Seventh Sunday after Trinity 2022
I’ve been listening to a lot of Miles Davis the last few years. He was a brilliant jazz trumpeter and composer who kept reinventing himself from bebop to cool jazz to funk to fusion. The seminal sound of film noir came from his score to Elevator to the Gallows, which he and his group played by just jamming while the film was playing. As far as music goes, he didn’t have many natural limitations.
I used to want to be a jazz musician. I can understand what’s happening, but to actually perform it like the pros, you need a mind that runs about 20x faster than mine. I spent years practicing, but I have too many natural limitations.
I wanted to be a baseball player too. But I had trouble with the curve. Natural limitations.
I wonder if the translators of the ESV had some natural limitations when they were working on the Epistle for today. Because “natural limitations” is just … an awful way to put it. “I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations.” St. Paul isn’t explaining it simply because the Romans had a lack of aptitude, like when someone says, “Give it to me in layman’s terms.” No. Just a straight up translation of the Greek says, “I’m speaking humanly because of the weakness [or sickness] of your flesh.” It’s a word you’d use for a disease. It shows up all the time in the Gospels when Jesus is healing diseased people.
But St. Paul uses the term, especially in Romans, not for a bodily sickness but for the corruption of the human nature. You won’t understand the Bible unless you understand original sin. And that’s especially true for today’s Epistle.
Here’s what God’s Word is saying: your problem, and my problem, is not just that we have human limitations, but that we’re born as slaves to impurity and without respect to the Law of God.
Girolamo Genga, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But Baptism began a transformation in you. Today’s Epistle is from Romans 6; that’s the same chapter that’s in the Baptism section of the Catechism: “We were buried with Him through Baptism into death,” etc. That transformation in your life God’s Word describes this way: “For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.” Impurity can mean immorality, and that’s part of what God calls us away from. But notice the pairing and the contrast: Before you were a Christian, it says, there’s impurity and lawlessness; afterward, there’s righteousness and sanctification. Sanctification comes from Latin, but our natural English way to say it is holiness. So you have impurity contrasted with holiness; and the other contrast is lawlessness and righteousness. What’s going on here is that there’s movement, there’s a motion away from the things of death towards the stuff of life—away from impurity and lawlessness towards righteousness and holiness. It’s almost as though we were at the bottom of the hill walking up towards God’s temple to participate in His life and holiness. The life of the disciple of Jesus is a journey away from the world’s impurity and hatred of God’s Law toward righteousness, a love of God’s Law and purity, which is to say sanctification, which is to say, His holiness.
St. Paul asks a rhetorical question: What fruit were you getting from the shameful things? When you gave yourself over to intoxicants, or the pursuit of money, or the pursuit of status, or the pursuit of sexual pleasure, did it make you happy? Not for long. The shameful things have an end: death. That doesn’t just mean that death is the result of embracing the shameful things. Death is their goal. Here again we have our old friend, that Greek philosophical term telos. Telos means that things have a purpose, a goal, an intention. The devil, the world, and the sinful nature draw you toward the shameful things with the purpose (the intention) of destroying you. The aim is not just to kill your body, but the destruction and dissolution of your person. Now what things in your life are destroying you?
“You’ve earned death. Jesus gives life.”
Run away from them! “The end [the telos] of those things is death.” Come to confession. Pr. Rogness or I will pray for you and support you, and never tell anyone your struggle.
But lest you think everything is by your own effort, we get this beautiful passage of God’s grace: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Wages are what you earn. You’ve earned death. But life—life unto the ages—that’s a gift. It’s Christ’s wages credited to you. It’s Christ’s holiness shared with you. It’s Christ’s righteousness imputed to you.
You’ve earned death. Jesus gives life.
And the living person begins to delight in God’s Law. There’s a terrible distortion of Lutheranism out there, and if you ever come across it, flee. It teaches that we don’t need to think about good works, in fact we shouldn’t think about good works. Luther himself address this in a sermon on this day from 1535. A student of Luther’s took his manuscript notes and cleaned it up, but then there’s this note: “[Omitted is] Luther’s concluding castigation and admonition against fornication in the Wittenberg congregation” (AE 78). I’d like to read that!
But here’s what is written down: “People are falsely interpreting and perverting our teaching when they say that it teaches people not to do or respect good works” (p245). Not true. Here’s how to think about the law and good works. The law that’s at work in the world—police, the IRS, that sort of thing—can force us to behave, but it doesn’t change the heart.
“Turn off, tune out, shut down the things leading you towards death. That’s not who you are. You’re a Christian.”
But when God makes us a Christian, we know our sins are forgiven. We often sing Psalm 51, asking God to create in us a clean heart. The new heart of the Christian doesn’t behave in order to avoid trouble; the Christian hates sin, especially his own. We still feel evil thoughts and the enticement to sin, but the Holy Spirit reminds us, “Hey! You’re baptized.” So we say, “I could commit sin, and get away with it, yet I will not do it. I will obey God and honor my Lord Christ, because I have been baptized into Him and as a Christian I have already died to sin” [This paragraph adapted from Luther].
Don’t try to do this merely by your own willpower. Paul says in in 2 Thess., “God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” God chose you. Believe in Jesus. Breathe in and out the Spirit’s Words, and He will sanctify you.
Turn off, tune out, shut down the things leading you towards death. That’s not who you are. You’re a Christian. You are forgiven. Your end, your purpose, is holiness. Your end is life. +INJ+