Glory to Jesus Christ!  Glory forever!

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

As so often happens when we’re reading pericopes of Sacred Scripture, we frequently find ourselves in the middle of a larger apostolic thought or presentation of some sort.  So, it generally behooves us to re-visit what he has said prior to and what he says afterwards to acclimate ourselves to his larger thought.  In this case, St. Paul is in process of discussing with the Roman church the Mystery of Holy Baptism.  More specifically, he is expounding on the effects of Baptism upon the believers, that is to ask, what does Baptism mean for us who have been baptized?  What does it lead us to and away from?  In addressing this Mystery, he expounds upon the themes of sin vs. righteousness, of freedom vs. slavery, of death vs. life.  He uses that very Jewish paradigm of what is known as “the two ways.” 

In the writing called The Didache of the Twelve Apostles – the earliest extant church manual in our possession dating to around the end of the first century A.D., we hear this introduction to the whole book: “The teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles.  There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between these two ways.”  These two ways are present throughout Sacred Scripture.  The Prophet Moses speaks of “blessing and curse” (Dt. 27:1-28:68), the Prophet David sets forth in the opening psalm of the Psalter the way of the righteous and the way of the ungodly (Ps. 1:1-6), while our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ in His Sermon on the Mount speaks of the narrow gate vs. the wide gate – the one leading to life, the other to death (Mt. 7:13-14), and He employs imagery of the wise and the foolish (Mt. 7:24-27; 25:1-12).  Of course, this is the bread and butter of the Book of Proverbs and other Wisdom literature.

What St. Paul is addressing is the place of sin in the life of the believer.  What part does it play?  Should it even play a part?  Now that we have been baptized, what should we make of sin and righteousness, of freedom and slavery, of death and life?  To do so, he asks two questions: first, “What shall we say then?,” he wonders, “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?”  And the resounding, underscored, highlighted and bolded, apostolic reply is, “God forbid!  How shall we, . . ., live any longer therein?” (Rm. 6:1-2).  The second question is, “What then?  Shall we sin because we are not under the Law, but under grace?”  And the apostolic response is as equally clear and as emphatic as the first.  “God forbid!,” is his reply.

Know ye not that to whomever ye yield yourselves as servants to obey, his servants ye become whom ye obey, whether sin which leads unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? (Rm. 6:15-16).

It is this second inquiry from which we read today’s Epistle.  Lest we have any doubts, let us be clear that for St. Paul and the whole of Sacred Scripture, sin is incompatible with Christ and it is unthinkable for Christians to treat it as lightly as a minor irritant with little or no effects.  God forbid!  If left untreated by the Medicine of Immortality, we will die eternally.  If we do not submit ourselves to the Great Physician of soul and body, we will submit, in the end, to the ancient malefactor and archenemy of God!  For to whomever you give yourself in service to obey, that one becomes your master whom you must obey.  There are only two ways and there is a great difference between them. 

St. John the Theologian in his Epistles is equally forceful.  He says, “My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin” (1 Jn. 2:1).  He goes on to say, “[I]n [Christ] there is no sin.  Whoever abides in Him does not sin.  Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him” (1 Jn. 3:5-6).  The Apostle and Theologian furthers his thought.  “He who sins is of the devil, . . . Whoever has been born of God does not sin, . . .” (1 Jn. 3:8-9).  St. John does not allow any wiggle room here, especially for those Christians who have made sin in their lives acceptable, if not inevitable.  We are either sons of God or we are children of the devil who has “sinned from the beginning” (1 Jn. 3:8).  These are our choices.  Our Lord and Master Himself has taught us from the start that you and I cannot serve and obey two masters, we cannot have two loves in our lives: we cannot love God and we cannot love to sin (Mt. 6:24; Lk. 16:13).  It is spiritually unsustainable and reckless, and, ultimately, leads us to death. 

Of course, St. John the Theologian, who has attained great spiritual heights, is also a pastoral theologian and Bishop of souls who well understands our plight, that is, how sin still lingers nearby, even in us.  He acknowledges well the words of Ecclesiastes, “For there is not a just man upon the earth who doeth good and sinneth not” (Ec. 7:20), the truth we Orthodox employ in our services for the dead. 

So, “if we say we have no sin,” St. John declares, “we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn. 1:8).  In fact, he says, we make God – Whom we say we love – “a liar, and His Word is not in us” (1 Jn. 1:10).  Thereby, we reveal our true colors and show ourselves to be children of the father of lies himself who has practiced deceit and murder from the very beginning (Jn. 8:38, 41, 44).  But, if we speak the truth and “confess our sins [along with our sinfulness], [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:8-9).  The Apostle and Theologian assures us sinners, “[I]f anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. . . . He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (1 Jn. 2:1-2).  “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn. 3:8) – including sin in us and sin lording it over us – “and the blood of Jesus Christ [God’s] Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 Jn. 1:8).  The more we give ourselves to Christ, the more we find sin unappealing and suffocating, and, hopefully, absolutely abhorrent, so that when it is present in our lives we will quickly seek to rid ourselves of it by repentance and Confession.  And, then, receive the Holy Eucharist – the deifying Body and Blood of Jesus Himself – to fortify us in the fight.

The advantage the re-born child of God has is that the blood of the Lamb of God takes away our sin and cleanses us from all unrighteousness, making us whiter than snow (Is. 1:18; Jn. 1:29).  “[E]veryone who has this hope in [Christ God] purifies himself, just as He is pure,” says the Theologian and Evangelist (1 Jn. 3:1-3).  What we are talking about, beloved, is the notion of our sanctification, that is, God, by the power of His Holy Spirit, making us holy because God Himself is holy (Lv. 11:44-45; 19:2; 20:7; 1 Pe. 1:16).  Without this holiness “no man shall see the Lord” (Hb. 12:14).

“Therefore gird up the loins of your mind,” says the Apostle, St. Peter,

be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance, but as He Who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct (1 Pe. 1:13-15).

 St. Paul says as much.  “But God be thanked,” says the Apostle,

that though ye were the servants of sin, now ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered to you.  Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness (Rm. 6:17, 18).     

The “form of doctrine” that has saved us [doctrine is important!] is that of the Apostles which we received in our catechesis prior to our Baptism into Christ God and continue to feed upon even today.  You have been baptized into Jesus Christ, Paul says.  Now, you are dead to sin because you have died in Christ to sin.  Know this, then: “our old man is crucified with [Christ], that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.  For he that is dead [in Christ] is freed from sin” (Rm. 6:1-11; Ga. 6:14).  Paul goes on to tell us, if we are dead with Christ, we are now made alive with Him in His Resurrection to walk in His newness of life given to us in the waters of Baptism.  Waters that have and do continually regenerate and renew us in the Holy Spirit (Ts. 3:5). 

It is for good reason, it seems to me, that we hear this saving and sanctifying truth of our new life after Great and Holy Pentecost in these days that are labeled “Sundays after Great and Holy Pentecost.”  We live in the Resurrection light of our Lord and we do so by the very power from on high, divine power, the power from God, the power of God, the Spirit of Pentecost promised and received on that Great Day (Lk. 24:49; Ac. 1:8).  The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of holiness, has been given even to us in our chrismation – our personal Pentecost.  “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind,” Paul tells Timothy (2 Tm. 1:7).  Paul tells Timothy furthermore that he must “stir up the gift of God which is in you” (2 Tm. 1:6).  We, too, must do likewise each and every day because, though we have died to sin by dying with Christ, we must continually do battle with our passions that seek to lead us down the path to death.  We must, in apostolic terms, “gird up the loins of our mind.”  We must “reckon ourselves dead to sin, but alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rm. 6:11).  It is a conscious battle we wage with the powers we have rebelled against when we renounced “Satan, and all his works, and all his angels, and all his service, and all his pride” and spit upon him with all the contempt we could muster when we were baptized into the Death and Resurrection of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ. 

This is why Paul and all of Sacred Scripture speak this way because it is an act of our free will.  When we were loyal to sin, death, and the devil we did not realize just how in bondage we were, until we sought our exodus.  We didn’t worry about righteousness, about doing the holy will of God, until we were liberated by the Death and Resurrection of the Son of God Who shattered the shackles of sin and death and illumined the darkness of our minds with the deifying light of Jesus Christ!  As we once gave ourselves to sin and death, now, by the grace and mercy of God, we are empowered to give ourselves “to righteousness unto holiness” as slaves of God, to cooperate continually with the grace of God poured out upon us abundantly through Jesus Christ and which tabernacles in us (Ts. 3:4-7). 

Our freedom is bound to the Cross and Empty Tomb.  We have exchanged slavery to sin, death, and the devil for slavery to God and His holiness.  We have been “delivered from the power of darkness and conveyed [transferred] . . . into the Kingdom of the Son of [God’s] love, in Whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Co. 1:13-14).  And yet, this slavery to God and His righteousness doesn’t feel like slavery, like servitude or forced indentureship.  It is not a suffocating slavery, but is rather one of being the free sons of God who dwell in the Father’s abode and is totally Life-giving in the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life” (Jn. 8:31-36; Nicene Creed).  Once, all we had was death – eternal death – that was the fruit of our servitude to the devil.  Now, we have in Christ God “fruit unto holiness” and Everlasting Life.  “For the wages of [our] sin is death, but the gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

In the traditional Morning Prayers of the Church, we pray to the Theotokos, beseeching her maternal love and assistance, “O wondrous palace of the Master, make of me a home for the divine Spirit” (Prayer #8).  We pray that the Spirit of holiness make come even to us and take up His residence here in our hearts and souls, and we implore the mercy of the Master in these same prayers.  Having been saved by His grace through faith, we now implore Him, “O Lord, grant that now I may love Thee as I once loved sin, and that I may labor for Thee without laziness just as I once labored for Satan the deceiver.  All the more shall I labor for Thee, my Lord and God, Jesus Christ, all the days of my life, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.  Amen” (Prayer #9).     

Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us.  Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!  Glory forever!

PROPERS:

Rm. 6:18-23               

Mt. 8:5-13