In his Letter to the Romans, and certainly in the passage we just heard, the apostle Paul shows a keen understanding of human psychology. This might surprise those of us who have been taught that such profound self-awareness and interiority didn’t exist before René Descartes or perhaps even Sigmund Freud. Paul says, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
Oh man. This must be one of the most relatable things anyone says in the entire canon of the New Testament. Whole advertising campaigns have been designed around the idea that you can’t eat just one potato chip, or put half a pint of ice cream back in the freezer when the carton is practically begging you to polish it off. Americans are primed to believe that willpower and hard work can fix just about any problem, but our lives, individually and collectively, tell a different story. Remember what Oscar Wilde said on the topic of self-control, “I can resist everything but temptation.” Yep, I’m pretty sure a lot of us can relate.
However, I do want to be careful not to trivialize what Paul is getting at here. Let’s take the example of food a little more seriously for a moment. It’s a shame that for so long food has been discussed in moralizing terms, while our consciousness around the ethical framework of food, from production to distribution and beyond, has lagged far behind. Think of how we label certain foods and food choices, saying that a dessert is “sinfully good” or confessing to a friend, “I was so bad—I ordered a side of French fries instead of a salad!”
Such language may sound like harmless hyperbole, but the effects of it are both insidious and pernicious. We carelessly call a hot fudge sundae “sinful” at the same time that we’re uncomfortable hearing the language of sin and redemption used in church. Meanwhile, the last century or more of dieting culture has encouraged us to be mercilessly judgmental about individual choices regarding eating habits, causing untold harm, especially to women.
Besides the damage done to the relationship many of us have to food and our own bodies, diet culture has also distracted us from more pressing concerns about the ethics of food, about issues like the sustainability of industrial agriculture and factory farms. In the United State of America we throw away an estimated 40 percent of the food we produce while approximately 18 million children go to bed hungry. The silence around these issues is being dismantled, thanks to some prophetic voices that have prodded people to be more aware of the big picture.
We might not have created the mess that we’re in, but that doesn’t exempt us from considering the repercussion of our choices on the health of the planet and on so many vulnerable people who have few, if any choices, about what food they eat, let alone how much of it they consume. That is what it looks like to be “captive to the law of sin.”
One of the things that grabs us about today’s passage from Romans is that it sounds so confessional. Here we have Paul, who has a reputation as more than a bit of a scold, admitting to his own failings and shortcomings. This has instant appeal. But if we take a step back we see the ramifications of considering this passage more in terms of ethics than morals—to use the food analogy, more about factory farms than about individual overindulgence.
Some scholars are convinced that Paul’s use of the first person in this passage is a rhetorical device. They argue, for example, that he is not talking about himself at all but about Adam—about original sin, not his own experience of giving in to sin. I’m most persuaded by the argument put forward that “Paul’s concern is more than personal; it is communal and cosmological.” More than personal—it is both about individual failings and about being trapped in larger systems that shape and limit our ability to ability to make good choices.
It is natural for us to want to know that even the “great men” of history were human beings like us, to want to be reassured that nobody is perfect. I suspect that I am not the only one here who spent Friday night watching the musical Hamilton. One thing that makes that story so compelling is how these people who are so full of good intentions and great ideas universally fall short of the mark.
As Paul would have put it, they do not do all the good they want, and instead do much evil that they do not want. It was sheer genius for Lin-Manuel Miranda to shape the narrative in such a way as to highlight how much Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had in common, instead of simplistically portraying them as polar opposites locked in a pitched battle between good and evil. They are both fallible human beings, both men with egos and wounds that go hand in hand with their high ideals.
And of course it’s not just them. The whole country is shown as a paradox in the making, with evils like slavery and the subjugation of women being built into the foundation of a nation that proclaims itself to be seeking freedom and justice for all. In this way, a very intimate story about a complex individual illuminates the systemic injustice at the heart of our country’s founding, while also offering hope that things can change for the better.
Many of us grew up in churches that did not talk about systemic injustice. Many of us grew up with interpretations of Scripture that focused almost exclusively on individual sin and salvation, ignoring the Biblical emphasis on shalom, on jubilee, on the need for communities and nations to offer liberation and redemption to both people and the land.
For too long, our mostly white mainline churches have failed to equip our members to make these vital connections between our faith and the needs of the world. But the countervailing force has always been there. We just need to learn to be alive to its presence, to read and listen with new eyes and new ears, with hearts attuned to a different song.
For one last example, let’s think about the service of Baptism in the Book of Common Prayer. Before a person is baptized, we ask them to renounce sinful desires that draw them away from the love of God. But we also ask them to renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. And even though we hear these renunciations every time a person is baptized, we don’t often stop to name those “evil powers”—and, let’s be honest, if we don’t name them, it’s very hard to do anything about them.
Today’s struggles for liberation, equality, and justice are not all about a single person or a particular set of policies. They are about the evil powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. They are about racism, homophobia, white supremacy, extractivism, corporate greed, ableism, and the like. To name these as evil powers means we can finally admit the influence they have, regardless of our good intentions and high ideals. This is a first step toward breaking their grip on us and on the structures in which we live. But it is not the last step.
As the same service of Baptism reminds us, each renunciation, each naming and turning away, must be followed with an affirmation. We promise to turn toward Jesus, to follow and obey him, and to put our whole trust in his grace and love. Our whole trust. Because where willpower and good intentions and hard work can all fail, God’s love never fails. Indeed, God’s spirit, dwelling in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Remembering that, believing in that, trusting in that, we too can affirm Paul’s relieved and grateful cry—”thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Amen.
