Monday, July 7, 2014

Faithful Living - Failure (July 6, 2014)

Living Faithfully – Failure
Romans 7:15-25a
July 6, 2014[1]

Last week, we talked about freedom.  We said “freedom means that we are no longer separated from God.  The freedom that Jesus offers to us is the freedom to realize who we really are—we are children of God—free to live and to love as God wants us to live and to love.”  Yet, there is another part of this discussion that we need to address this morning.  There is a painful reality.  Sometimes, I don’t feel so free.  Sometimes, I find that the power of sin in my life is overwhelming.  Sometimes, I fail!
“I failed.”  I have had to say those words many times.  I have failed at times to live up to my hopes for what I might achieve.  I sometimes have behaved in ways that I didn’t want to behave.  Sometimes, I did this despite my good intentions.  Sometimes, my intentions were not so good. 
Sometimes, the stories seem funny in hindsight.  Sometimes, not so much.
Sometimes, my failure was caused, at least in part, by the conduct of others.  Sometimes, the fault was all mine.  Either way, the bottom line result was the same.
I know that I am not alone in this room—there must be others of you who have failed—at least once!
Although we like to speak of success, failure seems to be much more universal.  There are familiar quotes—some historically accurate and some not—in which somebody acknowledged failure or spoke of overcoming failure.  Let me point out two of them.  When Robert E. Lee surveyed the battlefield at Gettysburg the day after the battle, he was quoted as saying, “All this has been my fault.”  In the movie “Apollo 13,” Gene Kranz, the Flight Director says in a dramatic moment, “Failure is not an option.”  (Apparently, that line was more Hollywood than history.  I am told that Kranz didn’t actually say those words, but those words embodied the attitude that NASA took in responding to the issues that threatened the spacecraft.[2]) 
 “I failed.”  In our Lesson from the Book of Romans, note that the cry of despair doesn’t come from someone who deliberately rejects God; this cry comes from someone who has tried hard to do the right thing—in fact, he has tried so hard that he found it was impossible for him to be good enough.
Biblical Scholars read our text from Romans in a couple different ways.  Some read it at face value and believe that Paul was confessing his own difficulty in living faithfully the Christian life.  They read his frustration that “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…” (Romans 7:15).  They hear Paul’s cry of despair—“O wretched man that I am” (Romans 7:24a)—as a personal cry of desperation about his own inability to live rightly. 
Other scholars think that this was more of a rhetorical device (one that was frequently used in Greek writing) to put in the first person a statement that is universally applicable.  It somehow brings Paul back down to human level. 
I asked my Carla Worth, one of my seminary professors, about this question.  She told me that it doesn’t need to be an “either/or” proposition.  Paul could have used a rhetorical device to express his own personal failure as part of the failure of all of us.
There is yet another way to read this passage.  One could read it, instead of being a reference to personal, individual conduct, as referring to a way of life in which we put our trust but it turns out to be wrong.  Think of the Germans who placed their whole trust in the National Socialist Party in the 1930s, and only upon defeat had to face the fact that they placed all their hope and trust in a failed and flawed system.  In similar fashion, some scholars think that Paul was thinking out loud about the entire Jewish people who trusted in the Torah but found that they were incapable of living up to the Torah’s demands. 
These scholars would say that Paul was acknowledging that earlier in his life, Paul had put his whole faith and trust in the Law of Moses to save him and his world.  He did so to the point of persecuting the Christians, only to discover that the Law could not save him.  It was only by putting his faith and trust in the grace of Jesus Christ that he could be saved (See Ephesians 2:8-9).
Unfortunately, it isn’t possible for us to go back to Paul and ask him what he really had in mind.  But whatever the circumstances may have been that led him to write this chapter, one thing is clear.  He ultimately realized that he could not, on his own power, be “good enough” to deserve God’s love; he could only receive God’s love as a gift—a gift that God gave him “just because” God loved him.
You can’t deserve God’s love.  As a spiritual advisor of mine says that we should write in big capital letters “CDL,” shorthand for CAN’T DESERVE LOVE, and keep them in front of us.[3]  He goes on to explain that we can have as much of God’s love as we are willing to accept.  It occurred to me this morning that we have limits on our capacity to receive God’s love—limits that are the created by the stuff we accumulate in our souls as a result of living.  That stuff may be possessions, but I am thinking more about an analogy of “spiritual silt”—the stuff that accumulates in our lives just as a river accumulates silt that runs off from the shore.  We experience pain, suffering and failure in our lives and it leaves its mark—sometimes as callouses to protect us from pain, sometimes as guilt, sometimes as exhaustion.  We find that our spirits get so clogged up with this “stuff” that we have no more room to receive God’s love.  That leads us to more failure!
We still have this tension.  God invites us to faithful living; and yet we find that we can’t do it, at least not on our own.  There is a balance between committing ourselves to live the way God wants us to live, on the one hand, and experiencing God’s grace when we fail, on the other.  Our efforts to show how good we are can easily turn into attempts to live faithfully into an attempt to earn our way into God’s grace.  It just doesn’t work that way.  At this point in my own journey, I keep finding areas of my life that get clogged up.  In our life’s journey, we need periodically to have a “dredging” of our spirit, just as a river or harbor must be dredged from time to time to maintain its depth.  But we don’t dredge ourselves!  We have to let God, through the work of the Holy Spirit, clean out the crud in our lives.
Jesus says that the disciples know the Spirit because the Spirit abides in them—present tense—and will abide in them—future tense (John 14:17).  We will speak more next week about abiding in the Spirit as part of “Faithful Living.”  For now, let me just point out that the disciples don’t seem to realize that they have the Spirit abiding in them at that moment—At his last supper with His disciples, the disciples were upset because Jesus, the One that they gave up everything to follow, told them that He would be going away and they would not be able to see Him anymore.  They were upset, of course, and Jesus urged them to not let their hearts be troubled (v. 1).  The Spirit abides in them.  After the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to the disciples behind locked doors, breathed on them and invited them to “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22).  It seems as though we have the Spirit with us, but we need to be reminded of the Spirit’s presence. Sometimes, we forget.
But this much is clear in today’s reading.  Paul needs (and we all need) to be delivered from the brokenness and bondage of sin.  We can’t do it by ourselves.  Paul asks, in desperation, “who can free me.”  And he answers by exclamation, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  The Lord who calls us, ironically, to obtain freedom by taking up a cross and following Him, but who also assures us that His “yoke is easy” and His “burden is light” (Matthew 11:30).
I invite you to bow your heads this morning and prayerfully reflect on a few questions:
·      What has been your struggle this week?  We all have them.  In what area of your life have you found that you know what is right—what you should do, but you have failed to do it.  Or maybe it’s an area in which you know that certain things are bad for you but you do them anyway.  You fail.  What is it for you?
·      How have you struggled to fix the problem?  Have you tried to fix the problem yourself but failed in whatever “do it yourself” approaches you have tried?
·      Can you accept this morning that God loves you today, right now, just as you are, and that you can’t, in your own power, ever deserve God’s love?
·      Are you able this morning simply to place your hands in the living stream of God’s grace and accept the love that God gives you, and trust in God’s power to change and transform your life?
Who can rescue me, and who can rescue you from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.  In the name of Jesus Christ, we are forgiven and transformed.  Glory to God!  Amen!
Copyright © 2014 by Thomas E. Frost.  All rights reserved.



[1] Preached at Cunningham United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia.
[2] See “Apollo 13 (film)” in Wikipedia.  Viewed on the internet on July 6, 2014 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film).
[3] This quote is from Fr. Joe McCloskey of Washington, D.C.

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