“Essential : 5) The Secret of the Christian Life”

a sermon by

Dr. William P. Wood

First Presbyterian Church Charlotte, North Carolina

June 30, 2002

Text: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of -- what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

Several years ago The Atlantic Monthly featured an article by Harvey Cox of , entitled “The Warring Visions of the Religious Right.” In this article Cox chronicled a visit he had made to Regent University in Beach, Virginia, a school established by television evangelist Pat Robertson. When Cox arrived at Regent, he found 1,400 graduate students attending a law school, a divinity school and a business school, as well as a number of other professional programs.

The idea behind the founding of Regent University was to train young men and women in representing Christ in their various professions. It is hardly a new idea. The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits as they are called in the Roman Catholic Church, was founded in 1540 A.D. for the same purpose. So was for that matter. But as Cox points out, religious pluralism and secularism took its toll. As Quakers and other religious groups came, there was a great controversy as to which religious group would receive preference. The problem was finally resolved when Harvard decided to disassociate itself from all religious groups. But, as Cox observes, that did not totally solve the problem. Today, as schools seek to establish “values” and “ethics,” it has become clear that “ethics” apart from some “faith systems” become very hollow and very quickly dissolve into nothing more than “personal preference.”

I.

During the month of June, the sermons have focused on Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. In this seminal epistle Paul sets out the foundation of “Essential Christianity” and enumerates some of the great themes of the faith: 1) The Imperative of the Gospel 2) The Rediscovery of Sin 3) Overcoming Adversity 4) and The Triumph of Grace.

The Book of Romans, like so many of the letters of Paul, is divided into two major sections. Chapters 1-11 contain Paul’s systematic exposition of the faith. In Chapters 12-15 Paul shifts his emphasis to the Christian life.

Paul understands something that today often eludes us. Faith and ethics are one and neither exists without the other. In the first eleven chapters of Romans Paul elucidates a gospel of grace. In the final four chapters Paul applies the notion of God’s grace to the living of the Christian life. This morning we will examine “The Secret of the Christian Life” by looking at three critical themes that Paul develops in this part of the Letter to the Church at Rome.

I.

The first is that the Christian life is a life of self-sacrifice. Paul states this at the beginning of chapter twelve, when he writes, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Roman 12:1).

We don’t say much about self-sacrifice in the church today. Perhaps it is because we live in such an affluent and narcissistic society that it is impossible for most of us to imagine having to sacrifice anything. Yet our faith has a great deal to say about sacrifice. John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Faith treats the subject of the Christian life in terms of self-denial, bearing the cross, and following Jesus.

The concept of sacrifice is critical to our understanding of the Christian faith. Frederick Buechner in his book, Speak What We Feel, quotes Red Smith as saying that it’s really very easy to be a writer. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. I think on one level at least, preaching is the same thing. It’s not that every preacher can do it every Sunday. Even the blood bank recognizes that we have only so much blood to give, and some never do it at all.

But as Buechner points out, the great writers all put much of themselves into their books in the way Charles Dickens put his horror at the Poor Law of 1834 into Oliver Twist, or as Arthur Miller died in Death of a Salesman or as Dostoyevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov.

First Presbyterian Church Page 2 June 30, 2002 Certainly Frederick Buechner has opened a vein as he relates the suicide of his father and the profound effect that death has had on his life.

Paul’s understanding of the Christian life, however, is understood in terms of the simple fact that those who choose to follow Christ must also be prepared to make some sacrifices in their lives.

This past summer, when I was at Princeton Seminary, I came across a plaque on the wall at the Mackay Campus Center. The plaque commemorates the death of James Joseph Reeb who graduated from Princeton Seminary in 1953. James Reeb was killed in Selma, Alabama, on March 11, 1965. He was one of the young white ministers to heed the call of Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Selma to assist in the voting rights campaign. Reeb was attacked by an angry white mob on his first day in Selma. Four days after his death, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent the Voting Rights Act to Congress. At Reeb’s funeral service Martin Luther King thanked him for being willing to lay down his life in order to redeem the soul of a nation.

III.

Paul speaks of the Christian life in yet another way. In Romans, chapter fifteen, Paul speaks of the “weak and the strong.” As he did on other occasions, Paul argued that the strong have a special responsibility to the weak.

For the church at Rome the problem had to do with meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Some Christians felt that one should not eat meat that had been used for pagan purposes. Others felt that it did not violate the faith. Paul argued that the church was a community and that each should care about the other. “If meat causes my brother to stumble,” writes Paul to the church at Corinth, “then I shall not eat meat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic work The Irony of American History noted that human life contains elements of the pathos, tragedy and irony. The pathetic dimension of life is seen in those individuals who through deformity or illness are trapped into situations over which they have no control. The tragic element of life is evident in situations where individuals have to choose not between good and evil but between the lesser of two evils. The ironic element of human life is that often our greatest strengths are also the source of our greatest flaws.

Niebuhr goes on to say that often we make judgments about people without understanding these elements. Often we tend to separate people into two categories. On the one hand we see good people who work hard and deserve the good they receive. On the other side we see people who are lazy and who have made poor choices.

There is no gospel in this, only a self-righteousness that is self-deceiving. The gospel is hidden from those who cannot see the sorrow and tragedy in the worst life. The gospel is hidden from those who cannot understand that success is not even a possibility for some people who have a poor biochemistry or an impossible social environment.

First Presbyterian Church Page 3 June 30, 2002 In the the basic divide is between human beings is not between rich and poor, the powerful and the oppressed, male and female, or free and enslaved, but between those who know they are sinners and those who believe they are righteous. When Paul urges his hearers to acknowledge that the “strong” have a special responsibility to the “weak,” he is acknowledging that none of us is strong and all of us are weak. That is why the New Testament has a special concern for the “least of these.” Jesus recognized a basic humanity that binds all of us together.

IV.

The third image that Paul uses to describe the Christian life is “the primacy of love.” In Romans 13:8-10 Paul observes that all the commandments are summed up in the expression “Love your neighbor.” “Love.” observes Paul, “is the fulfilling of the law.”

The New Testament knows three different words that are translated in English as “love.” One is the Greek word “Eros,” which is erotic or physical love. The New Testament also uses the word “philos” to speak of love as in the love we have for a friend. But the New Testament introduces a third word, which is the word “agape.” This is a love that is not centered in the self but centered in the other. In Paul’s great letter to the church at Corinth he speaks of Christian love. “Love is patient and kind. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is nor irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in the wrong, but in the right. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (I Corinthians 13:4-6).

Some years ago a friend of mine visited a leper colony in Africa. At one point he and other members of his group saw a Catholic nun ministering to a mass of lepers, many of them without fingers or toes. She was changing the bandages of some of the most deformed patients. One of the members of the group whispered to himself, “I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars.” The nun, who overheard the man, said, “I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars either.”

Sometimes I get the feeling that there is something tragically wrong in our society. Too often it seems that those of us in the church are not much more than a pale reflection of the culture around us.

A recent celebration marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Walter Raushenbusch, a man who had a remarkable impact on the past century. As a young , Rauschenbusch served in an impoverished part of called “Hell’s Kitchen” where he discovered the dark side of the industrial revolution. Men were out of work, poverty and hunger were widespread and hopelessness was everywhere. Out of this experience Rauschenbusch wrote his famous book, of the Social Gospel, in which he appealed to the church to recover the message of the prophets as well as the social teachings of Jesus, especially the parable of the Good Samaritan.

“Do not be conformed to the world,” writes Paul, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

First Presbyterian Church Page 4 June 30, 2002 God grant us wisdom and courage for the living of these days. Amen!

First Presbyterian Church Page 5 June 30, 2002