The end of term was approaching and I’d not yet done the termly sermon the college recommends, so when Neil rang a few weeks ago to ask if I would like to preach in June, it seemed only right to say ‘yes’. I was offered Trinity Sunday or today; I gratefully escaped the doctrine of the Trinity, having done something with that last year, however, as I looked at the readings for this week, it was the Romans one that caught my attention, a not exactly easy option, as you too will soon discover!

In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul describes in detail his gospel, his good news, to the world. Today’s reading is a small but vital section of that letter, which gives Paul’s theology of what Christian life should be and how that life should be lived. Paul tends to use a lot of symbolic imagery in his writing, so in order to understand what he is saying, we need to unwrap some of the thoughts that lie behind his theology, to look at the theology itself and then how it applies to us. When it comes to ‘meaty’ topics for sermons, this along with the Holy Trinity doctrine, is about as much like prime steak as it gets -however I’ll try and keep it digestible!

What was a ‘Christian’ to Paul? Then, as today, people became Christian through coming to faith and through the sign of baptism, and at that time those two things tended to happen very closely together. One commentator explains that in Romans 6 Paul goes back to the Exodus story, when the people of Israel escaped from Egypt. He suggests, that for Paul, in a sense, Christians come through the waters of baptism (like the Israelites came through the Red Sea)and in the process they leave behind a land of slavery and enter into a new freedom (like leaving Egypt and setting off for the promised land). Put another way, in becoming Christian, we move from one type of humanity to another. One of Paul’s central beliefs was that since Christ, the Messiah, represents his people, what is true of him is also true of his people. Therefore, through faith and baptism, a Christian becomes a part of Christ; both in the sense of being a part of the church and also in a mystical sense that as part of Christ’s body he or she shares in Christ’s death and therefore also shares in his resurrection, into a new resurrection life, a life that is not ended by a physical death. A life freed from the power of sin, a life that in fact starts in the now as we build the Kingdom, and that will carry on through after our physical departure from this world. Through Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection, God’s grace, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are set on, what some African spiritual songs describe as the ‘salvation road’. And in order to stay on that road, we have to bring our actual lives into line with the life modelled by Christ.

So for Paul a Christian has been given, through God’s grace, a gift of spiritual humanity that is freed from sin and has the promise of eternal salvation. Through faith we have been given and accepted that gift, indeed have made promises to turn to Christ, and therefore we have the obligation to follow Christ’s teaching, in order to model ourselves on him. An obedience that leads to holiness and eternal life.

However, we also have what Paul describes as our ‘mortal’ bodies. He personifies sin as an evil force to which our mortal bodies respond. That evil force encourages our base desires into sinful action and if we become obedient to our base desires, we are led away from the salvation road, away from God, away from the route to eternal life. By personifying sin, Paul creates the idea of two possible masters God, and Sin. By following God’s salvation road, Christ’s teaching, we are led to eternal life; by following Sin we are led away from eternal life, to separation from God, to ultimate death. And we have a choice of which road to take.

It’s very heavy stuff, isn’t it? But, I’m staying with sin a bit longer. Whether or not you accept the idea of a personification of sin, such as the Devil, the Evil One, or the Enemy, just looking in our newspapers or the television news, it’s difficult to deny that there is a tremendous amount of evil about. At heart, we all know the difference between good and evil, but here’s an aide memoir specifically about sins. A few years ago a Parish Retreat took some of us to Alton Abbey, over a bitterly cold winter’s weekend. The monk who led the retreat had chosen sin as the topic of his talk, and he gave us an acronym by which to remember the so called Seven Deadly Sins: it’s PALE GAS, Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Greed, Avarice and Sloth. It’s a useful list to have in the back of one’s memory, but not something to dwell on.

It doesn’t take too much thought to recognise the results of sinful behaviour. Just remember back to the news coverage of the secret injunctions that the likes of Andrew Marr and Ryan Giggs used to try to cover up the revelation of their respective adultery. Whatever the rights and the wrongs of the use of legal injunctions, whatever was happening in those marriages, that news coverage represented lives broken apart as the result of the acts of betrayal by those men. Andrew Marr and Ryan Giggs are just public examples; sadly, we all do things that result in hurt to others, in varying degrees. The pain felt by the neglected elderly relative; the pain felt by the person who realises they’ve been lied to by someone they trusted; the list is endless. What is Paul’s answer? For that we have to move forward to Romans 13 v8 ”... he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery; ‘Do not murder;’ ‘Do not steal;’ ‘Do not covet’, and whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love one another as yourself. Love does no harm to its neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law”.

We know when we’ve done wrong, we all have consciences, some more highly developed than others. One of the most effective portrayals of guilt that I can remember was in a T V drink -driving campaign a year or so ago, perhaps you remember it too. As music plays we follow a man during his day. As he gets out of bed in the morning, by the bedroom chair is the crumpled body of a child, dressed in blue jeans and shirt in my memory; as he goes to wash and clean his teeth, the same body is lying in a corner of the bathroom, it’s there in his kitchen as he has his breakfast, on the train as he goes to work, slumped up against the pedestal of his desk in his office, in the canteen at lunchtime; the dead body of the child he killed whilst driving his car when drunk, it haunts his every waking moment and his dreams.

There is certainly room for guilt when it stimulates remorse and, if possible, action to reverse what we’ve done, but carrying sustained guilt is damaging and ultimately unhelpful. ‘He deserves to suffer’ people say; or, ‘I deserve to suffer for what I’ve done’ – we often make our own hells. But that human way is not God’s way, He loves us, He wants each and every one of us to be with Him on that salvation road; there is no sin so big that He will not forgive the penitent believer. It is perhaps impossible to understand fully the depth, the breadth, the scope of that all enfolding love, that is ours for the asking. With forgiveness comes healing and the ability to move on in our lives, perhaps forever changed in some way, but never the less moving on.

We access that forgiveness through individual prayer, through the confession and absolution we take part in at the beginning of each Eucharistic service. If we feel that doesn’t quite get us there, it’s not only the Roman Catholic Church that offers confession and absolution; an individual, one to one service with a priest. It’s something offered here at St Nicolas by Neil, we only have to ask.

In defining a Christian and the Christian way of life, Paul majors on love, to defend us from evil. God’s love, Christ’s sacrificial love, our love for our neighbour, which sets us on the right salvation road. I leave you with some beautiful and thought provoking words by Tom Wright, “...love is not our duty, it is our destiny. It is the language that Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so we can converse with him.... It is the music that God has written for all his creation to sing, and we are called to learn it and practise it now, so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton.”

Amen