The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin's Episcopal Church
July 6, 2008
Proper 9
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death!”
I got very excited reading that passage back in 1980, when I was taking Jerry Neyrey’s class on the letters of Paul and we had started into Romans. For a basically biblically illiterate new seminarian, studying the bible as an academic discipline had come as a terrible shock. I’d always thought, if I’d thought at all, that the bible was essentially self-interpreting – you’d read a passage, have a couple of pious discussions, agree on the meaning and move on. And I thought that preaching was going be nothing more complicated than regurgitating those pious discussions for a later audience.
Well. Then I walked into my first session of Old Testament 101 and fell down the rabbit hole. Studying the bible was going to be a lot more complicated than I’d expected. No mere pious reading of the passage would suffice – suddenly I was plunged into a world of form criticism, redaction criticism, text criticism, linguistic analysis, parallel cultural analysis, exegesis, and hermeneutics.
It didn’t take me long to learn that the reason we studied and analyzed the text in such detail was to undo centuries of “pious readings” which had piled interpretations and meanings onto words they’d never been intended to bear. I began to understand biblical scholarship as a kind of archeology. We stripped away centuries of cultural debris to get down to the bedrock of the text itself, so that we could try to understand what those words would have meant to the first people who wrote and spoke and heart them.
Dr. Neyrey’s mantra was always, “You cannot make the text say something it doesn’t say. Be true to the text.” By my third semester in seminary, I had become one of Dr. Neyrey’s most faithful disciples – he was a brilliant teacher and I had enthusiastically drunk his kool-aid. The text was everything – don’t mess up the text with my 20th century cultural baggage.
But ah! Then I got to Romans 7 and thought – reading the chapters the night before class – at last! He can’t take this away from me! “When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” What could that possibly mean but the universal human struggle between good and evil? What meaning could the text possibly have besides showing us a human and vulnerable side of Paul we could all identify with? Hadn’t we all felt exactly the same thing? Didn’t this text speak directly to our human condition?
I waited breathlessly for the lecture to begin, and the first words Dr. Neyrey said were, “Paul didn’t know Freud.”
All around me the class chuckled knowingly. “d-uh” I wanted to snarl – yes, yes – Paul is a product of his time – we all know he didn’t know Freud. Very funny. What’s your point.
And then Neyrey continued, “Don’t project your modern understanding of human psychology onto this text. Paul is absolutely NOT writing about the struggle between the id and the super-ego. He’s not confessing at a 12 step meeting, he’s preaching the gospel.”
So – that’s a very long setup for a sermon that I am trying to keep short this morning. A very long setup to say just what Dr. Neyrey said to me a quarter of a century ago. If we get into Paul’s head, we’re going to find a very different landscape. Our obsession with the therapeutic – with identifying a problem as something that can be healed or fixed or solved by the application of some technique – is a thoroughly modern obsession.
So if you just got all excited when you heard Romans read, and thought – at last! Here’s a passage Clare can’t mess up for me! It’s going to say what it means and mean what it says….Well – I’m sorry. Dr. Neyrey did his work too well – I can’t forget that Paul never read Freud or Jung – or ever sat in a therapist’s office and said, “I need help with this problem.”
Paul is writing to the new Christian church in Rome – the one letter of his we have written to a congregation that he had never met. He is preparing them for his coming visit, and the major theme of his letter to the Romans is to assure them that as Gentiles, they have a full share in the promises of salvation first given to the Jews. They may not have the Law of Moses bred into their bones, but they have something even better – the grace and power of God revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.
The Hebrew Law, which Paul knows down to every jot and tittle, is indeed of divine origin – sacred and holy. But the point Paul makes is that the Law can show us what is pleasing to God, but it cannot make us obey. That Law can show us what is good – but it cannot make us to it. Knowing what the Law commands is not the same thing as willing to do the things the Law commands.
So – he argues that Gentiles are at no disadvantage – it is not the Law the makes Abraham the great patriarch of the Hebrew people. It is Abraham’s willingness to trust in God’s promise, and give himself and his family into God’s purpose. “It is faith,” Paul says – “not works, that makes Abraham great.”
And he keeps telling the Romans that they have as great a capacity for faith and trust, and just as much access to the grace and power of God in Christ as the Jews. Not having the Law doesn’t handicap them in anyway – it may even make things easier for them.
The Law itself can become a snare Paul says, in this passage that we want so much to read as if he’s in session with his therapist. The Law is good and holy, Paul says – nothing wrong with the Law – but our human selves are ensnared by sin and selfishness and we can’t, in and of and by ourselves, fulfill the requirements of the Law. Who will deliver us from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord?”
If we skitter over from Romans to Matthew, we hear Jesus talking about the Law, too. “My yoke is easy,” Jesus says, “And my burden is light”. If the Romans passage makes us sit up in recognition, the Matthew passage that begins “Come to me – all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens. And I will give you rest” also makes us light up. Who among us isn’t tired? Who among us doesn’t need to lay down a burden – psychological, economic, emotional, work-related, family-related, existential angst – who among us doesn’t want a lighter load.
We don’t see yokes very often these days. What Jesus is referring to is a yoke for oxen – that harnessed them up in pairs to maximize their effectiveness in pulling a load. Being yoked together gave good results for the farmer, or the cart driver – made the oxen more productive – but yokes were uncomfortable, too. They chafed the neck if they weren’t properly fitted – it was terribly hard to yoke two beasts together unless they were well matched in size and weight. And no ox was likely to ever forget that as long as he wore the yoke, he was working and going exactly where his master drove him.
So the rabbis sometimes referred to the Hebrew law as a yoke – God’s yoke – given to God’s people to keep them in harness, to keep them walking in God’s pathways. If the yoke was hard to wear sometimes – it you found it chafed to try to keep all those purity rules when you were poor and couldn’t pay for temple sacrifices – if the yoke cut a little deeply into your shoulders when the rabbis condemned you for picking up a little extra work on the Sabbath – well, that’s the nature of a yoke and your job was just to wear it.
But Jesus gives his audience another choice. “Try my yoke on for size,” he says.” Maybe you’ll find it a little easier to wear.
It’s important to notice – remember – we love therapy – we expect Jesus to say, “I’m going to take that yoke right off your neck.” But he doesn’t. Jesus says, “I have a yoke, too – but it’s a different yoke – it doesn’t weigh you down – it doesn’t make your very life a burden to you. And here’s something else – I’m going to yoke myself in next to you. I’m going to be your companion – your partner as we carry this yoke, this burden together.”
“Take my yoke upon you – and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart. And you will find rest for your souls.”
Scripture doesn’t give us any therapeutic solutions for the pain of human life and the struggles of the human heart. Scripture gives us something better – it gives us the grace and the power of God in Christ, which are at work in us – through our baptisms and our continuing participation in the Body of Christ.
Who will deliver us from this body of death? Thanks be to God – who gives us the victory in Jesus Christ – and gives us precious rest for soul, for body and for heart.
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