The Wages of Sin is Death
Texts: Jeremiah 28:5-9, Romans 6:12-23, Matthew 10:40-42
Works Cited: https://renewalworks.org/researchsummary/ https://www.episcopalchurch.org/jesus-in-america/
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When I was a young teen, my mother was the pastor of three congregations about an hour away from where we lived. While my father and brother opted to go to a church closer to home, I would get in the car with Mom and go. She was my first and best pastor. On one of the windy back roads of the middle of nowhere Iowa we would pass this small church building by the side of the road. Outside of the building there was a sign. On the side we drove past in the morning on our way to church it said, “For the wages of sin is death”. The side we passed in the afternoon returning home said “But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It’s funny, I can’t tell you much about that church building. I can’t tell you if it was a still worshiping congregation or a relic of former times. I couldn’t tell you if it had something on the building saying the name of the congregation. I barely remember that it was a small stone structure. But I can see that sign clearly. I identified the building as “The wages of sin is death” church. That’s how it greeted me. That’s how it shared its message with me. I felt like if I were to walk into that building, if it were even a still functioning congregation, I would enter a place that convicted me to death. The first side of the sign had a greater impact than the second side.
We have to admit that’s how a lot of people view the Church universal today. I was at a Summer Ministry School and Retreat last weekend, which has various tracks you can take for study or rest. I took the track entitled “Nurturing Spiritually Vital Congregations”. It had a lot of good tips and tools for helping congregations grow spiritually together. One thing we looked at was The Episcopal Church’s Jesus in America study, which was a national study released in March of 2022. The study looked at perceptions of Jesus and Christianity in America among Christians, other religions, and people with no religious affiliation. It is an interesting study. It showed that 76% of Americans believe in the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth and 84% of Americans believe Jesus was an important spiritual figure. That includes people of other religions and no religion. The validity of Jesus’ existence or teachings is not really all that contested in the United States. The problem isn’t Jesus, it’s the Church. Half of non-religious people think that religion divides this country and the perception of Christians outside of Christian circles isn’t great. While the top three characteristics Christians gave to themselves were giving, compassionate, and loving, the top three characteristics people of other religions and no religious affiliation gave to Christians were hypocritical, judgmental, and self-righteous.
And when asked, “How well do Christians you know represent the values and teachings of Jesus?” none of the respondents, Christians included, had an overwhelmingly positive response. 34% of Christians said that Christians they know represent Jesus’ values and teachings a lot. 37% of Christians said that Christians they know represent Jesus’ values and teachings a little. Those were the best numbers. People of other religions said that 6% of Christians they know represent Jesus’ values and teachings a lot. Of those with no religious affiliation 2% said that Christians they know represent Jesus’ values and teachings a lot. The majority of people of other religions or no religious affiliation stated that Christians either somewhat don’t represent Jesus’ values and teachings, don’t represent Jesus’ values and teachings at all, or they don’t know. When only slightly over a third of Christians think that other Chrisitians they know represent Jesus’ values and teachings a lot (with only 25% of non-Evangelicals believing the Christians they know represent Jesus’ values and teachings a lot), we have to admit that the Church is not doing well. There is something deeper happening. We need to root ourselves in our relationships with Jesus.
This is especially true in The Episcopal Church as a whole. We looked at another study from RenewalWorks, a branch of Forward Movement, the people who create the Forward Day by Day devotional booklets. They asked 20,000 Episcopalians in 260 congregations where they were on the four stages of spiritual growth. Were they exploring, growing, deepening, or centered? Those who were exploring weren’t sure what faith claims they could make about Christ and faith is not significant to their daily lives. If they were growing, they were committed to the Christian faith but still had a lot of questions and had not developed a personal relationship with Jesus. Those who were deepening were building their relationship with Jesus and depended on God for daily guidance. Those who were centered said that their personal relationship with Christ was the most important relationship in their lives and they were still deepening their spiritual journey. 74% of Episcopalians were either exploring or growing, meaning that they didn’t feel they had a solid personal relationship with Jesus. This was a survey where 55% of respondents had been a part of their congregation for over ten years. The Episcopal Church as a whole has had issues with helping people move into a personal practice of prayer that deepens their relationship with Jesus and helps them center their lives on God. We cannot represent Jesus’ values and teachings to others if we aren’t personally living them out.
I want to be very clear, you aren’t at fault if you aren’t sure how to live out Jesus’ values and teachings in your own life. I don’t present this data to play a blame game. There are larger structural issues at play in all of this, systemic things that are bigger than any one individual. I also want to present a spotlight of hope. For the majority of my lifetime, the Church has pushed getting out into the world, doing works of service and helping our neighbors. All the congregations represented in my track were doing just that. We took assessments and that was consistently our highest score. We had learned and grown into getting out and doing good for the people around us. We had paid attention to what the wider church was asking of us. But I present this to share where the wider church needs to grow. When we take a loving look at the real, we are able to create lasting changes.
And it is time for us to push for a flip of the sign. So many hear from American Christianity that the wages of sin is death. There have been systemic attacks on immutable characteristics of individuals. Our society is especially prone to conflating sin with sexuality and gender expression. But sin is not about characteristics of an individual, it is the act of seeking our own will instead of God’s, thus distorting our relationship with God, others, and all creation. Loving another person of the same gender, being a woman pastor, doing things that provide a sense of wholeness to your life and do not harm another, these are what the church has been debating as sinful or not. We have been neglecting the inner spiritual life of people, how we connect with Jesus and live out his values and teachings. Our relationship with Christ brings us grace and life everlasting. We are a people of a relationship with Jesus, not people of a book or dogmatic statements. The Episcopal Church is increasingly clear, we are not interested in denying people any sacrament based on immutable characteristics like sexual orientation or gender, but we still have much to do to help people connect with the Holy Spirit and experience God’s gift of life through Jesus Christ. What if we held out the sign: God’s gift is eternally living with Christ Jesus our Lord?
Paul talks about this as turning from being slaves of sin to slaves of righteousness. This is a hard thing to parse out. Paul was talking to a community where a number of members were slaves. They had debts they were paying off through labor. Slaves certainly experienced abuse and hardship at the hands of their masters, it was not a good system, but it was distinctly different from American slavery. People weren’t considered inferior because of the color of their skin at birth. Slaves were people who were so poor they had no other options. They had to give themselves over to be slaves in order to repay debts. Paul is talking with them using metaphors about the conditions they knew well. Honestly, I wish he used something else as a metaphor, but here we are.
Paul said that you can either give yourself over to sin, to ways of living that distort your relationship with God, neighbor, and all of creation, or you can give yourself over to righteous living. Both ways involve patterns of living, habits and customs that become ingrained in the individual. The sinful way involves patterns and habits that are self-interested to the detriment of one’s relationship with God, others, and creation. Paul included worshiping Roman gods within that sinful way of living. We forget that much of his message to the Gentiles was that they had to reject Roman worship and customs. This worship was ingrained into Roman society, just as Jewish customs and worship were integrated into Israelite society. There was no separation of church and state. These patterns of living had to change. They had to take on new patterns, Christ-centered patterns. To do so invited persecution and ridicule. But it also brought a whole new life, one filled with grace.
Their patterns of living are still available to us. They still help us as we strive to embody Jesus’ values and teachings. They are daily prayer, baptism and communion, sharing life with others, being compassionate to our neighbors. They are study and action, contemplation and adoration, they are ways that are both externally and internally focused. This is the way of eternal life. Paul was not just speaking of resurrection as a future event but as a current day reality. We are resurrected into the way of Christ, a way of relationship with God and neighbor that is transformational. The gift of eternal life isn’t heaven after we die, it’s the work of striving towards heaven on earth in our lifetimes and beyond.
Sometimes that work involves looking at hard realities. Our reading from Jeremiah today is about just that. The part of the story we didn’t read was that God was very clear that Israel was going into a very rough time. They were going to have great hardships and God said not to trust anyone who prophesied that good things would happen. So when Hananiah prophesied with rose colored glasses, saying everything would be great, Jeremiah called him out. Jeremiah was being sarcastic when he told Hananiah, “May the LORD do just as you have said!” He would have loved for everything to be peachy keen, but it wasn’t. Later Hananiah was indeed proved to be a false prophet.
God doesn’t want us to sit in wishful thinking and not see what is right in front of us. We are called into a “loving look at the real”, one of my track leader’s favorite phrases. Things aren’t easy. Times are scary. The Church isn’t living up to what it’s called to be. We may be going into tough things ahead. But God is still there for us.
We are called to look at hard realities with the lens of hope. We know the end of the story. We know that God has resurrection power. God can move in and through us. We don’t have to be stuck where we are. If we are to move into the giving, compassionate, and loving Church that we see, we have to confront what makes others see us as hypocritical, judgmental, and self-righteous. That doesn’t simply mean trying to show others that we’re not what they’ve seen. That means we have to live into Jesus’ teachings and values. We have to center ourselves on our Savior. We have to shape our lives into the way of Jesus.
That is done not just through the external things we do, things like the blessing box, Laundry Love, and all the other beautiful things that we have been called into. It’s through prayer and contemplation, study, and having spaces where we are safe enough to be vulnerable together. We have the Book of Common Prayer to help guide our way, but there are also other patterns we can incorporate into our lives. In my track we spent a lot of time exploring different kinds of prayer, including a technique called praying in color. We began with writing down and doodling around a word or phrase for God that we wanted to use that day, then we added prayer requests around it. We continued to add doodles, colors, shapes, free form expressions that didn’t have to look like much of anything and it was beautiful. I found myself opening up in ways I don’t normally express myself to God when I use my prayer journal. We were given all these prayer forms as ways to help others and ourselves build deeper relationships with God.
The biggest thing we can do to impact the world is to have regular individual conversations with God. However we frame that time, we all need prayer practices that help us connect with the Divine. It is through these patterns that our lives are shaped into deepened relationship with God and through our living that our neighbors see Christ in us. None of us are perfect, I know I’m certainly not, but we can all work towards a future where we are all filled with eternal life, a flow of love between us, God, and our neighbor that has the power to change this world for the better. We have the power to help God build heaven on earth, a place of eternal life, which is God’s gift to us. We can turn the Church into what God dreams it can be. It starts small. It starts with us. Like a little bit of yeast, we can help the whole body of Christ rise. May we live into our relationship with Christ, expanding and growing daily in our prayers. Amen.
