Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Romans 8:12-25
Let's start with a show of hands (once your hand is up, just keep it up there!) Who here has now or has ever had: a mortgage? a car loan? a student loan? made a purchase on store credit? gotten a payday loan? a personal loan? or carried a balance on a credit card? Look around and see that this list covers just about everyone except for kids!
The hands prove that we all know what it's like to be in debt, to be debtors. Household debt in America is high and growing every year. We have a LOT of debt, and how do we FEEL about all this debt? Or rather, how do we feel about our various creditors?
Surely not like this: "how compassionate of Bank of America that they loaned us this giant pile of cash so we could enjoy this great house!" "I am just so GRATEFUL to Capital One Auto Finance for helping me buy a newer safer car." "I can never thank Great Lakes Financial enough for loaning my kids money so they could go to college."
No! Nobody feels that way about their creditors! Most of us are ambivalent at best, or fearful, angry or resentful at worst. That's because financial debt is kind of slavery - we sell a big chunk of our time and freedom in order to have a house or a car or an education. Or frivolities we can barely recall. Or food, medicine, or clothing when times are tight.
We are all debtors - we all owe something to somebody else - and it's not an uplifting experience. And our experience of financial debt colors our experience of other debts as well, which is where we're starting in our passage from Romans.
"So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh - for if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." So there it is - debt. We're debtors. We owe someone. But what do we owe? to whom do we owe it?
The "So Then" that opens this passage tells us that what follows it, is the result of what came just before it. We are debtors because of the promise given in Romans8:11: "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you."
It's that promise of resurrection life that puts us in the position of being debtors - and although Paul doesn't say it in so many words, it is clear from the context that the debt we owe is owed to the Holy Spirit.
So here we are: debtors. people under an obligation. We OWE......
And as a society of debtors, we know how we feel about our creditors, and it is not good. We pay our debts because we said we would. We pay because we made a deal. We pay because our creditor is going to take something from us if we don't pay. We don't pay as a free offering from our love or gratitude.
And because we, and all the people around us, are so steeped in this sort of attitude to our other creditors, it can easily creep into our spiritual lives as well, and we wind up living a faith-life of drudging obligation.
The thought process might go something like this: "I believe in Jesus as my savior who paid the debt for my sins, so I shall go to heaven when I die. Therefore, I owe God for that. What I think I owe is to go to church and give some money, and maybe take my kids to Sunday School. And I'm going to do "just enough" to keep this creditor satisfied; just enough to meet the minimum required payments. Because unlike my car loan I can't actually pay off this debt, let alone pay it off early - it continues until the day I die. In fact, I wouldn't pay this debt at all if I didn't feel a little nervous about losing that promise of "heaven when I die." "
Certainly, we all probably know people who seem to view God and their faith this way. Perhaps you yourself are someone who views God and faith this way. And certainly, any of us, at one time or another, might find that we've slipped, unwittingly, into this view of God and faith for a time.
So there's the problem - we treat our legitimate debt to God as a balance due, and consider God as just another account we keep paid up by means of our religious observances.....
How, then, do we get right with God?
Paul goes on in verse 15 to remind us that "you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption." So the Spirit - who's presence in us creates the debt we're talking about - this Spirit also makes us adopted children of God. Children of God! Oh, wait... but that's just one more thing we "owe" God for, right? Wrong!
You see, adoption in Paul's time and in Roman culture was a serious thing. An adopted son became heir to the father, and co-heir with the father's natural-born sons. And.. any debts or obligations the adopted person may have had to his family of birth were wiped away as if they never existed. As if he had always and only been a member of the adopted family!
This idea of severing all ties with the past can be difficult grasp in our society where adopted children often feel they need to seek out their birth parents to understand who they really are; in our society full of divorce and reblended families where both parents, and step-parents, hold sway over the children involved. In our time, being adopted, or being made part of a new family, is rarely the complete and radical transformation of identity that Paul is talking about when he speaks of adoption.
So the notion of just settling into a new family position as "child of God" with all the rights, duties, and privileges thereof, can be hard to comprehend and accept, because we have no good model of what this sort of transition might look like.
The best we can do, I think, is to look to the example of young children. Young children just know that they have a special relationship to their parents. Parents are the people they live with, who are there all the time. Children presume upon their parents, show both their best and their worst to their parents, make spontaneous gifts to their parents, rail and wail at their parents, ask of their parents - and all without any self-conscious notion of being in debt to their parents for their very life and well-being! Little children do not approach their parents as slaves or servants, begging an indulgence. They don't ask with any sense that they must repay for what they receive. They walk right up and say "I want a cookie!"
Simply put, the parent-child relationship is NOT a debt-based transaction! It is NOT like a mortgage or a loan. We don't have an obligation to give to God any particular service. There is no contract, no fulfillment terms. Once we proclaim our faith and accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we become (like him) children of God, and we enter a new relationship, not a new contract.
Any sense of duty-bound obligation we may feel, is our own - it springs from our desire to remain our own person, beholden to no one except by our explicit request and agreement - to keep God at arm's length and subject to our will instead of the other way around. It comse from our desire to limit what we "owe" to God, to boundaries of our own choosing, rather than accepting and enjoying that we owe every fiber of our existence to an Almighty Creator who loves and cares for us and has adopted us as his very own children.
And what, then, shall we do when our relationship to God has been overwhelmed by duty and obligation, by a sense of debt and payments owed? We must remember that the "debt" we owe to God is a debt like no other: we must simply "be" as young children in relation to God - confident in his love and patience, asking anything, sharing everything, with no fear, no doubt, and offering ourselves to him in love. Amen
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