The Evil Close at Hand

A few weeks ago, my two year-old daughter Hannah was being her normal feisty self, explaining to me exactly why she wanted something, and I looked at her and said, “You are so sassy!” She looked me right in the eye and said, “I’m not sassy; I’m strong!” Well, I guess I’ve done something right! It’s also clear I’ve passed along my strong, determined personality to my daughter. I appreciate determination; I think it’s a quality that will take you far. I’ve been called stubborn quite a few times, but being a determined person has helped me to stick with things when they got hard and accomplish many goals I’ve had for myself. Paul’s words in Romans 7 unsettle me: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 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. When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” What do you mean you can’t do it, Paul? Where is your willpower? Where is your determination?!

I grew up believing that if you knew the right thing, all you had to do was choose it. After receiving the knowledge of the Roman Road’s path to salvation, one is enlightened, and one should now be able to do what is good. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life. If we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus has been raised from the dead, check. We are good. Change of mind equals change of heart. If you wanted to do the right thing, then all you had to do was make up your mind to do it! Apparently, I skipped over Romans 7. But if I had read it, I’m sure it wouldn’t have resonated with me; it would not have held up my simplistic understandings of what it means to be saved. I only began to resonate with Paul’s words after I became a parent! Now I understand! I have on several occasions quoted to my friends when confessing something about my parenting, “I do not do what I want but the very thing I hate!” I snap at my kids even after I’ve decided I will remain calm and ignore their undesirable behavior. I find myself talking negatively even after I’ve made up my mind that I will only frame things in a positive manner. Becoming a parent has laid me bare in so many ways; it has humbled me as I’ve realized that I can’t always do the right thing or always parent in the way that I think or know I should. There have been so many times when I was determined to handle a situation in a different way only to find that my sheer willpower wasn’t enough to change my behavior. I’ve learned that generational patterns don’t just vanish into thin air. I’ve learned that a lot of them time my actions are a response to my own deepest fears and worries. We are humans bound to our histories, our upbringings, our societies, our desires, and our fears. We are bound to these things in ways we don’t even fully understand.

Last year, my husband and I decided to seek out some help with our parenting practices. We engaged in a type of therapy that was immersive, where a therapist watches you interact with your child and provides feedback. Like I said, parenting has come with so much humility! There’s nothing more intimidating! I’ll never forget the day that sweet woman whispered in my ear: “Lauren, where are you right now? I can see you. You are years down the road; you are in your head imagining your worst fears coming true. I need you to stay right here and only worry about being in the moment and how you are responding for the next five minutes.” While challenging my mindset, this therapist helped me to work on my behavior patterns, to be in the moment, and she measured my success by my behaviors. She didn’t care what I thought about parenting style or techniques; she focused on shifting my actions. Sometimes I wanted to declare, “Hey! I majored in religion and psychology in undergrad! I’m trained in pastoral counseling!” But even though I might know all the right answers, the truth is that with something as complex as the journey of parenting, I need practice! Being with this therapist helped me to understand that I get caught up in things that are larger than me, things that cannot be undone by sheer willpower. This process helped me to understand what Paula heard from her mentor that she told you about last week: “We may know something intellectually, but we have to practice it for it to become a part of who we are.”

For me, it was becoming a parent that really complicated my sense of my own ability to choose the good. It might have been something else for you. Paul’s words in Romans 7 are brutally raw and honest and invite us to confess how evil has been close at hand for us. It’s something addicts know all too well. They have gained humility that can be learned from. The first two steps of any twelve-step program are: 1. Admit that you are powerless over sin and can’t help yourself. 2. Believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. Paul was certainly living testimony of someone who knew the good and who couldn’t just muster up the power to always choose it. Paul was zealous for the law of God, and yet, he ended up doing great evil by persecuting and murdering the followers of Jesus. He believed he was keeping the law, defending it, in fact. Paul confesses this contradiction in himself. This description is actually where Martin Luther’s phrase “at the same time righteous and sinner” comes from. Luther said that believers often find themselves pulled in two different directions. We arrogantly think that we have the power to always choose the good on our own. But if we could be freed from sin by just a little more willpower, all we would need is a really good life coach – not Jesus!

Our beliefs about our ability to choose the good are formed around our ideas of sin. We often think that sin is simply failing to live up to some standard or missing the mark. We believe sin is an individual action that we can either choose or not choose. There are people who make good decisions and people who make bad decisions – good apples and bad apples, sheep and goats. But sin is so much more than this. Sin is wrecked relationship with our selves, with others, and with God. And in our text for today, Paul talks about sin as an “active, aggressive power that takes hold of God’s good gifts – even the law – and bends them toward death.”[i] He describes sin as something that dwells within us. He describes the sin that lives within fallen humanity. It recalls what God said to Cain when he said, “Sin is lurking in wait for you.” It infects us as individuals, but it also infects our society, our institutions, and our systems. Sin is the evil that is close at hand. It controls us in ways that we don’t often fully understand. It’s not just bad behavior. It’s something that resides in us and tries to kill us from the inside out. We are trapped in it.

Paul’s word here feels depressing and fatalistic and might lead us to the conclusion that sin is all-encompassing and unavoidable and that we are all just doing the best we can so there is nothing we can do about it. But Paul doesn’t stop there! Paul is writing to those who are in Christ, who are living under a new rule and a new life. And while he confesses that we do not have the willpower or determination to rescue ourselves from sin, he says God does! He asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” His answer is: Jesus Christ our Lord! Thanks be to God! We don’t have the power, but God has the power. Through the Spirit of God, we can resist doing the evil that lies close at hand. We who are baptized into Christ, buried with him, crucified with him, raised in him can allow him to dwell in us and release us of our captivity to sin. Through the power of the Spirit, we can go about the work of repenting of our sin and repairing what is broken. We can bridge the gaps and go about restoring right relationship to self, others, and God.

Jim Wallis has said that racism is America’s original sin, and it is clear that we have work to do to repair this evil that is close at hand, a lot of work to restore relationships that have been ruptured because of white supremacy. Paul’s lesson on sin this morning has a lot to say to us about the sin of racism. As we set about the work of becoming not just “not racist” but anti-racist, it’s important that we make theological connections, that we see this work as spiritual work, that we understand that our salvation depends upon it. The sin of white supremacy literally kills black and brown children of God, and it destroys the image of God in all of us. And we have to reckon with the fact that ridding ourselves of this sin is not just about individual determination or willpower. It doesn’t matter our individual commitments to just choose the good or our individual feelings that we are “not racist” or our individual relationships with people whose skin color is different than ours. We are being short-sighted when we see racism as something that can be addressed purely as individual sin.

We show that we aren’t seeing racism’s power as systemic sin when we say things like: “I don’t see color; I just see people.” “I don’t care the color of anyone’s skin. We are all the same.” “I only judge people by their actions.” “I didn’t mean any harm by what I said. My intentions are good.” “I think things will be okay when the next generation comes of age. Some people just have to die.” “I marched in the sixties; I thought we were beyond this already.” We also show that we don’t see the power of the sin of racism when we think it only resides in bad apples and not in us. We show that we don’t see racism’s power when we think we can get rid of it by only removing certain people from their positions of power and replacing them with other people who will make better choices but largely leaving our systems, our laws, and ourselves the same.

Antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo says that we need to distinguish between prejudice and racism. She reminds us that prejudice is prejudgment about another person based on the groups to which they belong. She says, “All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it. People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. [But] Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality…We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them.”[ii] She goes on to say that, “When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors….Many whites see racism as a thing of the past…yet racial disparity between whites and people of color continues to exist in every institution across society, and in many cases is increasing rather than decreasing….Individual whites may be ‘against’ racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group.”[iii]

DiAngelo cautions us, “White supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle than the actions of explicit white nationalists.”[iv] She says that when we refuse to examine the racism that dwells within us because of our own shame around it, it leads to something insidious – aversive racism, which is racism that professes egalitarianism but avoids interaction with those of racial or ethnic groups to which one doesn’t belong. This behavior is implicit or unconscious. She says an example of this is “holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse [maybe by flippant uses of stereotypes, for example] but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. [And this] Aversive racism only protects racism, because we can’t challenge our racial filters if we can’t consider the possibility that we have them. [We operate] under the false assumption that we can’t simultaneously be good people and participate in racism.”[v] As Paul would say, I delight in the law of God ,but I am captive to the law of sin, wretched human that I am.

Hear Paul’s words again. Hear them as prayer. Hear them as confession for our participation in the sin of racism, the evil that is close at hand. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 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. When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” This morning, I invite you to confession. I invite you to honesty. I invite you to humility. I invite you to be reminded that that while you can’t save yourself by your own good intentions, Jesus can rescue you! While we collectively can’t save ourselves from the evil that is close to all of our hands, God can deliver us! The Spirit can work to excise the sin of racism from our world, from our very bodies. The Spirit can repair what is broken. The Spirit can restore broken relationships. We just have to come just as we are and surrender ourselves and allow the Spirit to dwell within us and break every barrier down. Thanks be to God! Amen.

 

[i] Feasting on the Word – Year A, Vol. 3, Bartlett and Taylor, Eds. Quote from Ted A. Smith.

[ii] White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, 19-20.

[iii] White Fragility, 20-24.

[iv] Ibid, 33.

[v] Ibid, 45, 47, & 49.