July 10, 2011
Mules to Stallions - Romans 6:1-14
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI have been working on a theory for several years now that I would like to briefly share with you. It’s one of the few original thoughts I ever had, so it’s pretty big for me. I have always wondered why rich and famous people so often, almost always, get themselves in serious trouble. Are the rich and famous simply cursed, as some have said, or is it something else? I think it’s probably something else, and that something else is my theory: Rich and famous people view risk very differently than the rest of us do. Rich and famous people are, well, rich. They have a seemingly bottomless pit of money. They are also, well, famous, so they have a bottomless pit of connections. Therefore, they have some immunity. For example, if I borrowed a hundred thousand dollars to start a new business, I would go to every length possible to ensure that my business succeeded. I just don’t have a hundred grand floating around, and neither do my parents. And even though we have lots of friends, we’re fresh out of friends in high places. If you’re rich or famous, though, you do. And therefore, what’s risky for us is not risky for them. Yet, that doesn’t always hold true. It might well be, for example, that rich and famous people can get out of DWIs and drug convictions, but they can get addicted to drugs and crash their cars when they’ve had too much to drink just like we all can.
It’s all about understanding risk. If we’re completely immune to risk, then why not live it up? Why not be risky? Paul deals with that very question in Romans 6. Paul has spent the first five chapters of Romans telling us that we are free from sin. The sin that Adam brought into the world, the burden that we have carried, is gone. We are no longer under that power, not because we have perfectly kept any law, or because we have earned it, but because God, through Christ, has defeated it. It’s not about law, Paul writes. It’s about grace. Through grace we have been saved by faith. It’s grace, you see. It’s a gift. I got a speeding ticket once in Lyman, SC, the night before my sister got married. I did not want to tell my parents. So instead I told this friend of mine who was a state representative in South Carolina and he took care of it. That’s grace. And that’s what has happened to our sin. God, through Christ, specifically for Paul through Christ’ death, took care of it. It’s like that song we sang last week, “my sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the tree and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord on my soul!” That’s grace. And grace is what counts.
So therefore, people asked, why not go on sinning? It’s like immunity, you see. It’s kind of like constantly getting out of speeding tickets, so therefore we can speed? Or is it? That’s where Paul calls my theory into question, at least as it relates to sin. According Paul here, we’re missing the whole point. The whole point is that sin leads to death. It always has. But that sinful self, Paul writes, is already dead. It died with Jesus on the cross, like that song says. It’s history. We’ve been baptized, you see, and in that baptism, we died to sin. That’s part of what baptism is. “We who have been baptized in the Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead, so we too might walk in the newness of life.” In baptism, that sinful self is gone. So for the first time, it is at least possible for us not to sin. We are not enslaved to sin any longer. We really can be whom God created us to be. Before baptism, that was impossible. But it’s possible now. So to ask if we can just go on sinning because grace abounds, to act as if we have total immunity from any consequences of sin, misses the whole point. The whole point is to get out from under the power of sin, and that’s exactly what happened at our baptism.
Now maybe we can say that sin is fun, which is exactly why we do it. I remember when I was in elementary school that we had these inmates come talk to us about prison, hopefully to keep us out of prison. Two of the inmates were in jail on drug charges. One of those inmates said that she didn’t know why she ever did drugs, that they weren’t fun. And the other inmate refuted her and said they were fun, and that’s specifically why he did them for so long. But we know, now don’t we, sin is real, and it’s far more serious than a goof up, or a prohibition against fun. That’s not it at all, and we know that. Every one of us in this room knows what it is it to be broken. Broken relationships, broken families, broken souls. We know that all too well. Not one person in this room can plead ignorance to that. It’s not just that the world is broken. We’re broken, in all sorts of ways. It’s so typical, for example, that people come say that their marriage is in serious trouble. Every time, it’s the spouse. If she would just get her act together, then we’d be fine. Well I can assure you that least 50% of your marriage’s problem is you. You can’t fix your spouse, but you can do something about you. “I just want to get drunk, or I just want lots of sex,” lots of people think. I have never in my life seen that kind of lifestyle end as anything other than miserable. “I just want to keep accumulating stuff, gadgets here, gadgets there, a new boat, a bigger house, a nicer carŔ That’s miserable, too, and we all know it. It’s enslavement actually. If you think hell is just a hot place with a little devil holding a pitchfork in the afterlife, you’re wrong. There is such a thing as hell on earth, and most of us know a little something about that place because we’ve been there. Well Paul says that it’s entirely possible not to live there. It’s entirely possible, because of grace, to be free from sin. We don’t have to constantly be broken. And to ask why we cannot just remain broken, misses the point entirely.
One of my favorite sporting events of the entire year is happening right now. The Tour de France started last week and goes for another two weeks. It is the longest, most grueling sporting event in the world. I have ridden my bicycle for a one hundred miles in one day twice. These guys do that every day for three weeks. I do well to average twenty miles an hour. I saw where those guys were sustaining speeds of forty-three miles an hour, on a bicycle. As you probably know, that sport has been dogged with allegations and confessions of performance enhancing drug use. Some friends of mine and I decided that, even with the drugs, there was still no way that we could do what those guys do day in and day out for three weeks. Lance Armstrong said that he was just born with some of it. You can work all you want, he said, but in the end, you just can’t turn a mule into a stallion.
I for one am a mule. I come from a family of mules. I am very pleased with what few athletic accomplishments that I have. But I have resigned to the fact that I will never make the tour. I’m a mule. But what if some know-it-all subject matter expert told me that “Luke, you think you’re a mule, and goodness knows that you come from a family of mules. But actually, you’ve been given this rare gene. You were actually created to be a stallion, a race-horse, and there’s absolutely nothing that says you can’t race in and even win the tour. There’s no guarantee, of course. You can’t just show up and expect to stand on the podium holding a dozen yellow roses with pretty French girls kissing you on the cheek. There’s nothing that says that you’ll be anything other than a couch potato eating bon bons and watching Oprah all day, but it’s possible for you to be a stallion.” If I knew that, knowing how exhilarating that kind of stuff is for me, why would I ask if I could go back to being a couch potato?
What I think Paul is telling us is that we once were mules, with no way to be anything else. But not now. Christ has died for us. And when we were baptized into Christ, the mule died, too. All we’ve got left is the stallion. And while we still live in a broken world and while we still struggle with sin until Christ returns to take us home, it is entirely possible for us to be who God created us to be. God thought that it was a good idea to create us. And yet sin made it impossible for us to be us. Sin made it impossible for me to be Luke Maybry. But God has done something about that. God has actually turned Luke Maybry’s into a stallion. The same thing is true for you. And now, since our baptism into Jesus Christ, we can actually live like it.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
