(Note: some of this sermon was posted earlier as The Law Is Dead. This version is the first in a series of what the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection means to us in our daily lives.)
Preached at Silverton Friends Church, October 13, 2024
When God created the universe and set time in motion, God made a place for us humans to live and love and make choices. God made us so that we start as infants absorbed in our own needs and ready to absorb the sights and sounds and relationships around us into our frames of reference. God was and is unsurprised by our capacity for selfishness and our capacity for generosity, and God was prepared from the beginning to do whatever it takes to make it possible for us to know God personally and positively. God is not a human parent, limited as we are. God is, as St. Paul wrote, the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Without God, we simply are not.
In a mystery that retains our fascination, God not only created but intervenes in creation, and not in a particularly predictable way. But the point I want to make today is that, because God exists outside of time, and all times are present to God, the crucifixion was visible to God from the beginning of our time. Furthermore, it was implicit, not because of what we call the “Fall” but because of the words, “Let us make human beings in our image.” The entry of God into our time, which we call the Incarnation, was inevitable.
It is possible to see that from God’s point of view, human beings in time have been moving through stages, like the stages of an infant, innocent and testing boundaries, to childish lawlessness, to the adolescent understanding of Law, to disobedience, to consequences, culminating in the personal God in Jesus making a way forward that is different in substance from what was in place prior to his birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection.
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In recent weeks, I’ve been drawn to consider the crucifixion of Jesus and what the Bible says that means to us and for us. Today, I’m focusing on what it means for us with regard to the Old Testament Law and to law as a general concept. To people like me who were raised in the church, it can be a challenge to understand and live into what the apostles James and Paul call the law of liberty and the law of love. We may also have wasted significant time trying to figure out what parts of the Law apply to us today. I remember a number of these discussions from my time as NWYM superintendent. We may even have turned parts of the message of grace and love into a new law for Christians.
Some of you know that I’m a missionary kid. My parents went to Burundi, in central Africa, right at the end of WW II. I was born in Kansas, but went back with them at 6 months old. Eventually, they put me in the School for Missionary Children, a boarding school. I was seven.
At boarding school, I had to make my bed, tidy my drawers and surface spaces, dust and sweep my room every morning. While I was in classes, my dorm mother inspected the rooms, and if they were not up to her standards, we came back to find our names in the doghouse. We had to clean it to passing standards right away.
If we got put in the doghouse three successive days, we were confined to our rooms for the time between school and supper. I can’t remember what happened if our tidiness still didn’t meet standards, but I’m guessing it involved more of the same.
It was embarrassing to be put in the doghouse and have the fact posted in public. But even worse was the consequence for wetting the bed. My roommate was a chronic bed-wetter, and every morning she had to drag her soiled sheets up to the laundry room and wash them out by hand. Again a public event. One night I had a bloody nose and had the same consequence. I told everyone who would listen that it was a bloody nose, not wetting the bed. This public humiliation was hard to bear.
And that same year, I deliberately broke a rule by reading a Nancy Drew mystery under my covers with the flashlight after lights out. My roommate told on me, and my dorm mother confiscated the book and I got into significant trouble.
This is vivid to me because at seven, I left the somewhat lawless existence of childhood. I doubt if I knew how to make my bed, and I certainly didn’t know that I should make it. I was unaware of obligation, to a large extent. And since at home we had to turn off all our electricity at 9 p.m. or so, I may have been reading by flashlight without penalty before I went off to boarding school. I entered a system of law.
Now the apostle Paul has some interesting things to say about sin and law in Romans 5:12-21:
I need to make some things clear, says Paul.
Before a command was given, sin was in the world, but it wasn’t counted against anyone.
(To connect this to my story, my not making my bed was not a disgrace before I went to a school with rules.)
Paul says: Sin is not part of the reckoning without law. However, until God gave the Law to Moses, death had the upper hand even over those who did not directly disobey God’s command as Adam did.
(For me as a little girl, even though I wasn’t punished for messiness before I went to school, I did in fact cause messiness, and someone had to clean it up. Messiness does rule if no one cleans. And when there is a rule against messiness, shame arises. And shame is a kind of death.)
In fact, the Law came in so that we humans could see how sinful we are, how prone to error; but where sin increased, grace hyper-increased, grace filled and overflowed the deficit caused by sin.
(For me, the rules made clear to me just how messy I naturally was and am.)
The Hebrew and Greek words we often translate as “sin” have in them a number of pictures that help us understand this theological concept.
Sin is To Miss the Way, to Stumble, to Wander, to Misstep, to Slip.
Sin is To Miss the Mark, to Miss the Goal
Sin is To Fail at the Assignment, To Avoid, to Neglect, to Overstep
Sin is To Run the Wrong Way when Terrified, To Lose Oneself
Sin is To Bend, to Make Crooked, to Distort God’s truth
Sin is To Overturn God’s truth, To Trespass, to Rebel, to Break Away From, to Defect
You can see that “sin”—or trespass, or iniquity, or transgression, or other synonym—is a living word that works on several levels of intentionality. We can try to do right and end up messing things up even if we have given ourselves to God, and we can decide to do wrong, and we can deliberately assert that we belong to ourselves, not to God. All are kinds of sin.
The fact that we can’t keep the Law, in other words, creates in us the awareness of ourselves as sinners, and this is a hopeless position to be in. So it is very good news that the Law died with Jesus on the cross.
John 1:17 The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ
Colossians 2:8-14
Jesus blotted out the handwriting of ordinances [ the Law] that was against us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.
Gal 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law.
Romans 3:20-24, 28 Keeping the Law does not justify, but we are justified freely by grace through the redemption accomplished by Jesus; justified by faith in Jesus, not by works of the Law
As John says in the first letter, if anyone says they are without sin, they lie. But if we confess or own up to how we have messed things up and gone the wrong way and avoided what we know God wants from us, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin and clean us up and set us straight. This verse is about how those who want to belong to God can keep themselves moving with rather than against God.
There is a path God wants us to travel through our lives; there is a purpose toward which God wants us to aim; there are things God wants us to do; there are things God wants to make plain to us; there are principles God wants us to live by. What are these? Jesus said the two great commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How do we do this? We live out of love as much as we can, we ask God how to live out of love and we do what God puts before us to do, and we try not to harm our neighbor or ourselves. And when we fail, we confess it to God and let God work to help us do better the next time we have an opportunity to show love. We live under the law of liberty and we count on our gracious God to help us use our freedom lovingly.
James 2:12 speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty,
Gal 5:5-9, 13-25 For in Jesus Christ all that counts is faith working through love.
James 1:18-25 God chose to birth us through the word of truth; we need to humbly accept that word which is planted in us and which can save us, and obey it, the perfect law of liberty; be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry
1 John 1:7-9 But if we really are living and walking in the Light, as He is the Light, we have true fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ the Son cleanses us from all sin and guilt. If we say we have no sin, we delude and lead ourselves astray, and the Truth is not in us. If we admit we have sinned and confess our sins, He is true to his own nature and promises and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
The Law helps us realize we have missed the mark and are sinners in need of grace. However, when the Law brings us to the point of trusting Jesus, it has done its work and has no more to say to us. It is an eternal truth that the Law is dead because of Jesus’s death. “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life I now live in this body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
We know that Jesus is the answer to our frailty, our imperfect attempts to do the right thing, our mistakes, and even our deliberate wrong-doing. We know that when we come to Jesus, he does not condemn, even when he does instruct. Sadly, we can also turn our backs on God and insist on owning ourselves, of earning our own way, and when we do this, we cannot grow in grace and we rely on keeping rules rather than obeying the Holy Spirit of God. This kind of active rebellion can occur in church-goers and in atheists, and it prevents the rebels from knowing that God is Love.
Let us give ourselves to God, accept the grace Jesus gives, and live guided by the Holy Spirit. Let us embrace our freedom from the Law in order to live out love for God and neighbor.
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