NOTE: I am putting my weekly sermons on the church website. It will be on for two weeks (usually posted on Friday) and then placed in the Archives area by date. You can download in a matter of seconds.

Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Sermon: “Set Apart for God’s Sake”

Scripture: Romans 6: 12 – 23

Reverend Larry Gerber

How do you escape a blind date, once it goes sour?

Granted, blind dates are a distant memory for a lot of us. But we can empathize with those for whom dating, not to speak of blind dating, still evokes the fear factor.

Many twenty- and thirtysomething people can recall those social experiments which went awry within five minutes. The kind where you spend an evening of awkward, if not one-sided, conversation that resembles more an interview or exchanges of curriculum vitae, than a slow, simple and pleasant engagement.

What is one to do when caught in a date that’s going from bad to worse?

One can either endure it, or fake a fainting spell, food poisoning or maybe an onslaught of the flu.

But wait, your children and grandchildren do not need any of these tricks. None of these tricks is necessary if one has the latest technological wizardry from Cingular Wireless and Virgin Mobile.

Recently, both cell phone companies began offering “Escape-A-Date,” a rescue service for those caught in awkward moments. You can pre-program a cell phone to call you at just the right moment to extricate you from the most, shall we say, unpleasant encounters. Imagine that unbearable

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silence broken by an urgent call summoning you to leave wherever you are immediately. (Actually, I think I have heard some of those urgent calls during some of my sermons).

Both companies provide a number of scripts for those situations that call for urgent rescue. The phone rings and you are carefully instructed in just the right message that will get you out quick. “Oh, I can’t believe this has happened again! How could you? Okay, I’ll be there.” That’s the one for your roommate who has lost her key again and you can’t bear to leave her out on the porch for the rest of the evening.

There are at least seven other scripts written to help you to get out delicately, but immediately, from those awful situations. A spokesperson for one of the companies described the rescue service as a lifestyle accessory for modern people who want their phone to serve them. After all, who wants to stay in an uncomfortable situation any longer than absolutely necessary? Apparently a lot of people know the answer to that question — by one estimate at least 10,000 calls a month have been generated by fake rescue call services.

Our question is: What kind of a country are we where we require the services of major communication networks like Cingular to help us get out of a social misadventure? Are we so maladroit, lacking in both social skills and communication skills, that we can’t simply find a spider hole, crawl in and wait for CNN to show up? Or something?

All of this may seem just too weird until we frame the question a bit differently. Is it a good thing to continue in a mismatched blind date, on any date, only to save face? Of

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course not! Sooner, rather than later one must choose to change the situation or remain in a state of utter dishonesty, if not despair.

Something like this may have been at work when the apostle Paul brings to the attention of the Christians at Rome a program designed to rescue them, help them escape, the clutches of something infinitely more serious than a boring conversationalist.

We’re invited to renounce sin and live in new life according to the grace that has been given to us. In Romans 6:1, Paul asks the question, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” The question is directed toward his critics, who accused Paul of undermining faithful obedience to God through his emphasis on the unmerited, undeserved grace given in Jesus Christ.

He answers the question himself, “By no means!” The question is repeated in a slightly different form in 6:15: “What then? Should we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!”

Should one remain in a situation that is spiritually corrosive and generally speaking, way bad, so that grace might be more abundant? No way! Why? Because Christians, through their union with Jesus Christ, have died to sin and been raised to new life, which means not only a new status but a whole new way of living.

At this point, one might ask, “Why all this talk of escape, rescue and freedom?”

Slavery is not the most obvious answer ... but it’s the right one. We aren’t wearing leg irons or chains; our lives are

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mostly not restricted.

But we were, and might still be, slaves — to sin.

Slavery is both unreal and even offensive until we fully understand Paul’s use of the concept in Romans 6. But, we can’t understand that concept until we become aware of the back story hidden behind Paul’s use of slavery and freedom.

When Paul uses terms such as slavery and bondage to sin, he is drawing upon the experience of the ancient exodus, when the people of God were delivered from slavery into the freedom of the promised land. Everything Paul writes about the experience of freedom in Jesus Christ is grounded in this exodus story. To perceive this underlying structure beneath the story of sin and redemption is like looking into one of those Magic Eye photos the moment a whole world that was once invisible becomes apparent.

Just as the people of God were delivered from slavery through the waters of the Red Sea, so Christians through the waters of baptism have been delivered from bondage to sin into eternal life (6:4). As the people of God, freed from slavery, began a new life under the covenant and tutelage of the Law, so Christians through baptism begin a new life of “sanctification,” under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of Christ, the end of which is life eternal (6:22).

The word “sanctification,” like justification, has a long and rich provenance in our theological lexicon, and it’s a word we shouldn’t stop using because we’re afraid our congregations aren’t up to grasping its theological content.

The word sanctify means “to set apart” and was used in the Hebrew Scripture to describe the sanctity or “set apartness” of the vessels of the tabernacle. They were “set apart” for

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use only in the tabernacle. They were thus “holy” vessels, set apart vessels.

As are we, says Paul. We have been “set apart” for God’s divine purposes and we’re not to be used for any other purpose. We’re not to be used as instruments of evil, or wrongdoing.

Those who lives are characterized by wrongdoing, intemperate living, selfish lifestyles, are slaves. Slaves to their own nature. Slaves to sin.

That is to say, their lives are not their own. Their lives belong to someone else, or something else.

Paul calls on us to recognize that we can escape this date. Our lives are not our own—true enough.

But they belong to God, through Jesus Christ, not to sin.

Billy Graham has been preaching this same message for over 60 years! When he offers an altar call, it is to come down, to set ones self apart from the selfish lifestyle; to acknowledge intemperate living, and wrongdoing.

Reverend Graham is delivering his last crusade this weekend. At 87 years of age, he deserves to rest from his labors. But, his question, Paul’s question, God’s question is this:
Whose servant are we going to be? God’s? Or sin’s?

Interestingly, and perhaps confusing for those who cherish individual freedom, Paul has a radically different notion of freedom than most. We might sum it up this way: We are

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set free to be servants of God.

Commenting on this notion of Christian freedom, N.T. Wright says “freedom from the slavery to sin involves a new kind of ‘liberated slavery,’ obedience to God who loves us and seeks out our true freedom, our true humanness.”

Paul makes the provocative argument that slavery is a fact of human life. The question is to whom will one be enslaved: to sin with all its self-serving and self-destructive habits that lead ultimately to death ... or to God, with habits of life that display the grace of Christ and lead one to eternal life?

Bob Dylan’s song “Serve Somebody” captures the choice well:
You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride,
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side,
You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair,
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

The question then is straight forward: What or whom shall we serve?
Shall we continue to offer our minds, hearts and bodies in ways that lead nowhere beyond self-acclaim and worse, misery? Shall we give ourselves to pursuits that enhance the ways of death? “What advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death” (6:21). Or shall we day by day seek to live deeply into the story of our baptism by offering ourselves to

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God in service, prayer and faithful obedience?

Paul’s stark language makes it clear that the stakes are very high. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus” (v. 23).

Of course, we know the correct answer. But we also know how difficult it can be to live a life of faithful obedience to our God. The struggle does not go away once one embarks upon the life of faithful service in Christ. In fact, the struggle may intensify.

What Paul has done in Romans chapter 6 is lay the essential groundwork to understand our freedom in Jesus Christ. That freedom which leads to sanctification or holiness of life, is not passive; it entails an active offering of ourselves to God.

It would be a mistake to assume this means the Christian life is just another version of grit-your-teeth moralism. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and throw yourself on God.

No, as Paul makes clear in other chapters, especially in Romans 8, Christians are enabled to live a life of obedient service through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us (5:5 and 8:11). Active freedom means active trust in God who not only rescued us from sin, but is able to transform us into the very image of Christ. We do not do this by ourselves alone — God is at work within us to bring about our sanctification (Philippians 1:6).

At the start of the day, we ask the critical question: Will my actions today serve the purposes of God and not my own?

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Sources:

Dylan, Bob. “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Slow Train Coming. Sony, 1979.

Wright, N.T. “The letter to the Romans.” The New Interpreter’s Bible. Abingdon Press, 2002, 548.

Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766