Marty Folsom—Year A Proper 9

Anthony: So, let’s dive into our lectionary text. Our first passage of the month is Romans 7:15–25a. I’ll be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, the updated edition. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 9 in Ordinary Time, July 5.

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶ Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷ But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. ¹⁸ For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. ¹⁹ For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰ Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. ²¹ So I find it to be a law that, when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. ²² For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, ²³ 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. ²⁴ Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵ Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am enslaved to the law of God, but with my flesh I am enslaved to the law of sin.

So, Marty, “I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very things that I hate”, verse 15. In some sense, Paul is diagnosing what has ailed the human condition. So, where’s the good news here?

Marty: The good news is he recognizes that he often says no to something that is the yes of God, and the yes of God in Jesus is always yes to the heart of the Father. And so, Paul recognizes the gospel is there, the goodness of God is there, and there’s something in him ― call it distracted, call it disconnected, call it whatever you like, the nature of the human ― there is this capacity to look away from the One who is the very source of life even while he still continues us.

And Paul has woken up to this. There’s something that when I recognize that saying no to God, that was choosing death. I was killing the relationship. And what good is this? Nothing. It is simply death. But thanks be to God, the yes is there. The yes of God in the person of Jesus Christ, even in this person who I am, says yes to me and no to my evil.

And to say the cross is, first of all, the yes of God for humanity that says no to the sinfulness of humanity. And so, we could look at the cross and see what Paul’s wrestling with here, the nature of sin, but you have to look deeper and go, “It’s all yes.” It is the yes of the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ who acknowledges what Paul’s acknowledging here and says, “But don’t get stuck there.”

The cross is proclaiming the yes of God, and in his resurrection, he is that yes every day to us, so that even as we wrestle with what Paul wrestles with here, the yes is the pronounced thing when we ask, “Do you love me even today?” And the resounding yes comes back, meets us, embraces us, and each day that yes is there.

And Paul’s ability to recognize the things that he says no to ― that is what comes from what is called “conscience” which, “con” “science”, the two parts are there. Knowing with. Knowing with what or who? Paul knows with God, and he knows that what he is inclined to is so often not a conscience shaped by being with the God who is living and present to him, but gets distracted.

So, he’s living in a tension, but he knows true north. He knows the right thing to do, and therefore his final statements are that delight. “But I know where” truth is. I know what it means not to be caught enslaved in this life apart from, but to be lived in the freedom that God gives to us in himself who is here present with me. I am not abandoned. I am one even in this state who is embraced.

Anthony: Yeah. Amen and amen. That’s a beautiful heralding of the gospel right there. But if you were to dig or mine something else from this and proclaim it to a congregation, what else would you have to say?

Marty: So that word enslaved, I’m not enslaved. The nature of Paul’s sense of being enslaved is particularly fear. “I’ve not been given a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but I’ve been given the spirit of adoption by whom I cry out, ‘Abba Father.’” So if we recognize here that Paul’s wrestling here with the possibility of the unfreedom that comes when we forget our essential orientation as children of the Father, loved to him in and through the Spirit by Jesus’ work in bringing us there, and that this whole sense of slavery that the law even brings ― the law’s always going, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong?” ― we become attentive to ourselves and not to the delight of the One who loves us. So, to say Paul here in the end is wanting to release us from any sense of being enslaved with the fear that ever makes us judges, and the word law that appears after it would seem to point us towards a kind of law, but it’s not the law of our courts.

This is the law of God. It’s the Torah. It’s the way of walking with the one who has loved us and given himself to us. So, he is, in his whole being, not in slavery to any earthly law. He is submitted to the nature of the way of God, which is the way of freedom. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

And so, this is the law of the Spirit and sets us free. We’re not enslaved to judgment, condemnation. Even as he’s sitting here wrestling with this, he could get absorbed in that condemnation, but no, he recognizes, “This God calls me to the life of freedom, and I will not be enslaved to any other law, judgment, or anything. Even my own judgment, I will not allow to be enslaved. I will live in the freedom won for me by the One who says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.'” And in knowing Him, you are free.

Anthony: Oh, wow. The scope of it ― it reminded me of a Thomas Torrance quote that “nothing in all of creation will be able to separate from his love any more than anything can separate the Father and the Son from one another.” Hallelujah, that he says yes to us, even as he says no to evil.