After last week’s sermon I had a number of people ask me about the rest of the story about my truck breaking down.  Today I thought I would tell you the rest of the story before we took the special offering to help pay for it.  Seriously though the truck is back and relatively little was wrong with it so praise God for God’s good providence.  What I really want to talk about this morning is way more interesting than my truck story any way, because I want to talk about sin.  We all do it, we all have our favorites, and nothing will get some good gossip going any better than talking about the sins of another, never mind the Bible suggests gossip too is a sin.  It really begs the question, what is it about sin that we find so attractive?  Why do we pay it so much attention?  Why do we argue so vehemently over what is and is not a sin?  Don’t we know the good news of the gospel that by the power of Christ we have been freed from our sin?  But it is not that easy is it.  The apostle Paul in the passage we read a few moments ago from his letter to the Romans is encouraging us to shake free of sin because we have been freed from it.  On the face of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but we understand what he means.  We celebrate the good news that through Christ the power of sin and the wages of sin which is death have been conquered.  By Christ’s actions in our lives Sin has no more power over us but simultaneously as we celebrate our new life in Christ we go on sinning constantly. So Paul takes us to task and calls us to start living according to our new reality in Christ; to start being who we in fact are, the redeemed, the saints, the Holy Ones, the Children of God, the Royal Priesthood, the Holy Nation.  Having been so rescued through the resurrection of Christ, its time to be who we in fact are!

          Indeed, through Christ we claim dual citizenship as members of God’s heavenly kingdom who for a time also live in a broken and sinful world.  Paul however is calling us not to renounce our dual citizenship but to start taking more seriously our behavior as God’s own and to, even now, begin living as those in heaven.  Let’s face it Paul is right we like the Romans tend to believe fervently in God, but imagine God as removed, far off, and therefore are not always compelled to take our role as God’s redeemed quite as seriously as we ought.  Paul is not suggesting that we should be perfect in this life.  Paul knows that we all fall way short of perfection no matter how hard we try, but at the same time Paul calls each of us to try a little harder.  I think Martin Luther summarized Paul’s sentiment quite nicely when he said “This life, therefore, is not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on. This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.”  As the old saying goes how do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, Practice, Practice.  So how do you get to heaven?  Not by practice or anything else you can do, but by God’s grace alone but the practice can’t hurt us any and we ought to begin even now living according to the rules of our heavenly home.

            An anonymous Zimbabwean pastor once said “I am a disciple of Christ. I will not let up, look back or slow down.   My past is redeemed, my future is secure. I am done with low living, small planning, smooth knees, mundane talking, chintzy giving and dwarfed goals. I no longer need pre-eminence, prosperity, position, promotion or popularity. I don’t have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised or rewarded.  My face is set; my goal is sure. My road is narrow; my way is rough, my companions few. My God is reliable; my mission is clear. I cannot be bought, compromised, detoured, delayed or deluded. I will not flinch in the face of adversity, not negotiate at the table of the enemy, or meander in the maze of mediocrity.  I am a disciple of Christ. I must go until he comes, speak of all I know of him and work until he stops me. And when he comes for his own, by the grace of God, he will have no problem recognizing me, because my colors are clear.”  Would be that we all had that kind of resolve to live as Christ has called us to live, to live as Christ has freed us to live. 

          The late Erma Bombeck, in her Mother’s Day column of 1995, commented on mothers who survive the loss of a child to death. “The longer I live,” she wrote, “the more convinced I become that surviving changes us. After the bitterness, the anger, the guilt and the despair are tempered by time, we look at life differently. “While I was writing my book I Want to Grow Hair. I Want to Grow Up. I Want to Go to Boise, I talked with mothers who had lost a child to cancer. Every single one said death gave their lives new meaning and purpose. And who do you think prepared them for the rough, lonely road they had to travel? Their dying child. They pointed their mothers toward the future and told them to keep going. The children already had accepted what their mothers were fighting to reject.” 

           I think similarly the death of the one of whom God said “this is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, do as he commands you.” changes us.  Christ’s death and resurrection gives our lives new meaning and purpose as we become participants in them.  We are tempered not by time but by God’s redeeming love and once we come to understand that we have been redeemed by this love we can not help but to look at the world differently.  This life is still a long road to travel and it is a road full of twists and turns, a road full of dead ends and wrong turns.  But the dying and rising of the one we call Lord has prepared us to walk this road freed us to follow him faithfully.  We look to this one as our compass so that we may avoid as many wrong turns and dead ends as possible and walk as humbly and rightly with our God as possible.  There is no reason for us to be so obsessed with sin because Christ has freed us from it and therefore we don’t have to worry about it any longer.  So we don’t have to worry so much about sin, but neither should we return to it.  Instead may we all do our best to reject it when we are able and to even now begin living according to the rules of God’s heavenly kingdom.  Amen. 

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