Sin Evil and Good – (Audio approximately 9 MB, right-click to download)

Rev. Samuel G. Alexander

First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael

1510 Fifth Avenue, San Rafael, California 94901

sam@fpcsr.org – blog: www.gracecomesfirst.net

March 21, 2010

Sin, Evil and Good

Romans 3:21-26

As I said throughout these last weeks of Lent, we’ve been dealing with the five major theological questions at least of Christian Theology.If you can find your own answers to these questions and how they interrelate, then you’ve developed a systematic theology, that is to say a theology that is at least internally coherent.Whether or not it finally makes sense of things, well that’s a matter of faith.

The first Sunday we talked about Nature and Grace.How is it that the God of Nature, the god of the physical laws of the universe relates to the God who is active in the world?The Second Sunday we talked about Reason and Revelation.How do we know God?Do we know God because God reveals God’s self in purpose to us through faith, or do we know God by examining the world around us?What’s the relationship of those two?Last week we talked about Law and gospel.there are laws that we need to follow in order that we can develop as a society, as a people, and yet there is also Gospel – there is good news that we are loved by God regardless of law.and in what way do those two things relate?how does that work together?

And today frankly is the hardest.And it’s the hardest question for the mainline congregation. It’s the question of sin and evil, and it’s relationship to the good.Can the good be overwhelmed by evil?Or does the good have some strength and power that in the end transforms evil?And for this passage I have chosen Paul’s Letter to the Romans, third chapter, beginning in the 21st verse.Please listen to what the Spirit of God might say to you in these verses that I recognize may be problematic for some.

“What now, apart from the law” – that is, the teaching of God in the Old Testament – “the righteousness of God has been disclosed and it is attested by the law and the Prophets.” [The Old Testament] “The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe,” that’s what’s been disclosed, “for there is no distinction since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.They are now justified or made righteous by God’s grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood effective through faith.God did this to show God’s righteousness because in God’s divine forbearance, God passed over the sins previously committed.It was to prove at the present time that God alone is righteous and that God makes righteous the one who has faith in Jesus.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that sin is something hangs so many people up?The reason that I don’t put it in the service is that so many people that walk in the door [will see] sin – oh, well that downer Christian thing again.And Paul’s passage here, I mean, this gets to the heart of why a lot of people just never darken our doors.The whole thing with the magic blood, Jesus dying for our sins, washing us clean somehow with blood – that’s very difficult.Now the truth is that I think the real reason for that is not so much that Paul is confused or wrong because I don’t think he is.I think the reason for that is that we’ve historically done a really lousy job of interpreting that to the world around us.

There are good reasons why we’ve done a lousy job of doing that, but we really have.It has to do with worldview.You hear me talk about that often enough.But the truth is that folks around us, they do have a problem with that kind of language, the sin and grace, the sin and cross kind of language.But there are also Christians out there that have made them feel funny about it, and oftentimes – we’ll call it the evangelical wing of the church – this comes up the clearest in what’s called the Four Spiritual Laws. [Anybody hear of the Four Spiritual Laws ever?Holy smokes!Only Bob Hirni, oh Enid, thank you very much, glad to hear it.]You go to New York and see somebody on the street corner saying, “Jesus is coming, get right with God” and he’s got a pamphlet in his hand you can bet it’s got the four spiritual laws in it.It crystallizes this whole idea of sin and redemption.so I’m to do a PowerPoint sermon today to explain to you about the Four Spiritual Laws and we’re going to look at them.Now I got these PowerPoints from the web, a couple of them really just at random though I did like some of these.So there they are, the Four Spiritual Laws.

Now the first one of course is that God loves you, but as you see, they skip over that pretty quickly and get to Man is Sinful and Separated from God, then move to the fact that Jesus Christ is God’s Only provision for that sin, and fourth, We must individually receive Jesus as Savior and Lord.

In this particular PowerPoint, we go immediately from this slide, the four spiritual laws, and we wanted to expound about them, so we go right to sin.We skip over the fact that God loves you. Isn’t this one of the problems with the way Christianity is perceived in the world?We skip RIGHT over the fact that God loves you and there we are – we’ve got sin, all of us are sinners.Now not all of the slide presentations did that.Some of them do talk about God’s love.God’s love is for you and you were created to know God personally.God so loved the world that God gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in God should not perish, but have eternal life.(Although those of you who don’t believe, I don’t know. Mmmm . . . )

We get the one slide there but now we’re going to move quickly to sin.And there’s our passage, “All who’ve sinned have fallen short of the Glory of God.”We were created for fellowship with God but because of our own stubborn self-will – it says, our self-centeredness.

When I was growing up at the Peniel Bible Conference, they always put the word sin up on the board with a black ’S’ and a black ’N’ and a giant red ’I’.The ’I’ was in the center.We’re self-centered so we are rebellious from God and as a result we go down the path of death instead of the path of life. (Shown on the slide.) Sin is equal to death, don’t you just love that?Isn’t that great?I love the skull and crossbones.Sin is equal to death. And the thing is there’s this gap between us and Holy God.That’s what sin is.There’s a giant gap.And we do all kinds of things to fill it up.

One of the things we do is we live a good life.This is your way – I’m telling you because you all are in church.We church people, that’s how we do it!We live a good life.We say, “OK, we’re living a good life, I’m going to be a good person – that will get me close to Holy God.”But it does not seem to close the gap, there’s still a big gap there.The other thing that you and I tend to do is RELIGION.We figure out the right religious words to say, we do the right things in our religious context, we believe the right things, and then maybe we’re all right.It doesn’t close the gap.And then there’s philosophy.We try to figure out, Who are human beings and how do they relate to the divine?What we tend to do in a moment when we use philosophy to draw us into perfection is that we tend to narrow the scope of God.The subject is no longer God, the subject is really us, our wisdom or the creation around us, and that does not seem to close the gap either.Now we’re in pretty desperate shape according to this scheme.We’re sinners!We’re totally depraved, rotten to the core.

And the next slide is from the other slide presentation, I have to show them to you because I really liked them.Don’t you like that, the skeleton foot and the ball and chain?I really liked that one.And then, my personal favorite – the Grim Reaper.Now what I liked about this is the passage, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”What’s the picture about, is it about the free gift of God?No!It’s about death.That’s the nature of the way this gospel is sometimes communicated – no wonder people run from us!

Law number three: Jesus Christ alone is god’s Provision for us.So you’ve got the theory: you’re rotten, you’re bad, and the wages of that badness and rottenness is death, and therefore somebody’s got to die.And so God sends God’s Son Jesus to die.And the thing that’s strange to me about that, Christ died for our sins, is that we’re supposed to be happy about it.

That seems rather self-centered of us.To be just delighted that Jesus died for us, that means we get off the hook.But in this scheme, Jesus dies for us because somebody had to die, he was buried but not to worry, he was raised on the third day.So it turns our OK in this scheme.Jesus is the only way, see there’s no death there, I like that.And then we’re able to bridge the gap, because Jesus bridges this gap between God and human beings.God reaches down into us.God reaches within us and seeks to make the connection with us.And all you have to do is to accept these truths you’ve received: ’I believe that, I can trust that.’And it gives us the right to become children of God, to be connected to God – our adoption certificate.And it’s the gift of God, not a result of works, and it’s a good thing because we can’t possibly be good enough to make this happen.And we experience a new birth, we become a new something in this scheme of things.

Though we get the human plus the cross, now the cross becomes a part of our life and we are now complete, having received Christ.That gap is filled. And so instead of being or living in a self-centered life, we’re living now in a Christ-centered life.Often not defined very well, but there it is.

And so you pray this prayer, “Lord Jesus I want to know you personally.Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins.I open the door of my life and receive you as my Savior and Lord.Thank you for forgiving me of my sins and giving me eternal life.Take control of the throne of my life.Make me the kind of person you want me to be.”

To tell you the truth, that’s not too bad, is it?Now, we may not like the dying and the cross and the sins, but the notion that the presence of God might take control the throne of our lives and make us the kind of people that God wants us to be, well maybe we’re on to something here.If you receive God in that way, and Christ comes into your life, your sins are forgiven, you become a child of God, you receive eternal life – that is to say life beyond this life – and you begin the great adventure for which God created you.

That’s the scheme.That’s what people don’t like.And I have to ask myself why don’t people like it.Let’s go through the four spiritual laws again.Maybe this time let’s interpret them, you and I, in a way that might make some sense to us nowadays.

Let’s go through them.God is loving you.Now that’s actually something that we do really well in the mainline church.God is love when the kids come up here.If there’s one thing I want you to know, if you don’t hear ANYTHING else from me your ENTIRE lives, what I want you to know is that God loves you.That’s the children’s sermon, you call the children up, you tell them Jesus loves them, and then you send them on their way.Each and every week I say there’s nothing you can do to keep God from being God.God is love, God is that which puts value into you.We’re pretty good at God is Love.But can we hold onto that at the same time that we say we fall short?

The word sin in the New Testament Greek is harmartia, and harmartia means ’missing the mark.’ It’s an archery term.Many of you know that.And don’t you just love this?Not only do you miss the mark, you fall short.You don’t even reach the target.That’s how Paul sees it.You’re not getting to that place where this loving God is hoping you will get, where this loving God is driving and moving you to get.

Now we don’t like that word, sin, but too bad – we need it.Or something like it. Think about the world around us. I actually think the world NEEDS the presence of God to heal it and bring it to the next beautiful thing.Never mind your own life, whether or not you have lust in your heart or you get angry at somebody, let’s think about our world as a whole.The self-centered lives, the fact that we focus only on our own community and what’s good for it instead of what’s good for the whole thing. . . causes so much difficulty and sorrow and struggle.Where’s the heart that’s going to expand, that’s going to seek ways to find the justice in the world?

I’m not a simpleton about this.I’m not suggesting that liberal ways of doing it are the right ways or God’s ways.It’s a difficult thing to have the wisdom to try and figure out how humanity is going to live together, because we don’t do it very well.We really need the presence of God to be able to do that. What concerns me most about my friends outside the walls of a religious community, is that they seem to have forgotten that it’s about healing, development and growth.It seems to not be a category.It’s like, “I don’t want to focus on sin because then I’ll feel rotten about myself.Let’s be satisfied with ourselves the way we are.”When someone says that to me, I say, “Wait a minute.Don’t we need something like the four spiritual laws?”

The third one – the third one’s a little more complicated, in fact it’s the hardest one for us, because it talks about this idea that there is a God up there who has a son, who sends the son to us in the earthly plain, and that son is able to die and somehow make our mistakes, the things that we do that fall short, okay with God again.Now that is a very mythic interpretation of who God is and what God does.It’s actually a wonderful interpretation if you believe that there is a God up there that does such things.But we long ago stopped thinking that.And when we talk to people, we really ought to say we don’t think that.It’s not anti-religious, it’s not anti-Christian to suggest such a thing.

OK, we don’t think there is a God up there that has SONS, and sends them to Earth, like a science fiction movie or something.But does that mean Paul’s wrong? No, I don’t believe so.I think that Paul recognized that there is something about giving of a perfect life, about the giving out of life into the world that allows the next beautiful and surprising thing to take place.He recognizes that THIS is the way of that creative and loving God – to move us from death to life, metaphorical death and real death to life.

The thing about God’s movement, God’s strength, God’s creative power is that it’s not predictable.You simply can’t guess how God is going to restore something.If we could, we would probably make an effort to make it happen. . . though we have to rely on this God to move into creation, to continue creating as God has always created.There’s no reason for us to say that Jesus died for our sins and we have to say those words and mean it, in order to believe the heart of God’s gospel, that God is the God who moves us from death to life.There is no need then to pretend that we’re okay, and shut out the presence of God out of some sort of strange fear or guilt.Because this message is a message of good news that it is the nature of that which creates to make us complete and whole, to take us to that new beautiful place in your life.The next step. . . The power of God.If you like, the power of God in Christ, is there to move you and make you whole.

And in step four, all you have to do is believe it, trust it, act upon it.And all of the redemptive, restorative power of the presence of God begins to move in and fill your life.It is not a bad message.It is a great message, because then you’re off on that adventure, that thing for which God created you, to become MORE than you even expect to be.

This PowerPoint I found. . . last slide. . . Growth.You’ve got to love the Evangelicals, and I mean it.They know what it’s about.It’s about growth.Now I might not talk in those ways.I might not quote you Scripture phrases quite like that.But they get it.The presence and the power of Christ within us, that pattern of creation within us, is what takes us to the next step.You begin with knowing that God loves you.You recognize that you fall short.So that you then seek the power and the strength of God to move within you and change you.And you act out of that trust, and that let’s you grow.That is what we are about here in this place.The next step.Your growth.with the presence of God.I might not have you pray that prayer.And I’m not going to have you raise your hands right now, trust me.But I wonder if in the quietness in this place, if you would like to commit your life, afresh, anew, to having the presence of the Spirit of God enable YOU to take the NEXT step towards the beautiful person [that] God creates you and knows who you are.