Romans 6.1-11
When the Comedy Central animated series “South Park” debuted in August 1997, after a pilot episode the year before became one of the internet's first viral videos, it created much controversy and met with many indignant complaints for the way it parodied Christianity in general and Jesus in particular. For example, in the Y2K episode titled “Are You There God? It's Me Jesus,” Jesus worries that for the new millennium humanity may crucify him again. As it turns out, Jesus wasn't so crazy about being crucified the first go around; therefore, Jesus decides to do something cool to distract us from crucifying a second time. Jesus organizes a Rod Stewart comeback concert.
When “South Park” debuted nearly thirty years ago, it sparked heated controversy. The Christian Child Care Action Project protested the show, complaining that children's ability to understand the gospel would be corrupted by the show’s satirical bite. Meanwhile, the Christian Family Network registered alarm that “South Park” impeded their work to restore morality to the nation and protect the American family. All those years ago, many Christians expressed outrage and fear that an animated television series posed an ecclesial emergency, threatening to inoculate us against the gospel.
Of course, the single cultural force that has done more damage than any other to our ability to speak Christian is indeed a long-running animated television show.
It's just not “South Park.”
It's “Scooby-Doo.”
I did not become a Christian until I was seventeen. And even then I did so only kicking and screaming. I think my being born again was every bit as painful and drawn out as my initial birth because of “Scooby-Doo.” I should have seen it coming. After all, “GI Joe,” which came on every weekday before “Scooby -Doo,”had warned me that “Knowing is half the battle.”
And I knew how every episode of “Scooby-Doo” was going to go.
Therein “Scooby-Doo” was forming me in such a way to make it impossible to read the scriptures rightly.
“Scooby-Doo” has aired continuously on television since 1969.
“Scooby-Doo” has spun off into dozens of series and around forty theatrical films. “Scooby-Doo” has been everywhere for a long time so chances are you already know all about “Scooby -Doo.” You could probably sing its theme song this very moment if prompted.
In fact, you're probably singing it in your heads right now.
You already know all about “Scooby-Doo.” You know that the gang is led by Fred Jones, the blond Hardy Boy doppelgänger, who apparently owned only orange ascots and white v-neck sweaters. You know that Vilma was the first lesbian on TV. And you know that Scooby and the gang drove around in a van decorated to look like a mobile Marijuana dispensary and that they constantly complained of having the munchies— no mystery there. And you probably also know that “Scooby-Doo” would often feature crossover guest stars like the Harlem Globe Trotters and characters from other live action shows like the “Andy Griffith Show.” Which just shows how baked the gang was because otherwise you'd think it would have occurred to a team of detectives that the real mystery in Mayberry is: “Where are all the black people?”
But this the problem.
This the gospel-corroding problem presented by “Scooby-Doo.”
There's never any mystery in “Scooby-Doo.”
Not once.
In nary an episode.
Never is there any actual mystery.
Every “Scooby-Doo” episode follows the same exact pattern.
You know it—
The sleuths of Mystery Incorporated drive their psychedelic Mystery Machine van into a little town where a rattled resident lets slip how their quiet hamlet has recently been haunted by some ghost, spook, or monster. Scooby and the gang then commence an investigation. Ultimately, after a suggestive hit or two of Scooby Snacks and a comedic chase scene, the gang nabs the creature. And always— every time, every episode— Scooby and his friends unmask the monster only to reveal that the troublesome specter is not a monster but rather some mendacious mortal from the town.
Always, the doer is some local wearing a monster mask to frighten people away from noticing their shady, criminal designs.
Every monster is just a man in a mask.
I mention Scooby and his gang in the Mystery Machine because in the sixth chapter of Romans the apostle continues a mysterious and unsettling motif. Like a face hidden behind a mask, you may have missed the puzzle latent Paul’s deployment of ordinary words like Sin and Death.
Notice— the fright is right there in front of your face from the start in the second verse.
PAUL MAKES SIN THE SUBJECT OF VERBS.
Sin is not simply something you do.
Sin is a power that can do to you.
Sin is an agency with the ability to grasp ahold of you, “We died to sin’s grasp.” In this way, Paul further unveils a mystery he has been revealing from the beginning.
In his opening diatribe, Paul speaks of sin not as our act but as God’s rival, a tyrant to whom the Lord, in his righteous frustration, “handed us over.” And the word Paul uses over and again is paradidomi, whose straightforward definition is to give someone or something over to the power of an enemy. In chapter three, Paul speaks of both sin and the law as despots “under” whose regime we live apart from Christ Jesus.
The apostle ups the ante in the passage immediately before this text, making sin, death, and the law synonymous with one another and making all three the subjects of the very same verbs Paul uses to describe the work of God in Jesus Christ:
5.12: “Sin entered the world and through Sin came Death. Thus Death entered into all people.”
5.14: “Death ruled as a king from Adam until Moses.”
Again later, 5.17: “Death ruled as a king through the transgression of one person.”
5.21: “Sin reigned as a monarch with Death.”
Paul makes sin, death, and the law the subjects of verbs. They are what Karl Barth calls "Lordless lords” who exercise dominion. This is why Fleming Rutledge says of this passage:
“When I write sermons about Sin, Death, and the Law, I capitalize those three words. The purpose of doing this is to show that Sin, Death, and the Law are not just components of human life, but a Power that rules over us. That is the way Paul understands the situation. In Romans, Paul uses words that indicate their sovereign sway.”
Interpreters frequently characterize chapter six as an excursus on ethical exhortation, yet even here Sin and Death continue to operate in a mysterious way as anti-God powers.
6.9: “Death no longer lords it over Christ.”
6.12: “Do not let Sin rule as a king in your mortal body.”
6.13: “Do not present yourself as a weapon for Sin.”
6.14: “Sin will not lord it over you.”
6.17: “You were slaves of Sin.”
Paul is not writing about morality. Paul is disclosing a mystery. Sin is not a what. Sin is a who. Our little-s sins are but masks Someone wears in the world. Paul does not pull back the curtain to reveal this who until the very end of his epistle when he finally delivers the full promise of the gospel, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”
When I was in high school, I worked as a volunteer for Sam Nixon, a South Side Richmond Republican who was running in the 27th District for the General Assembly. A woman I knew only as Mrs. Smith was the district operative who told me where to post signs and stuff mailboxes and knock on doors, and on election eve, take down the other candidate's signs. Mrs. Smith was the mother of a classmate I vaguely knew.
For each one of my campaign endeavors, she drove me along with a van load of other volunteers from place to place in Chesterfield County. And every outing, always with some AM squawker squawking on the radio, she would turn away from the steering wheel to proselytize us with her latest conspiracy theory.
“Did you know,” she told me as I rode shotgun into some planned community, “President Clinton is responsible for the murder of several witnesses in the Whitewater scandal?”
“No, I hadn't heard that,” I said. And by way of explanation, I added, “We don't have cable.”
“Well, I read it on the internet,” she said, “Do you have the internet? It's an information superhighway.”
And I shook my head.
“Honestly,” she said.
Turning away from the wheel and towards me in violation of everything I was learning in driver's education, she asked me, “Honestly, what would you say if I told you Vince Foster didn't really commit suicide? What would you say if I told you Bill and Hillary were behind his murder and then faked it for political purposes? It's a cover up. Honestly, what would you say?”
And because I was a recent convert to Christianity who thought Jesus expects us to tell the truth even if the president didn't, I didn't lie.
“Honestly,” I said. “Honestly, I'd say you sound like an insane person.”
After that day, I didn't quit the campaign, but I did have to find my own rides. A few years later, I was home from college on break and I went to church, just an ordinary suburban praise band and polo shirt type of church. I was surprised to find Mrs. Smith in the row ahead of me. Even though I knew Mrs. Smith to be somewhere to the right of the Ayatollah, a Shiite pro -lifer, I also knew that back in the day, she wasn't a Christian.
“Mrs. Smith,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
And she frowned.
“All those lies I spun and all that hate I spread. Something took hold of me,” she said, “Back then. What's Jesus call him? The Prince of Lies? Anyways, I met Jesus here and got baptized. I’ve since been set free.”
“The Devil made you do it?”
“I think that’s right,” she nodded, looking equal parts alarmed and awed.
Thanks to “Scooby-Doo” we have been conditioned to look for the explanation behind the scriptures.
Every time Jesus encounters the Devil or one of his demons, we moderns suppose there must be a rational answer if we but peak behind the spooky mask.
No less than the nineteenth century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher insisted that what’s really going on in a passage such as the story of the Gerasene demoniac is that Jesus healed a man with severe mental illness.
The Devil and his demons— they’re just monster masks.
We say.
But the problem with trying to pull away the spooky mask to see what's really going on is that even if the Devil and demons are only masks to moderns like you, even if you don't consider the possibility that they can be real, it does not alter the fact that Jesus did.
“This woman is a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for 18 long years,” Jesus diagnoses in the Gospel of Luke.
That's not the Pharisees attributing Satan to a woman’s paralysis. That's not the chief priests saying she's been bound by the Devil. That's not the disciples implying it.
That's Red Letter.
That's Jesus saying that whatever else has ailed this woman Satan has bound her in his captivity. Or as Paul puts it in Romans 6, The Power of Sin lorded over her body.
Call it the Devil.
Call it Sin and Death, as Paul does here in Romans.
Call it the Principalities and Powers, as Paul does in Ephesians.
Call it the Prince of Darkness or the Adversary, as Jesus does.
Call it what you will; the sheer array of names proves the point.
Evil-as-person is the narrative glue that holds the salvation story together.
The language of Satan so thoroughly saturates the New Testament, you can't speak Christian without it. To pull off the monster masks and insist that something else is going on behind them is to reject how Jesus understood his mission and how Paul understood the gospel Jesus gave him. John puts it as plainly as Paul does at the end of Romans. “The reason the Son of God appeared,” John writes, “was to destroy the Devil's work.”
You can count up the verses.
More so than he was a teacher or a wonder worker.
More so than he was a prophet or a preacher or a revolutionary.
Jesus is an exorcist.
As a product of the United Methodist Church, I used to scoff at the notion there’s a mystery behind masks like Sin, Death, and the Devil. But then, typical of Jesus's sense of humor, Jesus sent me to be a preacher at a maximum security prison.
And there I discovered that perhaps I was not the one living in reality.
I was preaching one Sunday morning at Trenton State Penitentiary. The text assigned to me that day was from the Gospel of Mark, another “Scooby-Doo” type scripture, where a desperate father brings his convulsing boy to Christ. Eventually Jesus rebukes the boy’s demon saying, “You, spirit, that keep this boy from speaking and hearing. I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.”
Being seminary educated, I took that wild, ghost-busting story and I preached a placid, G -rated sermon about faith as a gift.
After the sermon, as we were preparing the table for the eucharist, one of the inmates, Malcolm, raised his hand and said, "Preacher, what was that? We deserve better!”
“I'm not sure what you mean," I said, “And I'm a Methodist. We're not used to this being a dialogue, so maybe we should just move on to communion.”
“You didn't say nothing about the demon that possessed that boy,” Malcom said, “You didn't preach a single word about the power of Jesus over the evil that can grasp ahold of us.”
I stammered.
“If you had the benefit of a seminary education,” I said, “you too would understand how stories like that, the devil and possession, they're metaphors.”
“Metaphors?” Malcolm shot back, “Man, I don't know what a metaphor is, but I do know you skipped right over one of the few things that gives hope to guys like us.”
“This passage gives you hope?”
“How do you think most of us ended up inside, preacher?”
“Most of us here, we were taken captive by something long before we ended up behind bars. That Jesus Christ has the power to exorcise that from us, that's one of the few things that gives people like me hope.”
The gospel drama is only good news when you realize the cast necessarily includes a fourth, oft-neglected character:
God the Father.
God the Son (in their Spirit).
God’s Enemy.
Humanity— caught betwixt and between.
The Lord Jesus does not appease his angry Father.
The Lord Jesus rescues us for his loving Father by delivering us from their Adversary.
Only when you have the correct cast of characters can you hear rightly Paul’s proclamation for the church at Rome.
Sin and Grace do not name two different modes of behavior; they name two different regimes with two different lords.
You are born into one.
You are baptized into another.
Yes, you sin. Of course, you sin. But, no longer do you belong to Sin. By blood and by water, Christ has rescued you from his clutches. As Robert Jenson writes, “The sacraments overcome the tyrants.”
In Romans 6, Paul is not suggesting that we cannot sin. Were that Paul’s claim, then the ethical admonitions in chapters twelve through fifteen would be superfluous. Paul is not positing that we cannot sin. Paul is proclaiming that we are no longer in the grasp of the One who lurks behind words like Sin and Death.
This passage is not a bit of exhortation.
This is passage is a preview of the ultimate promise.
After last Sunday’s service, I received an email from a woman who worships remotely with us from out west. Rightly, she knows that behind a rational, every day word like alcoholism is the Adversary whom Paul makes the subject of verbs. The diagnosis is but the mask for the Enemy Paul calls Sin and Death.
In her message, Susan wrote:
“Dear Jason,
I'm not sure why I am writing to you about my raggedy faith and family. I think it’s because you are far enough away from me that you feel like a safe place for my confessions.
My son is in his 6th round of treatment for his alcoholism right now. He is a brilliant, beautiful man— this go-around he’s a little more desperate than before for good news that can't be undone by his brilliant mind or this damned power that has him in its grasp.
And so he told me that when he gets out of treatment this time he wants to go back to church, but he needs to be handed the gospel for all, even for fumbling, brilliant captives to alcohol who come to Jesus in the middle of the night nearly begging to be outsmarted by something too good not to be true. It's just this word that sets free can be really hard to find in these days of smoky worship shows and platforms filled with everything but him who is our Rescue.
Now I don't know what the outcome of this treatment will be. I'm not so naive as to believe at this point in my life that this treatment or even a sermon Sunday’s will make everything right.
But I do have that mustard seed's worth of faith that everything will be delivered from the One who binds it. Thanks to your church for gospeling us.”
In other words—
On account of her son, Susan’s counting on the promise to which Paul provides a peak behind the curtain of the ultimate promise of the gospel, “The God of peace will soon trample Satan underfoot.”
Hear the straightforward claim of the scriptures:
There is a spirit afoot who has no self.
If John the Evangelist is to be trusted and the Son of God appeared for no reason other than to destroy the works of the Devil, then for all of us who are in Christ Jesus, Christianity just is struggle against a personified Liar. Faith is nothing less than contending with a Power determined to capture us in his grasp.
As Robert Jenson writes:
“It has always been my principle that there is more in heaven and in earth, and presumably then also in hell, than is dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy. I have therefore always acknowledged reality so abundantly testified in human history as angels and demons…
That is, somewhere in being, somewhere out there and in there and down there, there is a subjectivity that comprehensively despises the world, that hates all things, and, thus, deceives all things. And that subjectivity, that hatred, that despising, that deceiving is also antecedent to all our hating and despising and deceiving.”
It is impossible to speak gospel without explicit reference to Sin and Death, aka: the Devil. Just so, if we are unable to speak of the Adversary, then all is lost and we are without hope.
Fortunately for us, if Jesus’s own struggle against the Devil provides any clue, then we do not contend against his power by believing in his reality.
We do so as Jesus does in the desert.
We do so by trusting the promises of God.
Therefore—
Come to the table where Christ pledges to give you himself and thereby make you a part of himself. Loaf and cup, bread and wine— what Paul calls the mysteries— these are the masks God wears in our world.
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