Proper 9 -- Zechariah
9: 9-12; Psalm
145: 8-14; Romans 7: 21
– 8: 6; Matthew 11:
25-30
A homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, given at The
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Springfield, Illinois, on Sunday, July 6, 2014.
“I HAVE BEEN SAVED, I AM BEING SAVED, I SHALL BE SAVED”
(Homily text: Romans 7: 21 – 8: 5)
“I have
been saved….I am being saved....I shall be saved.”
We
continue, this morning, reading and hearing from St. Paul’s wonderful letter to
the early Churches that were in Rome.
Like nowhere else in the Apostle’s writings, we encounter the immensity
and the depth of Paul’s mind, as he explains the process of God’s saving act in
sending Jesus Christ among us for the express purpose of saving us from our
sinful condition.
In fact,
the first eight chapters form an enormous theological arc, a sublime
theological treatise on the process of salvation, salvation past, present and
future. Wow! This is awesome stuff.
These first
eight chapters of Romans lay out in detail the plan of God’s saving acts, as
God has saved us in the past, as we are being saved in the present, and as we
shall be saved in the future. We have a
glimpse of God’s future salvation, for at the end of chapter eight, Paul will
exclaim that “nothing will separate us from the love of God.”
But we need
to back up and retrace Paul’s argument from the beginning of his letter to the
Romans, for we’ve picked up Paul’s train of thought somewhere past the midpoint
as the season of Pentecost has come upon us. Recall that, two Sundays ago, we began by
considering his wonderful explanation of the meaning of baptism, likening our
descent into the waters to “being buried with Christ in a death like his.” That explanation lies in chapter six of the
letter.
So, since
we began with a statement about being saved, being saved in the past, in the
present, and in the future, let’s back up a little and briefly summarize Paul’s
argument as he lays it out for us in his letter to the Romans:
- Paul begins, in chapters
one and following, by reminding his original hearers and us that we are
locked in a sinful state. We are so
trapped in our sinful condition that even when God had revealed his
righteous law to us in the world around us, and when God had revealed his
righteousness in the Law which was given to Moses, we ignored both of
these revelations and continued in our sinful habits.
- He comes to the conclusion
in Romans 3: 23 that every one of us has fallen short of God’s glory. God’s law, revealed in the world around
us (known, oftentimes, as “natural law”) and God’s law, revealed in the
Law given to Moses, simply served like yardsticks to show us how far short
we were in meeting God’s standard of holiness.
- But our situation is far
from hopeless, for Paul reminds us that, “while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.” (Romans 5: 8).
He prefaces this statement by reminding us that God acted out of
His love for us. As a result, Paul
continues, we have now been “justified by His (Christ’s) blood, and that
“we shall be saved by him (Christ) from the wrath of God. We have been reconciled to God,
therefore, through Christ’s saving action.
Hopefully,
this very brief summary of the first five chapters of this wonderful letter
will accurately capture the sense of Paul’s argument.
“I have
been saved,” past tense, is the focus of this first part of Paul’s description
of our sinful condition before our coming to faith in Christ, and as we make our
passage through the waters of baptism to be claimed, as our baptismal liturgy
exclaims, “as Christ’s own for ever.”
If that
part of the saving process – the past tense part - was all there is to it, St.
Paul could have ended that first part of his letter right there.
But in the
passage before us today, Paul lays out a blunt confession about the state of
his salvation, post-baptism: “So I find
it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner
being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my
mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” (Romans 7: 21 – 23)
Notice that
Paul describes his situation in military terms:
There is war raging inside of him!
But aren’t
we aware that Paul – like most of us – has been buried with Christ in a death
like His? Didn’t we say, a couple of
Sundays ago, that Paul’s explanation of the meaning and importance of baptism
is essentially a geographical one, meaning that, once we’ve descended into the
waters of baptism, we have passed the boundary between our old lives (in sin)
and our new life in God? Yes, that was
our approach to Paul’s explanation a couple of Sundays ago.
So, if
we’ve passed that boundary and cannot go back, how is it that those old ways
continue to hold any influence on those who have been baptized?
Perhaps an
explanation from daily life will suffice:
A person who escapes from a country where there has been persecution or
hardship, and who comes to this wonderful country where freedom and opportunity
abound, will struggle to set aside their old ways of thinking and
behaving. Adjusting to being a citizen
of the United States will take some time, and some of those old ways will
continue to exert their influence on those who have come to our shores.
So if the
old ways linger in daily life, as we’ve just observed, isn’t it also possible
that the same sorts of things will happen in our life with God?
Paul seems
to be telling us that that is exactly the case:
Our old ways won’t die away and won’t go away all at once.
What Paul
is describing is God’s ongoing saving action, working on us, day in and day
out, to reshape and mold us into the image of God that we see in Christ.
This
process has a technical name which is worth knowing: sanctification.
The word “sanctification”
comes to us from the Latin, and essentially, it means “to become holy” and to
“purify and to make free from sin.”
But notice
that Paul says he isn’t free of sin, and surely, he must feel pretty
un-purified as he struggles with his old ways of being and thinking.
However,
Paul sounds a strong note of hope. He
says, “But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Paul seems
to be saying that he is a “work in progress.”
Eventually,
Paul says, the process of being made holy will work itself out, God being the
one to accomplish that process of purification.
So, Paul is
in the process of “being saved,” present tense.
And so are
we all in that same process, for we, too, are “being saved.”
Paul’s
process of sanctification involves knowing just what the signs of his old ways
of being and thinking are. Alas, for us,
the awareness of our past sins is a necessary part of living out our new life
in Christ.
For those
old ways do not die off quickly, in many instances, and so we must be on our
guard to see the markers of those former ways of being whenever they emerge
into our consciousness.
This is the
truth of the matter, that the Christian life is one of struggle, struggle that
will result in victory, in being saved by God at some point in the future.
So, for
now, we cling to the reality of God’s saving action in the past. We cling to the reality that He is able to
bring us through the struggles of the present time, as He continues to save us
in the present, and we cling to the hope that He will save us at the end of our
earthly journey at some time in the future.
So, each
one of us can say, with St. Paul, that “I have been saved, I am being saved, I
shall be saved.”
AMEN.
