Taking sin seriously
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 20th April 2008
Romans I:18 – 32

One Sunday a man left his wife at home and took himself to church.   When he returned home his wife asked him what the sermon was all about.  The man replied, “The minister was preaching about sin”.  The wife asked, “What did he say about it?”  The man replied, “Oh, I think he was against it!”
People expect the church to be on about sin. However, when the church speaks about sin often people only have the most general idea of what we are really trying to say.  They know we are against it, but they find it hard to hear any nuance or pick up the real significance in what the church is trying to say.  Of course, some church congregations major upon sin: it is their main theme.
The founder of the Iona community, the Rev George MacLeod, later Lord Funiary, once visited the centre of a large Australian city where he had been invited to preach in a leading Presbyterian church.  Hearing that such a distinguished preacher was to be visiting their city, a somewhat more liberal church over the road from the Presbyterians also contacted the Lord Funiary to see if he would preach in their church. MacLeod said, “I’m sorry but I’m due to preach that morning at the Presbyterian Church.”  “No problem”, replied the progressive church. “We’re just across the road from them and their service ends just as ours begins.  You won’t even need to disrobe, just walk across the road and join our service.”  Perhaps against his better judgment George MacLeod agreed.
At the appointed time he was bemused to come out of the Presbyterian Church only to find the other Minister in full regalia standing across the road on the steps of his own church, together with two church elders, with a roll of red carpet and a team of policemen.  The police stopped four lanes of city traffic, two each way, the elders unrolled the red carpet across the road and the liberal Minister processed across the road with great pomp to meet MacLeod.  The liberal Minister then led him back across the road, complete with the two elders rolling up the red carpet behind them as they walked. As he recounted the story later of these two churches, their different understandings of the gospel and what was important in it, George MacLeod said that he himself obviously was a man of deep insight because in the dour Presbyterian Church he had preached about grace and in the liberal upbeat church he had preached about sin.
Most churches seem to fall somewhere on that spectrum between grace and sin as the hallmark of their preaching. This church (I think) stands more in the tradition of grace as the great theme of our preaching.  But never think that we do not take sin very seriously.  
Now if a preacher did wish to thunder against sin, there is no passage more custom-made for this purpose than Romans 1:18 following! If a minister really wants to go hell for leather about sin, this passage gives him or her plenty of ammunition.
This passage is an extended development by Paul of the rebelliousness of humankind, of God's abandonment of human beings to their own devices and the debilitating and ever deepening problem of human sinfulness and our estrangement from God. I shall summarise the argument before we reflect upon on what it means and how we are to read it and interpret it.
Note that this passage immediately follows the opening summary statement about the gospel of grace that we explored last week. Remember that we explored two different ways of reading verses16-17. As we talked about it we looked at two different ways in which that summary statement could be read.  We said that we have to try to listen to what perhaps Paul is trying to say to his listeners and to hold those two readings in our mind.  Immediately after that, Paul follows with a statement that the wrath of God has been revealed against all human ungodliness and wickedness. That wickedness, he says, subsists in human beings’ willful refusal to see and acknowledge God, as God, even though everything about God is plain and clear to anyone who will simply look around at creation. So, Paul says, there’s no excuse – they willfully turned away and embraced idolatry of various forms.
Then begins a series of three little passages each of which begins with “therefore God handed them over” - notice that refrain coming through three times.  Because of their idolatry God gave them up to the lust of their hearts and to the degrading of their bodies because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie – true worship, for idolatry. That’s why God gave them up to unnatural passions, women exchanging natural intercourse for unnatural, (whatever that means) and men turning away from women to be consumed with passion for one other.
Then he reprises again, and since they didn’t see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up again to a debased mind and the things that should not be done. Then follows a long list which includes: wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, gossip, slander, hatred of God, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, those who are rebellious towards parents, those who are foolish, faithless, heartless and ruthless!  I think that just about covers us all!
Then comes Paul’s final accusation, that though they know God’s decree that those who do these things deserve to die, they not only do them, but they applaud others who practice them.
Before exploring how we are going to read and interpret this passage I must make one diversion or excursus. In the middle of this exposition stands what is considered to be one of the clearest proscriptions of homosexual behaviour in the New Testament. To go into this teaching in depth today would distract us from understanding the overall intention of what Paul is saying about sin.  However, this is an area of Christian ethics and teaching that we do need to examine at some time and that will not be easy for us as a congregation.
Within the wider Christian community today there is no ethical or biblical issue quite as divisive as this one.  The Anglican Communion worldwide is being strained through different attitudes on this issue.  Here in Australia, the Uniting Church has experienced a great deal of conflict in recent years.  In the Baptist community of the United States several hundred churches withdrew from one Baptist Convention and transferred to another over their understanding specifically of these ethical issues.
It is not just in the wider church community that these issues are controversial and painful.  There are people in our congregation who have been deeply hurt by the existence of same-sex relationships.  There are others who have friends or family members who are involved in such relationships. Underneath the conflict and pain of these discussions lie complex issues of hermeneutics (how we read and understand the Scriptures) and issues of moral and pastoral theology. When it comes to thinking about same-sex relationships we will need to have a great deal of grace, patience, understanding and sensitivity to one other. 
It is enough for today to say that although some people would take verses 24 through 28 as a strong and clear condemnation of homosexuality, we should note that homosexual behaviour is just one element of the rebelliousness of humankind.  If Paul is actually presenting a picture of a downward spiral into sin and human brokenness, homosexuality is not the end of that process of moral decline but just a stage on the journey, metaphorically speaking. If it is an ordered structure of deeper sins then the worst sins are found in the list of verse 29 and following: and the worst of all is the applauding of other people’s sinning.
Now I say if because we have to ask, what is Paul actually doing in this passage? Last week we explored two different readings of Romans. One reading says, the real problem at the heart of Romans is SIN, and the solution to the problem is GRACE. The other reading says that the theological issue that troubled the Romans was GRACE itself and SIN is simply used by Paul as part of the data, as one of the facts that we must understand if we are to truly understand God’s grace and how it works.  What God’s way is with human beings. 
If we read the text the first way, Paul is here in the passage establishing the very structure of sin in human life. He is stating the problem that he will then go on to answer.
If we read the text the second way, that sin is part of the facts that we need to understand grace properly, then Paul in this passage is actually rehearsing what everybody else already knows about sin.  He’s setting up what others think is the orthodoxy about sin before he makes the point that he really wants to make. 
It’s a very finely shaded, subtle difference but it’s critical as to how we interpret the text. Are these words really Paul in full flight, is he telling us what he is absolutely passionate about or is he kind of shadow boxing to set up an argument that he will then in it’s turn, turn on its head?  There are many references in his theology of sin that reflect rabbinic and Old Testament views of morality. There’s nothing new in it for the Roman Church. It would have sounded familiar to them. As we try to think how this would have sounded to the conservative Roman Christian with his Jewish roots, let theologian Wendy Dabourne describe this Roman listener:
The conservative in the Roman Church sees himself before God as privileged, chosen, loved, a recipient of grace, and is in no doubt that that gracious action includes dealing with his sin, but over against the Gentiles he sees himself as a member of God's holy and righteous people who are separated from and favoured above the rest of the world, the Gentiles…. The root of this problem is not that Jews are good and Gentiles are bad, but that Jews are special to God and Gentiles are not.  With this goes a view, perhaps not even conscious, that Jewish sin is different from Gentiles sin, mere peccadilloes over against the blackness of a culture characterised by idolatry and sexual mores he finds abhorrent….  (Dabourne, Purpose and Cause in Pauline Exegesis, 123)
Does this sound at all familiar? Isn’t this how we in the church often think about those outside?  She goes on:
The thing in his new faith that threatens this image of God, people and judgement is not that he has accepted Christ as a sacrifice for his sins, but that the same sacrifice is being accepted by Gentiles for theirs and is bringing them into the church.  If it brought them into Israel, he would have no problem. Christ crucified could be seen as the fulfillment of God's earlier means of dealing with sin within the covenant.  The insistence that God's action in Christ is the same for Jew and Gentile as Jew and Gentile seems to wipe out Israel's distinctiveness, and with it Israel's election.  This is what he cannot reconcile with his understanding of God's righteousness as including faithfulness to Israel.  (Dabourne, Purpose and Cause in Pauline Exegesis, 123-124)
Well, which reading will we choose to hear? Was Paul really gunning for sin when he penned these words? Or was he foxing just a little, laying out what his listeners knew to be true before hitting them with his counter argument? Each one of us must decide how we, with the help of the Holy Spirit, will hear this text.
I think there is evidence that Paul was foxing just a little and he goes on immediately at the beginning of chapter 2 to deliver his counter argument.  But when Paul finishes talking about sin he moves immediately into chapter 2 and this follows directly on what he says.  Here you can sense it in the very next words and know it is plainly Paul speaking loud and clear:
Therefore, (means: on the basis of what I’ve just laid out) you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge are doing the very same things (Rom 2:1)
Far from his analysis of sin giving us a way of picking up other people and levels of meaning, guilt and responsibility, what he says is that it implicates all of us together. 
This is a kind of a theological 1-2, leading people on and then hitting them with his very powerful argument.  What Paul is saying is that if you really want to take sin seriously you must understand it reflexively. Don’t judge other people’s sins, start looking to your own. This is the last thing in the world that most of us want to take seriously. Most people who go on about sin want to address other people’s failings. But when your own sin is ever before you, when you keep re-discovering your own deception and self-justification, it then that you really begin to appreciate grace, because you know there’s nothing that we can do or say or achieve that merits God’s love and acceptance of us. You realize that we very quickly become like those conservative Romans looking down our noses at others while we feel we are so clever and right.
In the mid 1990’s an interim minister at the Collins Street Baptist Church introduced a new prayer into their set form of literature – a prayer of thanksgiving and confession, an unusual juxtaposition of prayer themes.  The minister would pray first- for a number of things for which we wish to give thanks and then for a number of things that we wished to confess. When I became Pastor of the church following him it was a tradition I carried on. One day when I was writing this prayer, I gave thanks for the freedom and prosperity of our country, for our tranquil and happy lives and for the sense of peace that many of us in the congregation experienced. Then I confessed our turbulent relationships, our lustful thoughts and the discontent that broods within our hearts. On completing the prayer somehow it just didn't seem right so I played about with the structure. I suddenly realised we could reverse this prayer completely, confessing that the freedom and prosperity of our country is grounded on the expropriation of other people’s land and the protection of our wealth through restrictive immigration law.  Our tranquil and happy lives could be confessed as a failure to care and have compassion for others, to have real compassion and openness for those who are vulnerable.
Then I gave thanks for what I had just named as sins:  it may be that the turbulent relationship that we have with someone is actually God's gift to us – a divine invitation to learn patience, forgiveness and honesty.  Perhaps our lustful thoughts is the Lord tapping us on the shoulder and showing us how barren and unhappy our life may be. Perhaps our troubled hearts are brimming with the divine discontent that is stirring us up toward change and transformation within God's world. So I prayed the prayer both ways, led the congregation into that great mystery of how do we take sin and gratitude seriously?  How can we even be sure that we have understood them aright? The prayer ended by saying, “Lord we are like children playing in the nursery, piling up the pretty blocks in the order that we think make sense but not really knowing what belongs where.”
In worship we offer it all to God, the murky and difficult parts of our experience, the things where our hearts are glad and joyful.  We become deeply aware of our own sinfulness and aware that we have no foundation to judge others.  Because it is the grace of God that holds us all, in the church and outside the church and invites us to respond in gratitude to what God has done through Jesus Christ and His grace.  We come asking that God will grant us discernment to see our sins clearly, gratitude to offer our thanks freely, and the courage to welcome His grace gladly at every level of our being and in every moment of our days.  May God give us the faith so to believe and so to live.