God places on our hearts, alive to how we move through the world.

Our faith in Jesus Christ helps us come alive in the midst of the death of sin. And here we have to hold two opposing concepts in our minds at the same time. One: we continue to live within the dysfunctional world of sinful systems. And Two: living in the reconciling truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection allows us to work with God to repair the distortions those sinful systems make. 

Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans says this: “We know that our old self was crucified with [Jesus] so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin.”

This freedom from sin does not excuse us from complicity with the world’s sinful systems. Rather, this freedom grants us the opportunity to work against those systems from inside them. The witness of Jesus, standing in solidarity with all those who have their “backs against the wall,” standing with them even to the point of death on the cross, this witness of Jesus repairs the distortion of sin.

Paul continues: “The death [Jesus] died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” 

Again, our death to sin does not mean we are no longer responsible for repairing this world. Rather, when we embrace the radical aliveness of the Risen Christ, we make choices that promote this same aliveness in every way we encounter the world – an aliveness of repaired and renewed relationship with God, with other people, and with all of creation. When the sinful systems of the world move all things inexorably toward death, our radical aliveness becomes a kind of sabotage, a halting of what author Brian McLaren calls the “suicidal machinery of the world.” Our freedom from sin in the light of God’s forgiveness and love allows us to stop the machine of sin from destroying the world. That’s our mission: to be so radically alive in the reconciling love of Christ that the sinful systems of the world don’t stand a chance.

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Photo by Nathan McDine on Unsplash.