We’re at the home stretch, one passage to go. It’s Romans 6:12–23. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 8 in Ordinary Time, June 28. Matt, read us for it, please.
[00:45:44] Matt:
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, so that you obey their desires. 13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that you who were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become enslaved to righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms because of your limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, leading to even more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification. 20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 So what fruit did you then gain from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the fruit you have leads to sanctification, and the end is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[00:47:12] Anthony: Amen. Paul uses a language of slavery, Matt. And we’ve already talked about sin and righteousness. Help us apprehend a Christological Trinitarian way to consider enslavement to righteousness. Is it just some sort of behavior modification program? How does that get expressed in the ways that we live in love?
[00:47:33] Matt: I think it starts in just acknowledging a cold, hard fact that comes to us from none other than Saint Bob Dylan: “You got to serve somebody.”
[00:47:45] Anthony: Yes.
[00:47:47] Matt: I spend a lot of time with folks from a variety of traditions and experiences who are on this journey of seeing the triune God is greater and better and kinder and more depictive of love than what they had traditionally believed.
And it always alarms me a little bit how quickly some folks will turn off the idea of service specific to God, but even service to the Creation as if all slavery is the same. I love Paul’s use of love slave language throughout his writing. This is voluntary. No one is forced to be enslaved to God.
It is a conscious choice that is made. Specifically, the way I am going is not productive for me, it is not productive for my family, it’s not productive for the world around me. And so, I want to go a different direction, but like Dylan told us, “you got to serve somebody.” There has to be some direction that you lean into because we are not independent actors in the world.
We are not capable of creation in and of ourselves. We’re not capable of producing the destiny outcomes that we want independent of ourselves. We are only capable of leaning into the order and design of that which is greater than us. And by holding the world together, by being … I take the view of the Ascension that when Ephesians references Christ as having filled all, he ascends and fills all things with himself, we find in everything, the silver thread of redemptive glory that essentially places Christ in this position of being the fabric that holds everything together — not just our spirituality, but everything. It is what holds, keeps the air flowing into our lungs. It’s what keeps the sun rising. It’s that he is the mechanism — to the degree that one can refer to the Uncreated as a mechanism — the means by which the world keeps in motion.
And so, from that perspective I think the opposite of legalism is actually hedonism. Interesting. That, I can simply live for myself. I can do whatever I want because I’m free. One of my mentors years ago used to use the phrase that the law will kill you, but license will kill you quicker.
And I think there’s wisdom there …
Anthony: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: … that I am free to “do as I please,” but it can still lead to very destructive ends. I was freed for a purpose. I was freed in the hope that I would voluntarily choose a posture of love, a posture of voluntary loving enslavement to the only master who does not force subjugation, but only accepts service voluntarily.
[00:50:58] Anthony: Yeah, that’s … I want to chew on that. As you look at this text, Matt, what else would you want to proclaim from it? Because so much has been shoehorned in here, but what else do you see?
[00:51:09] Matt: I think the theme as a whole — and this is true for a lot of Paul’s writings, but I think it comes out in Romans the most and probably nowhere more so than this particular passage — is this notion of kenosis.
[00:51:20] Anthony: Yes.
[00:51:20] Matt: What I found is a lot of Christians can get on board with the idea of Christ being kenotic that he is self-emptying, that he empties all of his personal desires, all of what he may want, feel entitled to as God, whatever, and uses service and putting the interests of others ahead of his own as the metric for what his kingdom looks like.
[00:51:47] Anthony: Yeah. Go God. Don’t let it touch us.
[00:51:50] Matt: Yeah. Oh, that’s it exactly. We’re okay with that being him.
[00:51:53] Anthony: Yep.
[00:51:54] Matt: And we’ve even created — it breaks my heart — we’ve got a whole branch of folks out there who have pretty much decided that anything written before the crucifixion in the gospels is an irrelevancy because that was pre-cross.
Yeah, but they’re written after the cross, they’re even written after the epistles. So obviously there’s something there we’re supposed to be seen, or else it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to write it down just to tell me it’s not pertinent. The Sermon on the Mount is specifically what comes to mind with this — we’re now told what the kingdom should look like. We’re told the value of meekness, the inheritorial worth of putting the interests of others ahead of our own. In the Magnificat, the prayer that Mary prays when the angel visits her, that the high are brought low and the low are raised up, that the rich are sent away empty and the hungry are given bread.
That — and not twisted into some kind of weird class warfare thing, because that’s a whole, that’s the other swing of the pendulum that goes the other extreme — but that there’s an equalizing within the gospel where if all of us are truly living this modeled in, through, and as Christ, we are going to engage the world in a kenotic manner where we are putting the interests of others first. Imagine a faith community, a local church where every single person present is actively putting the interests of others ahead of themselves. Yeah.
[00:53:26] Anthony: Man.
[00:53:27] Matt: Imagine the challenges you’re not going to face. You’re not going to need arbitration, mediation. You’re not going to need a full-time marriage counselor on staff. There’s a lot of things you’re not going to need because everything shifts toward the other. There’s a book. It just came out. It’s priest and poet Malcolm Guite …
[00:53:50] Anthony: Yes.
[00:53:51] Matt: … has a new book out Galahad in the Grail. It’s a length, and this is, I think, part one of five, and this part’s 345 pages. It is a, an epic poem looking at Arthur and the Holy Grail and that story.
But he has this section, if I can read it here. It’s in the beginning and he’s talking about Galahad. And the only two characters relevant to the reading here are Galahad, who’s a kid at the time, and his mother, Elaine. And the text reads here, “He asked the lady, fair Elaine, what will become of me? Oh, you will be a knight, my son, the flower of chivalry. So many knights just draw their swords to shed blood on the land. They lust for might and mastery. They only pray of courtesy and keep a code of chivalry they scarcely understand. But when the sword of destiny is holdened in your hand, then you will not bring violence, but healing to the land.”
In a way that only Malcolm Guite can …
Anthony: Yep.
Matt: … that is the gospel. That is the summation of the gospel. Not that the powers that be knock the swords out of our hands and eliminate our participation, but that we voluntarily lay them down and instead choose to proceed in a new manner, actually operating as if we actually are a new creation rather than just a retread of what always has been.
Until — and again I don’t believe this is an inherently partisan or even political idea — until we are as aggrieved by what is happening to our neighbor, whoever that neighbor may be or what whatever their nationality, race, political persuasion, income — until I’m as alarmed by injustice to them as I would be with injustice that comes to my doorstep, we are still living out of an old covenant.
[00:55:43] Anthony: Preach.
[00:55:45] Matt: And again, I think what’s most challenging for me right now is how — what I interpret that as just, that’s just the gospel. I don’t see it as controversial at all. And yet there are certain circles within the Christian faith, and not just Christendom, but within the legitimate Christian faith that views that very controversially, where they still seem very centered that the Jesus who is coming back is coming back to kick butt and take names, and he will look nothing like the Jesus that came as a lamb. And I don’t overuse the word heresy very often, but that is heretical.
He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The Jesus who returns in bodily form, the Jesus who is presented to us with every revelation, every time the light burns a little bit brighter, every time we see love and kindness in the world — that is a coming of Jesus. But to the degree that there is a “second coming” — that Jesus must be identical to who he was when he came the first time.
[00:56:48] Anthony: Amen.
[00:56:48] Matt: Or else God changed it.
[00:56:50] Anthony: Oh, there’s a lot there and I’m grateful for you, Matt. As we come to a close, I’m grateful for the myriad ways that you are a minister of the gospel, and it came out loud and clear in your articulation of the good news. And friends, the gospel is just that it is good news.
If it’s not good, it’s not gospel. And I wanted to end with a quote from the book, Tell It Slant by Eugene Peterson, because so many folks in our audience are preachers and teachers and pastors. He says, “Preaching is proclamation. Preaching announces what God is doing right here and now at this time and in this place.”
It also calls hearers to respond. Preaching is the good news that God is alive and present and in action, and because that is true, we can love our neighbors well. And I just thank you, Matt. I thank our team that works behind the scenes to make this podcast possible and as is our tradition here on Gospel Reverb, we like to end with a word in prayer. Matt, if you would please pray for us, we’d be grateful.
[00:57:55] Matt: I’d be honored to.
Gracious and merciful God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are grateful that you have pulled us into your life and that you do this in such a way that we don’t lose personality or distinction, but we’re engrafted into the very heart of who you are. Thank you that there’s no such thing as an outsider. There’s no such thing as someone who has been separated or secluded out from your love, but that your love shines everywhere, that there is nowhere the rays of your countenance doesn’t touch. And so, Lord, we are grateful that we get to participate in this with you, that you could have been God all by yourself without any participation from us, but you opt to include us. You chose us for your very own. Thank you, Lord, that we are able to see you more clearly, more genuinely, and that the veil is being lifted from our sight more and more every moment of every day. I speak blessings, Lord, over everyone who is listening to us today who has engaged these beautiful texts with us and to the preachers who are going to be taking these texts and speaking to the hearts of your people, Lord, that they would receive not a new word, not a novel word, but that you would speak to their hearts specifically what is to be heard by their congregations and parishes, by those you’ve placed in their life, their family, and their own hearts, that Lord, you gave us a wonderful text of Holy Scripture, but you animate it, you enliven it by your Spirit, and we are grateful for the Comforter and Teacher that is ours this day and forevermore. In your name, we pray. Amen.
[00:59:33] Anthony: Amen.
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