Who Will Deliver Me?

A sermon preached by Father Dwight D. Duncan, ssc, Rector, St Matthias, Dallas, Texas
2 July 2002 - The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year A, Proper 9)

Scripture: Romans 7:21-8:6


Is there anyone here for whom St Paul's words, which we heard in the Second Lesson, could not be your own? Let me quote them for you again, but in the translation of the noted biblical scholar J. B. Phillips:

"I have the will to do good, but not the power. That is, I don't accomplish the good I set out to do, and the evil I don't really want to do, I find I am always doing ... In my mind I am God's willing servant, but in my own nature I am bound fast ... to the law of sin and death. It is an agonizing situation, and who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my own sinful nature? I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ ..."

Well, it's obvious from these words, isn't it, that the man Paul found this situation, as he said, "agonizing"? Do you and I? For me, this predicament of ours is not uppermost in my mind as I go through a day. I do become aware of it at least once a day: in the morning when I do my examination of conscience of the previous 24 hours of my life.

Outside of that, my awareness of my bondage to sin, and my regret for it, recedes below my consciousness. UNTIL ... until I am in some way slapped in the face with my sins – their consequences to someone else / their consequences to me – and I find myself feeling either the fool or a monster and hear my inner voice speaking to myself, saying, "When will this stop? When will I get a handle on this?" Thank God there are in my life at least these echoes of Paul's anguished cry: "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this agonizing situation?"

I pray there are such echoes in your life. Such echoes mean we are taking God seriously and taking seriously ourselves as his potential saints. And echoes such as these only bounce off a ground of openness to and desire for God. A good thing: for only from ground which is open to and desirous of God may we step into becoming someone better than we are, the person he has created us to be.

But for such ground to be laid in us, we must first recognize how powerful Sin is. We are that creature who tries to be more than we are by making God less than he is. We dethrone him from lordship of our lives and place ourselves there. But we end up actually less than what we are, dominated by a force that tears us, our relationships, and our society apart.

The power of this force is great, far too great for us to overcome on our own. That is why the cry of Paul, as of any man or woman in touch with reality, is not, "How can I deliver myself?" but "Who will deliver me?" I can lurch into the quicksand of Sin on my own. But, unaided by someone outside the quicksand pool, I cannot get out. All my frantic efforts to extricate myself only sink me deeper down.

One of the reasons Sin is so powerful is because this rebellion of ours against God is collective. It is not just me who sins, it is we who sin. And the sins of all, mingling together, create a pervasive environment that wraps itself round me like a cloak and seeps inside me like air, confusing me further, beguiling me more, atrophying my power to resist.

Consider just one instance of how this works: "little white lies." My knowledge that most people tell, at least, such lies, encourages me to do so. But these "little ones" set in me a predisposition to lie to my advantage about anything. Knowing that most everybody does this, I live in a climate of wondering just who I can trust. Destructive for healthy communal life, eh?

So here we have it, or rather it has us: we are in bondage to Sin. You and I cannot break out of this defective environment on our own.

But there is good news for us. There always is when Christ enters the picture. Though we cannot break the power of Sin over us, there is someone who, with our collaboration, can. "I thank God," Paul says, "that there is a way out through Jesus Christ ... the new spiritual principle of life 'in' Jesus Christ lifts me out of the old vicious circle of sin and death ..." (J. B. Phillips translation)

What this means is that as I allow Jesus to come to ever deeper levels of myself and seek the help he has to give me, his power, which we call "grace"(gift), passes into me. And his power enables me to grow stronger and stronger in combating the assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The way this happens is much the same as the way I learn how to do anything from someone else and become proficient in it. For instance, a long-time parishioner of St Matthias', Carl Grimes, is an exceptional builder of model airplanes. I'm not talking those little plastic kit things many of us men used to glue together as boys. I'm talking impressive suckers, done from scratch.

Now, if I wanted to become, at the least, a competent model airplane builder, I'd ask Carl to teach me what and what not to do. Kind man that he is, Carl might agree to take me on. But Carl would not just pass his knowledge on to me. He would pass his ability and power to do it. How?

Well, gracious man that Carl Grimes is, he would patiently work with me, continually showing me how to do it, forbearing my mistakes and correcting them, encouraging me, hanging in with me until I finally got it all down right. But once I got it down right, the Carl I know wouldn't abandon me. No, now we would have something to enjoy doing together. And so I would get better and better at this art form of his.

That is the way Jesus' power passes into us. You have to spend time with him, as I would with Carl. You have to watch him in action, as I would Carl. You have to imitate him and practice his technique, as I would Carl. You have to let him see your mistakes and correct them, as I would Carl. You have to re-orient your life towards him and upon him, as I would with Carl. And you have to let him love on you, encourage you, as I would Carl.

How do we do these things with Jesus? That is precisely what all the disciplines of the Christian life are about: faithfulness in worship, reception of the Sacraments in a state of repentance for one's sins and gratitude for God's blessings, making one's Confession, fasting, giving sacrificially our time, talent and money to fuel and fund his Church's mission, a discipline of personal daily prayer, another of studying God's Word, another of fellowshiping with our brothers and sisters in Christ ... a willingness not to run from one's problems but to seek help in growing through them to a healthier person.

All the disciplines to which the Christian community for 2000 years has called her people, have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with earning anything from God. God doesn't need them from us. We need them for ourselves. For all these disciplines are simply the means by which a human being turns his soul towards God and places himself in the way of God's grace.

It is that grace, and that grace alone, which can extricate us from the agonizing situation in which we humans are caught. It extricated Paul the Apostle. It has extricated millions now for 2000 years. It can extricate you and me. So give yourselves over to the disciplines which open you to receive it.

Back to the SERMONS page