Sermons

Help!

July 3, 2011
Third Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 10.12-21; Romans 7.15-25a; Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30
The Reverend Javier A. Viera

What was I thinking? Why can’t I stop? What will it take for me to change? You can imagine the apostle Paul asking himself this series of questions at one point or another. His forthrightness is so jarring that we find it almost titillating to consider what he meant when he said, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Another translation renders his agony this way: “What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise.” [1]

Theories abound, of course, as to what it is Paul references. Oh wouldn’t we like to know? Were women his weakness? Or men, perhaps? Was this thing he hated related to money, or relationships, or to God, or some form of dishonesty? Maybe it was all of it? How scandalous the possibilities!

If he lived today we’d probably know by now. Such a public and controversial figure would certainly be under intense scrutiny, and even his most minor mistakes would likely be traced on Twitter or captured by paparazzi. Somebody would have tried to discredit him by now, as they did even in his day. In one sense, he was a lucky man to live in time when demons were still mostly personal. In another sense, he captures the human condition, and names a dilemma we all, to a person, know so well—the inner contradictions and struggles that characterize us, and which we work hard to mask or to keep sequestered for fear of exposure.

Don’t be tempted to go home and read these verses from Romans for more information. You’ll be sorely disappointed, for Paul gives no further personal insight other than what we’ve read. Curiously, this portion of his letter to the church in Rome is not a personal confession, or a deeply revealing biographical sketch; rather, it’s part of a long, intricate, complicated philosophical argument on the relationship these new Christians are to have with the ancient Jewish Law. The section is only biographically revealing insofar as Paul hints at his own relationship to the Law. Apparently he became obsessed with trying to fulfill it, becoming a slave to it, but never did so perfectly and in the process he lost sight of the fact that the point of the Law was to facilitate our relationship with God, and to help us master whatever kept us from fully living that connection with God.

The Law, Paul seemed to forget, served God’s purposes and not the other way around. Our first reading puts it this way, “keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees…for your own well-being.” [2]The Law was intended as a guide on our path toward holiness, or better said, on our path toward union with God. It was meant to help us live and love and be as God would live and love and be among us. Instead it became a vain challenge for Paul, and in that narcissistic process he lost a connection to God. That was his deepest shame.

It wasn’t that long ago, Sara Lipton reminds us, that self-mastery was the very definition of manhood. While in a recent NY Times column she writes specifically about masculinity in response to the spate of politico-sexual scandals of a number of elected officials, there is no reason her argument needs to remain gender specific. She notes, for example, “Rampant sexuality was something men were supposed to grow out of: in medieval political theory, young male bodies were used as symbols of badly run kingdoms. A man who indulged in excessive eating, drinking, sleeping or sex — who failed to ‘rule himself’ — was considered unfit to rule his household, much less a polity.” [3]

While the human condition has remained constant, what has changed is our acceptance of it. We’ve made peace with being lesser selves, less than what we know we can and ought to be, and, Lipton adds, our failure to aspire to some level of self-mastery has wrecked havoc on our political, social, and personal lives. Pause momentarily and think about it. You can add any number of maladies to the modern person’s struggle that Paul has so aptly described in saying “I don’t understand my own actions. I decide one way but then I act another.” Our struggles with food, alcohol, with credit cards and spending, exercise and healthy living, are but a few examples. Sex figures prominently, to be sure, but it is one among many. Parents could easily add to the list their struggle to say ‘no’ to children already overly indulged. Each of us could add our version of the promise to be intentional with our relationships, intending to be more present, in better contact with those we claim matter to us, or to be a better friend. We would likely include on the list our well-intentioned hope to care more about those in greatest need, the vulnerable, the poor. Yet time and again, "we don’t understand our own actions. We do not do what we want, but do the very things we hate.”

Paul’s struggle, and ours, was for much of our history something one was meant to outgrow. The lack of self-mastery was an indication of immaturity, frivolity, or worse, narcissism. Even Paul’s obsession with mastering the law would have been an indication of this immaturity, for the point wasn’t mastery of something external; rather, the point was mastery of the internal realm precisely so that one could function maturely and freely in the external realm. And all of this was as much a spiritual journey as it was a psychological process. For Paul and others this was what it meant to “follow Jesus,” to be like him. It was the Christian calling to become like the One who exemplified this self-mastery par excellence, and who, as a result, knew intimacy and a life with God like no one Paul had ever known. That was what Paul aspired to, and what he was encouraging his readers to aspire to as well.

So you see, the Paul we read from today isn’t Paul riddled with guilt and shame. This is Paul no longer at ease with his own smallness. This is Paul having grown tired of his own excuses. This is Paul unwilling to be patient with the persistent pattern of his choices. Paul is no longer content to remain spiritually immature, and is longing for something deeper, more worthy of a mature follower of Jesus. He longs to be someone who has achieved, by the grace of God, a certain personal profundity that is honorable and commendable. It’s Paul crying out ‘Help!’ hoping to encounter that same Jesus who years earlier had told crowds “Come to me all who labor and struggle and are weary, carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Follow me and learn from me, for I am gentle and patient, and you will find rest for your souls. Follow my way, and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” [4]

Like Paul, do you ever feel like crying out ‘Help!’? Do you ever long to wake up in the morning free from the very things that keep you captive to yourself, or those things you hate? Ever fantasize of being liberated from those heavy burdens, those chains that have kept you bound for far too long? Do you long to be freed from that dungeon of patterns or choices or addictions or excuses that have never served you well? That’s the spiritual challenge Paul describes for us today. The follower of Jesus, he makes clear, is the one who is up to the challenge, the one who is determined to follow a different way than the one they have previously trod.

It’s not lost on me that these passages are assigned on the weekend we observe our national holiday. There’s wisdom here for our nation as well. This whole business of a need for self-mastery, for being free of our collective addictions, and of that which is at odds with our highest ideals rings true. Our personal afflictions have bled into our national life and as a people we are in as much need of crying out for help, needing to be liberated from ways that only harm us and others in the long-run. The personal and the collective are so closely related that it’s hard to decipher where one ends and the other begins.

I wish there was a way to neatly wrap this up; to say something poignant and inspiring so that it might stay with you throughout the week. A clever, perhaps jarring word would be helpful right now. Yet, if what Paul has opened for us has resonated with you, if you’ve heard a personal and collective truth from his transparency, I hope that will be enough to sustain the urgency of the work that lies ahead for each of us. I hope that as a result when you’re sitting here next week you’ll be at a different place on the journey than you are right now, having taken seriously Paul’s example to cry out for “Help!” and having trusted the words of Jesus, “Come to me all who carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

1. Romans 7:15 from the New Revised Standard Version and The Messagetranslations.
2. Deuteronomy 10:13
3. Sara Lipton, "Anthony Weiner and the Manly Men of Yore", New York Times, June 16, 2011. Retrieved at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/17lipton.html?r=1&ref=contributors
4. Matthew 11:28-30