Reflection for Thursday, Feb 21, 2008

Romans 6:15-23

Slaves to sin? That is strong language. Perhaps a better term for how sin rules our lives and the world is “occupation.” A friend told me about a short documentary nominated for an Oscar this year.

The film starts with a woman and her son who is 5 years-old and contracted HIV; they have just run out of his medication. The film follows the woman as she tries to get healthcare and medicine for her son. She treks out into a desert town. She knocks on what seems to be a clinic. She is told she needs certain paperwork. She treks outside again. There are tanks in the background. She is in Iraq. She goes to one government agency after another. As she tells the story of how her son got sick from a blood transfusion, she is given more paperwork and told to go to yet another place for more before she can see what few doctors there are and get what few rations of HIV drugs are available. She is a mother who wants to help her son. Perhaps the doctors, soldiers, and government officials want to help her son too (or maybe they think they have by referring her to some better place), but the bureaucracy set up by the occupation will not let them. Meanwhile, his right ear grows more deformed, his eyes more sunken and skin sallow. Their world and each individual life is “occupied.” They feel helpless—unable to break the cycle of sin in order to serve this boy. (But could they? Could one individual—the doctor, the nurse, the soldier, the official, even the film-maker with his access to the Western world, get this 5 year-old boy his medication? Or slowly change the rules of occupation in Iraq?)

Earlier in Romans, we learned that we are slaves to sin, but we are not set free by our own attempts to be sinless but by God’s grace.

“What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” Paul really cuts to the quick with this opening question. How often when confronted with the intractable situation of evil and human sin (and my own desires to satisfy myself first), do I say, why bother trying to serve others, why bother trying to do as Jesus would, it won’t make a difference and isn’t God supposed to love me anyway? Isn’t that what makes God, God and me, human? I know that reaction sounds hopeless, selfish, and on the brink of great depression, but it is actually a subtle reaction that comes each time I decide whether or not to buy a drink in a disposable bottle, to sign up to volunteer, or don’t unplug my electronics and zap more energy from the grid than I need. Why not take? Why not sin just this once (oh and the next and the next)? I can’t save the environment alone? I can’t change our dependency on oil and the international conflicts fighting over resources, right? My choices (my sins) don’t make a difference to the world being saved or my salvation right? To feel like your sins don’t matter so why not sin anyway just like everyone else is to be enslaved by sin. To feel like nothing you do, even the right choices, can free you. Maybe so, but Paul tells us that our slavery is a state of mind and heart. God has freed us. God asks us to be “obedient from the heart” to God’s teaching so that we may understand that we are free, that our choices do matter, and that our efforts to save the environment and seek world peace do matter. The teachings of God (the law) and the love of God (grace) offer us freedom. When we must choose and change our complicity with sin, God’s teaching/law frees our minds. When we struggle with our desires to serve ourselves and with our hopelessness that serving others makes little impact, God’s grace frees our hearts. We are saved from the helplessness of sin's occupation by God's grace so that we may have hope and may act in and for hope.

By Rev. Beth