Lessons from a Spiritual Support Group ~ Romans 7:15-25 ~ Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

For eleven weeks, I attended a church that changed my life…

It wasn’t Lutheran, Catholic, or even Christian…

It didn’t have clergy or a council; committees, or musicians…

It didn’t even have a building; it was just a room within a building…

It was the spiritual support group held in the behavioral health unit of a hospital.

It was a congregation of addicts and the mentally ill.  One of its leaders was a timid, twenty-seven year old seminarian who was in way over his head…

Yet what set them apart from me was not the fact that I didn’t have a substance abuse problem or debilitating depression, but that they fully knew that they were helpless to overcome their sickness on their own. 

You see, I walked in that first day thinking like I was above them for where I was in life.  They taught me how wrong I was. 

They were brothers and sisters who were fighting against the deadly grip of sin and the weakness of the human flesh that the Apostle Paul describes today in his letter to the Romans…

Now Paul had come from a mindset not all that dissimilar to mine.  Remember: he was once Saul the Pharisee; a “professional holy man” who consistently kept the Law of Moses.  He became so convinced of his holiness that he brutally persecuted and killed persons who fell short of his holiness; especially, those who worshipped Jesus called Christ.  But everything changed with a flash of lightning on the Road to Damascus.  Suddenly, Paul realized that his holiness was merely an illusion.  He was fooling himself, but not God…

And even after undergoing a dramatic transformation that shocked and amazed everyone who’d known the old Paul called Saul, Paul fully realizes now that he is not—nor will he ever be—above the struggle against the sin that lived in his flesh.

All of us are with him in that struggle.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a hardened criminal or if you’re practically perfect in every way…

Every day, a war wages within you and me.  Scripture pulls us upward to doing God’s will—but SIN pulls us downward, to satisfy the desires and longings of our flesh with that which is not of God.  It is in sin that we take possession of God; God’s gifts; and other people—using our power and our abilities to exploit them for our own selfish benefit.  We need no reminding of the havoc we wreak upon ourselves, our neighbors, and God’s creation.

But sin is more than just an individual matter.  Sinful peoples give birth to social, economic, political, and even religious systems that deny God’s image in the neighbor and deprive them of their daily bread.  And it is sin that we point fingers and cast blame upon persons different from us for society’s ills instead of recognizing our shared responsibility for the ills of the times.

And contrary to our normal way of thinking, we cannot pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and become holy—anymore than we or any single leader or idealism can solve society’s ills.

When we try to do good, we do evil.  We do the very things that we hate and despise.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.  This is the Apostle Paul’s struggle—the same man who wrote two-fifths of our Bible and who planted the seeds for the Church we are part of today. 

What set me apart from the members of the spiritual support group is that its members knew this full well.  They understood total helplessness.  They were blessed as Paul was for recognizing this truth—even for as ugly as it is.  For it is God who reveals the truth that “we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  But it is also God who reveals God’s answer to our sin: the crucified and risen savior Jesus Christ.  God exposes the ugly truths about ourselves and our communities so that we may take hold of the grace of repentance; in other words, that we (as individuals) may be transformed—and that our communities may too be transformed. 

For when we abandon all pretense of the righteousness of our flesh, Christ’s righteousness takes hold.  There is grace to overcome deadly sin and its consequences. 

Where are you struggling most in your obedience to God?  What is it that you know you should do—but you can’t?  What disgusts you most, that you repeatedly do, even though you know it’s wrong?  And with that, what disgusts you most about society?  About the economy; the government; and even, (dare I say) this church? 

Name these things—and pray the prayer prayed in the spiritual support group and by members of Alcoholics and Narcotics anonymous:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The people of that support group taught me not just the importance of recognizing that I’m right there with them in their struggle against sin…  They taught me my total dependence on God—and my need to be with God’s people, that we may support each other.  For God uses communities to transform individuals, that they may create communities that transform the world. 

Grace can and will free you from sin’s deadly grip.  And God’s grace, at work in people like you and me, can go a long way to reshape this world into one where all enjoy their daily bread—and we learn to see God’s image in one another.