All in the Same Boat

 

All in the Same Boat

 

Romans 8:1-11
8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
8:2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
8:3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,
8:4 so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
8:5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.
8:6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
8:7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law--indeed it cannot,
8:8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
8:9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
8:10 But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
8:11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

 

As you read my recent messages, you may see a pattern developing: I tend to get more jazzed by the Old Testament texts than the new, and there are a couple of reasons. First of all, I took Greek in seminary, and had no time to squeeze in Hebrew, after I took a near full-time student pastorate. Secondly, I never liked the Old Testament, because in my “NT” prejudice, I thought it was too judgmental and “nasty.” In my old age and retirement era, I am coming to see its more of its beauty, and thanks to more time for better exegetical scholarship, am seeing more clearly through the “human” hands that wrote it, to view the benevolent, brooding, and yet rejoicing God who inspired it. That said, there are New Testament texts that read like the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence, and the book of Romans is full of them!

 

Take a look at the first verse of this pericope from Romans 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Wow. One must ask, however, “What does it mean to be IN Christ Jesus?” A few weeks ago, five people were “in” a submersible called the “Titan,” and they all simultaneously lost their lives when it imploded under the overwhelming water pressure at 13,000 feet below the ocean. Sin is an imploding thing, crushing us under its tremendous pressure. However, Christ “lifts us up.” When we are “IN church,” worship inspires and recharges our spirit. Being “IN Christ” is a gift of God, NOT a specific list of “orthodox” doctrines we must painstakingly “obey” to please God. JESUS pleased God for us, and our best, righteous living we now do out of GRATITUDE for this gift.

 

As I wrote in a recent message, it is helpful to understand “sin” differently and more deeply than the “tweet” version of it we often hear. If I were to ask you to define “sin,” you might say it’s “disobedience to the law of God,” or behaviors or attitudes that “anger” a “righteous” God. Those are both religious definitions. I have suggested that a better definition of “sin” is “anything that damages relationships between persons, including a person’s relationship with God.” In this vein, “sin” may also be things that harm community (eroding it) between persons, or that creates excessive resistance to its forming. What if we expand our definition of sin to include things within the person that keep them from “forming” into the fullness of what they want to be, or are “called” to be. Sin, in this thinking, may include mental illness, unhealed, broken relationships, financial hardship, or even negative behaviors like bullying or gossiping. “Sin” may cut a wider, insidiously “bad” swath through the individual psyche, the heart of benevolent community, or the church, than we fully understand. To reduce “sin” to just a breach of some rule or law found in scripture is to lose focus on just how destructive it can be. “Fixing” it is, therefore, requires so much more effort or remedy than a “substitutionary” offering that equates Christ’s death to a cow butchered and burned on an ancient altar. A friend recently posted an Edward Teller quote that summarizes the power of “sin” to disrupt:

 

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

 

Paul is telegraphing the destructive power of sin when he connects it with death, which he does on more than one occasion. What kind of death? We all know that there are harmful practices that may lead to a physical death, ranging from murder, to addictions, to dying by suicide prompted by any manner of horrible, demeaning experiences in a life that rob a person’s sense of worth. Lesser, yet tragic “deaths” include the emptiness that occurs within an individual when they sell out great sections of their life to things that provide pleasure, but little purpose, or give in to manipulation or “game playing” by others in their life, who derive their pleasure by controlling people. The Apostle says that the only effective balm for sin is living “IN Christ.”

 

There are many ways to unpack what it means to live “IN Christ,” including this text’s reference to the Holy Spirit of God living IN (or within) our lives, comforting, guiding, and nudging us toward right living. It should be so much more, though, than the trite “religious” meaning we give to it. If sin is so insidious, then God’s effort to disarm it would necessarily need to be much more pervasive. We can argue theology all day long about how the Christ Event provided an “ally, ally, in-free” for the spiritual “penalties” of sin, as we addressed in last week’s message, but let’s say that the Christ offers us a clean slate in this regard. But to provide a fix for the tenacled nature of sin, both individual and corporate, living “in Christ” must include all manner of healing for addiction, mental anguish and illness, that inner emptiness, and purposelessness that may haunt any of us. Corporately, a community “in Christ” must adopt the teachings and “vision” of Jesus to overcome sin’s entropy and cleanse itself through acts of compassion and mercy aimed at what our Jewish siblings call tikkun olam, or “fixing the earth.”

 

I titled my message on this passage, “All in the Same Boat,” based on the Rembrandt painting at the top of this page, and a story that Maxie Dunham tells in one of the first-generation “Disciple Bible Study” videos. Dunham shows Rembrandt’s painting of “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” depicting the time Jesus and the twelve were in a boat on that famous body of water, and a big storm came up. Jesus is asleep, and the disciples were panicking, thinking they would perish. It’s a wonderful (and somewhat dark) painting. Dunham shows us that if we carefully count the men in the boat, there are FOURTEEN, not just the twelve disciples and Jesus. The dark figure in the rear of the boat—just as terrified as the rest—is Rembrandt, himself. He has painted himself into the scene, because he believed “we are all in the same boat.” Sin is like the storm, be it one of those quick ones that may come up on the Sea of Galilee, or the “500 year” variety that now seems to strike at least monthly! But while storms pass, sin will not go away on its own. In fact, it is so insidious, it will seed itself and just keep spreading, when we are not held to account for it, whether it is personal or corporate. 

 

It's a little hard to see in Rembrandt’s painting, but if you look very closely, he appears to be terrified AND lost, at the same time. Sin can do that to us. Paul would know. He had become so convinced that what he was doing in persecuting these new Christ followers even to the point of having them stoned to death was RIGHT, that he believed he was doing God’s work. This kind of delusion is common to people who sell out to sin. Persecuting people who disagree with your faith or viewpoint is very clearly wrong. The people who stormed the U.S. Capitol, who did great harm to police officers, and threatened the Vice President of the United States with hanging were wrong, plain and simple. But the people in both of these examples had become convinced that their cause was “righteous.” Sin puts us all in the same boat and kicks up the storm. Some in the history of humanity strike out when appropriately challenged, or when their fear overcomes their conscience. One wonders what might have happened on that boat if Jesus hadn’t intervened. One way we are “all in the same boat” is that we may be victims of sin, and perpetrators of it. It may just depend on the day or the circumstances. Either way, sin gets us, especially when you begin to see its “wider” form.

 

The GOOD NEWS is that Jesus is in that boat with us! When the scriptures tell us that “Jesus was tempted as we are, but without sinning,” we should take that to mean that as he walked among us, having “emptied” himself of the “privilege” of all that being part of the Godhead, he experienced the typical human “tug” of all that promises great things that it can’t deliver, leaving an emptiness of its own, behind. And we should interpret that Jesus was “without” sin to mean that his resolve to begin the process of fixing us and the world was so strong that the “tick” of sin couldn’t find a soft spot to bite on him. In the midst of rescuing people—including the disciples on the boat—he launched the rescue of all of us. So, we are all in THAT boat, too! By now, you know my theological perspective that the redeeming power of the Christ Event is so strong that ALL of us on the “boat” have been rescued, unless we intentionally jump overboard. While there’s nothing at all wrong with saying a prayer to “ask Jesus into your heart” and to proclaim oneself “saved,” these steps are most likely not even necessary. If you WANT to find salvation, however you understand that, it is already yours. God ran so strongly our direction, as evidenced by the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, that the only way we can “miss out” is to very intentionally refuse, refuse, refuse, and reject, reject, and reject the love and grace of God. I don’t know why anyone would do that, but I’m sure some have, and some will. How very sad. No one is more sad than God over this, but it is a freedom we have ALSO as a gift from God.

 

Recap: We are “all in the same boat” in that sin can really screw up our lives, our relationships, and our world. Indeed, it has. But we are ALSO “all in the same boat” in that the redemptive, rescuing, reconciling God is “in the boat” with us, and will calm the waves and heal us of our fear. And as we learn to fully integrate the teachings of Jesus, as well as trust the indwelling lure of the Holy Spirit, we will experience life “IN Christ,” as Paul says. Again, a caution: don’t read the Bible to discern who’s “in” and who’s “out.” Read it to find the key or keys to unlock the doors and gates so that everyone can be “in the same boat,” the boat of safety, love, acceptance, and possibility, for NOTHING is impossible with God! Happy sailing! Amen.