“Setting Wrongs Right”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Text: Romans 5:12-19
We used to call him Stevie B. He wasn't like the rest of us, he was small, fragile. Unlike the rest of us in Grade Nine he wasn't particularly strong or boisterous. He was light and thin and weak. He used to walk around with a great, big brace on his leg, along with very heavy leather shoes. These irons on his leg seemed heavier than Stevie B himself. But Stevie B was a cheery sort, a good friend, who craved affection. If you were a friend of his, you were a friend, indeed. He used to do things with us, we would go to soccer matches in our local town of Darlington in county Durham and we'd walk to the games. Often times the skinheads would drive by and make fun of him, crying out to him cruelly, “You loser!” It didn't deter Stevie B, he had heard it a thousand times before. In fact he was quite proud to be a bit different. He had cerebral palsy and used to refer to it as “CP.” “I am a CP.” And bear it like a monarcher, a statement of praise and status, unlike everybody else.
His great goal in life was to actually play goal for the team that he loved so much, Leeds United Football Club and would often walk around wearing the kit of the team as soon as he got home from school. Stevie B was different. He was also somebody who wanted to get out of himself a bit. He used to go to a barn down the road from where we lived, dress up like Batman and jump off the top of a pile of hay and land on the bales below, shouting “Kapow!” As if he were a superhero. One day he jumped off the top and landed awkwardly and the metal shaft on his leg went into his femur. He ended up in hospital, undeterred Stevie B could not be depressed. He would not listen to guidance, was very stubborn, and it was hard to love him at times because he refused to listen to smart and wise guidance from his parents or peers. More than anything else Stevie B wanted to be a superhero but would never be, he wanted to be well but would never be fully well. He wanted to suspend reality but reality would not release him from its grasp. Stevie B was a lovely guy but he was sad.
In many ways I think that Stevie B is like a mirror held before the rest of the human race. I think he is not unlike all of us, although at times we take a Stevie B and look at him and think that he is unfortunate and different and sometimes like those skinheads who drove by we exclude him and are nasty with him, it's often because he is a mirror of our own weakness, of our own mortality, our own brokenness. None of us are glittering superheroes. None of us are morally pure. None of us are righteous in the full sense of the word. None of us are immortal. None of us have no brokenness within us. None of us are full, marvellous, immortal, physical specimens… none of us. Stevie B is a mirror shining back on us all.
When I read today's passage I realize that the apostle Paul is struggling with the reality not only of a Stevie B but all of humanity. There is a mortality, a brokenness, a sinfulness, a partiality to human existence that Paul tries to make sense of, tries to work his way through it as a theologian, to comprehend and articulate it. How is a broken humanity, how is a vulnerable humanity, how is a shaken world, how are mortal human beings who are unrighteous supposed to live and find hope?
The apostle Paul in this magnificent passage from Romans seeks to deal with it by contrasting two characters. In many ways it is a marvellous but convoluted argument in the Book of Romans. It is a legal argument contrasting two characters, two personalities, two beings, two Adams. When I think back on this passage I realize that probably I am a Christian because of it. There is something about the Book of Romans that transforms a person when they read it and understand it and I commend to every one of you the reading from beginning to end that small Book of Romans in the New Testament. In the middle of it there is this peach, Chapter Five, Paul talks about the two Adams. The first Adam he said, is the Adam of the Bible of the Old Testament. The first Adam that we read of in Genesis Three, that it is this Adam who is a typology really for humanity. Five hundred times the name Adam is used in the Old Testament as a proper noun to describe not just the character of Adam but Adam - humanity. Adam, then, is not just a person, Adam is a type. He is a type representing humanity and he is known as we know from the Book of Genesis for his disobedience. He is known for the fact that he, in the Garden of Eden with Eve, turned from God and God's will and purpose and declared his independence.
This Adam represents humanity. Now, it does not say anywhere in the Old Testament that Adam's sin is imputed to all of humanity. Only a couple of times there is a reference to the fact that humanity is sinful from its very beginning. For example, in Psalm 51, which we read at the Ash Wednesday service that David McMaster led. There is this line that even from our mother's womb when we were conceived we were sinful. So the writers of the Old Testament knew this. But it is in the New Testament and in the intertestamental period where this concept of Adam representing sinful and broken and mortal humanity is really developed. Paul, however, takes it to its height for he understands that through Adam, humanity becomes mortal, that humanity is sinful and broken and disobedient.
This comes to us involuntarily by the fact that we are human beings and we inherit the sin of Adam, but also voluntarily by our sinning and our own personal disobedience. “There is not one,” says Paul in Romans, “who has not sinned. There is not one who is righteous.” We are all broken in the same way that Stevie B was broken. Paul then concludes that if that is the case we are powerless to do anything about it. On our own we cannot overturn Adam. We cannot replace Adam ourselves no matter how righteous we are. How obedient to the Lord we might be we will never fundamentally alter our mortality, our sinfulness and our own righteousness and all that comes with it.
In many ways we are like something that used to happen when I was growing up in Bermuda. I always think about this during March break because many Canadians and Americans would go to Bermuda during March break and the Bermudians used to wait for these students, particularly university students, to come to Bermuda in order that they might be able to take their money from them. One of the things they used to do was to take students who were very gullible and they would dare them. They would take them to a dock with a body of water and a little island. The island seemed like it was less then a stone's throw, far less than a stone's throw from the dock. It looked like you could easily jump off the dock and land on the beach of the island. So the Bermudians would bet them that they wouldn't be able to land on the beach if they leapt off the dock. You don't know how many students were gullible enough to try this. They would launch themselves off the dock and land in the water, never hitting the beach. Like lemmings they just kept going and trying to get onto the beach. It became almost an obsession with some of them. The Bermudians used to say that they would do it easily, “Many of us have done this. The problem lies with you.”
No it didn't. The problem lay with the fact that it was an optical illusion. The island seemed nearer to the dock then it actually was. When the sun shone on the water it made the island look like it was very close to the dock when in fact it was quite a long way away. Even the great Carl Lewis would not be able to leap off the end of the dock and land on that beach but people kept trying and they kept paying in the hope that they would be able to win the prize. They never did.
I think that humanity is just like that. I think that deep down we want to strive for the kingdom of God. We want immortality. We want righteousness. We want to be free of our guilt. We want to be good human beings and we just keep diving off the dock and landing in the water, falling short of what it is that God wants us to be. It seems that all is lost, but for Paul, it isn't.
For the apostle Paul there is another Adam, and that is Jesus, the new Adam. Whereas Adam one, the old, was an archetype of the sinfulness of the world, the second Adam was the manifestation of God's righteousness. Where the old Adam led astray, the new Adam brought life. Be not misunderstanding this. These are not two equal Adams. The Adam in Jesus is greater and superior to the Adam of old. He is the embodiment of God's grace and because he is he can do greater then what the old Adam could do. His is the victory, his is the hope, his is the grace.
How does this manifest itself? It does in a couple of ways according to Paul's argument. The first is that there is now no condemnation. Under the old Adam there was condemnation, there was guilt, there was unrighteousness, there was mortality, but with the new Adam there is justification, there is forgiveness, there is righteousness. Whereas in the old Adam there was an expansion going on where the sin of one person led to the sins of many, in Jesus the new Adam, there is a contraction where the sins of the many are forgiven in the sacrifice of the one. Where the brokenness of the world is taken upon itself in the new Adam, in the old Adam it just kept going and maintained itself. In the new Adam there is no condemnation. In the old Adam there is guilt.
There's more than that. There is actually the power of life. In the old Adam there is death. In the new Adam there is life. The whole of the New Testament is a testimony to one, single, solitary thing. Lent is all about one thing. Easter is all about one thing: in the death of the son all the sins of the world are borne and in his rising from the dead all those sins are forgiven. In the person of Christ all the brokenness, all the sinfulness, all the mortality, all the shame of the world is borne in order that through him you might be raised to a newness of life. If you don't believe me believe, in my opinion, the greatest theologian of the 20th century, Karl Bart who in his magnificent commentary on the Book of Romans, put this succinctly: “As a consequence of the righteousness of Christ,” he wrote, “there comes justification of life unto all people. Here is the negation of all negation, the death of all death, the breaking down of all limitations, the rending asunder of all fetters, the clothing of men with their habitation, which is from heaven. For all humanity there is death, but it is swallowed up in victory by Christ and by his life.”
The new Adam is setting right the wrongs of the old Adam. How then, should we live? I think we need to let go of the old Adam. We need to set free from the old Adam. I think one of the great ironies is that over the last 50 years or so some of the so called progressive ethics have actually brought us back closer to the old Adam than to the new. In fact, by trying to tinker with our sinfulness or trying to assuage ourselves of our guilt and responsibility by removing, so people think the importance of righteousness, humanity is somehow free from the constraints of Adam. But we are not! We know that. You know that. It is like putting on a Batman suit and leaping off a magnificent array of bales of hay and crash landing and finding in the landing that the rod on our broken leg has gone into our femur. It's like Stevie B.
We can try to play the game that sin is not sin that death is not death that obedience is not required that righteousness means nothing. We can play that but any observer of humanity and reality, let alone of theology, knows that the old Adam is alive and kicking and well. The old Adam needs to be let go.
I think there's a great misunderstanding out there and I know that I've said this before but it is something that as Christians we need to deal with and we need to address with our friends. There is the assumption that somehow the obedient life to Christ, the life of worship and glory and adoration, the life that recognizes the righteousness of Christ and what he has done for us, the joy and the freedom and the power that comes from worship is misunderstood as being a form of tyranny and constraint. The religious life is misunderstood as a life of sorrow and sacrifice and pain and hardship. People say, “Why would I ever embrace that?” All the time they are embracing the old Adam and thinking they are free? They think that somehow they can avoid their guilt. They think they can avoid their own mortality. They think they can avoid the consequences of their disobedience. Like super heroes dressing up, they fool themselves, for the life of faith is a life of freedom. It is to say, “Look, I know that I am broken but in Christ I can be renewed. I know that I am fallible but in Christ I am forgiven. I know that in this broken, mortal flesh it appears that I die but I know in Christ I shall live forevermore.” There is this incredible sense of joy, and this is what Paul's capturing in the Book of Romans. Let go of the old Adam, embrace the new Adam, for there is life and freedom.
I was reading a car magazine not long ago and one of my heroes, the driver A.J. Foyt. A.J. Foyt, as far as I'm concerned, is one with the holy trinity. He has won the Daytona 500, he has won the Indianapolis 500 and he has won Le Man: The holy trinity of auto racing. He wrote in an article not long ago about a time when he was driving in Indiana. He is now a man of very mature years but he was in the car driving along when suddenly, next to him drove up a young guy in a souped-up car with shiny, wide wheels. He had spiky hair and sunglasses and flames going along the hood of his car and down the trunk. He had exhaust pipes that were the size of chimneys in most houses. He sat next to Foyt, depressed the clutch and revved the heck out of the engine, as if he wanted to drag race. Foyt was in a normal, every day car, and he looked at this young guy (and I don't think the young guy realized it was Foyt next to him) and started to rev his engine, the car began to shake, the light turned green and the young man tore off down the road. Foyt gradually progressed, went through the gears, arrived at the next stop sign next to the same young man. The young man looked at him again, revved the car some more, the boost gauge on the turbo was at the very maximum, he released the clutch, shot down the road again. Foyt very gently and quietly drove along to the stop sign and reached the same place next to him at the next block. This went on for two or three blocks. The young man was getting so frustrated because Foyt wouldn't race with him that finally the young man tore off at the next stop light, smoke pouring out the turbo boost and the nitro that was in the car and around the corner came a police car, pulled over the young man and Foyt drove slowly by waving to the young man with the spiky hair and sunglasses. Foyt's argument is: there is always a time to be obedient. On the track obey the rules, on the road, obey the rules and you'll get where you need to go.
Who is the one who had the freedom and joy? Who was the one who got to their destination? Who is the one who is really the great one? I think the same applies to us. I think that in our brokenness, the obedience and the love of God in Christ, imputed to us is the greatest gift and the greatest freedom and the greatest joy.
Not long after Grade Nine had finished my mother, father and I emigrated to Canada. We left Darlington. A few weeks later there was a letter in the mail. There had been a farewell party for me before I'd left, hosted by the mother of Stevie B, and many of our friends were there. The letter came informing us that Stevie B had died. He had a hole in his heart that hadn't been fully diagnosed and Stevie B was gone. I've thought about him a lot over the years. There is one thing I take comfort in and that is that those of us who were his friends were friends indeed. No matter what he was like he was loved by us. Even when he did the stupidest things you had every seen we loved him, we really did, and he knew that.
Paul want humanity to know this: that in all our brokenness through the old Adam God still loves us and God loves us through the new Adam. That new Adam will set all the wrongs right and will be with us forever. Amen.