June 26, 2011
Peaceful, Easy Feeling - Romans 5:1-11
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadThis year is the twentieth anniversary of the mini-series, Lonesome Dove. I read an interview with Tommy Lee Jones, who played the main character, CPT Call. CPT Call never once cracked a smile in that whole movie. He was a Scotts-Irish immigrant, a Calvinist, Tommy Lee Jones said, so he would be very dour. I thought Tommy Lee was being kind of hard on Presbyterians. Most Presbyterians that I know laugh can tell a joke with the best of them. In fact, we modern-day Presbyterians can party with the best of them. But I do recall that my last three sermons were somewhat dour. As I think about it, as I read my own thoughts and words and sermons, and those of other Presbyterians, we are pretty pessimistic about the world. So maybe CPT Call had a point. Maybe John Calvin did, too. The longer I live, the more I have to accept two, unfortunate truths. First, we live in a badly broken world. Something has gone badly awry. Hurricanes and tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, cancer… You name it, and it’s there. There are many things beyond our control, beyond anybody’s control really, that are really bad. The world is badly, badly broken. And the things that are in our control may be even worse, which leads me to my second unfortunate conclusion, and that is human depravity. There is such a thing, you know. I need look no further than me. And you need look no further than you. If you’ve come here for one of those motivational “you can do it” speeches, you’ve come to the wrong place. In fact, the only way that we can think that “you can do it” alone, as if you are all you need, is to never do any kind of self-reflection or to never read the Bible.
Paul has the same problem, really. He can be as dour as CPT Call. Paul spends the entire first chapter in Romans talking about how broken the world is. It’s just rotten. And he, Paul, is even more rotten. I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but after Paul wrote about all this faith and justification and boasting and hope and peace, he wrote this about himself. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not what is what I do… Who will rescue me,” he asks, “from this body of death?” Now that’s Paul we talking about, the Apostle Paul. Paul often contrasts vices with virtues in his letters. Take this list of vices from Galatians 5: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. Now contrast that with this list of virtues from the same chapter: love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Which list most indentifies you? What about me? Well, you probably see the list of virtues. There are others in this room, however, who could list a few of my vices. My wife could really spout off a few, and I could spout off even more.
It seems then that peace would be the farthest thing from Paul’s mind. After all, our brokenness has made us enemies to God. And yet Paul says that, even despite his problems, that he’s got peace. It’s not that Paul denies the brokenness, or puts on a happy face. In fact, he even acknowledges for the umpteen-hundredth time the world’s brokenness. In fact, in a way, he even boasts in it. “We boast in our suffering,” he writes, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint,” all of which might sound like a Oprah rerun were it not for this last part, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
God has done something for us. “For while we were still weak, Christ died for us.” Christ died for us while we were at our worst, while we were most broken. In fact, never does God deny the world’s pain. Rather, God enters the world’s pain, and in Jesus Christ, defeats it. God reconciles us to who we’re supposed to be. We have been made right. We have obtained grace. Theologians call it “imputed righteousness.” “My sin, o the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin, not in part but the whole is nailed to the cross and I hear it no more. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.” Paul would agree wholeheartedly with that verse. “For if while we were enemies,” Paul writes, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will be we saved by his life.” And the “we” there is a pretty inclusive concept. And the “we” there is totally passive. God is the subject of all of that. We are the objects. And while we once were the objects of God’s righteous wrath, we’re now the objects of God’s unending grace.
I have several friends who are pastors, and I have come to rely on them very much. It never fails that when I ask one of those friends for something, they come through. They care about me, and my family, and my Church. They care enough about me to hold me accountable and tell me things that I don’t always like to hear. They lift me up when I’m down. We were once enemies to God. But God has made us friends. That’s something that God has done. And even though the world continues to be broken and unexplainable things continue to happen good and innocent people, and even though we are still deprived, God has done something for us. God has come into our world and has loved it literally to death. God has reconciled this place. So despite all that dourness, we can have some peace. I think that’s what Paul is after. It’s not about reading the paper and getting depressed. It’s not about keeping score, or guilt, or shame. It’s about this grace that we have inherited. That’s a very peaceful thing.
The Eagles sing a song that most of us know called Peaceful, Easy Feeling. “I’ve got a peaceful, easy feeling. I know you won’t let me down. ‘Cause I’m already standing, on the ground.” Like most of those songs, it’s sort of a dream. The verse is about falling in love with this beautiful, well-tanned woman and “having relations” (nice way to put it) “in the desert tonight with a million stars all around.” Now we all know that that generally leads to an STD and not peace. Be that as it may, the verse has the same metric as the hymn, Amazing Grace. So sometimes we sing Amazing Grace to that tune and then sing the verse. I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with that, not just relocating Amazing Grace to a wistful tune about pre-marital sex, but how it portrays God. God is not one to be trifled with. God makes us do things that we’d never do in a million years. If anything, God removes us from our security, from our comfort zones and sometimes drops us off in the middle of nowhere. Jesus told us time and time again that if we followed him, then we were going to a cross. Jesus felt a lot of things up there, bleeding and dying on that cross, but a “peaceful, easy feeling” was almost surely not one of them.
Now all of that is true. But according to Paul here, when it comes down to it, even if Jesus does call us to a cross, it really does come down to a “peace that surpassing understanding.” I have no idea what this week, or this year, or my life or your life hold. I know one thing that it holds is brokenness, of all kinds. We had VBS this past week. Christ Covenant Church in Matthews had a VBS of sorts on their campus last week. It was like a mission trip from Church. Our middle school youth are going on one at Myers Park later this summer. Anyway, after a long day’s work, some of the youth went outside, laid down in the parking lot to watch a thunder storm. Meanwhile, one of the workers was riding an ATV, and he couldn’t see the youth lying on the ground. And one of the boys couldn’t see him. And a fifteen-year old boy was hit and killed. Nobody did anything wrong at all then. It’s just that we live in a broken world. That kind of stuff won’t happen in heaven.
And we won’t have that list of vices in heaven. The Kingdom is coming. We’ve got the Gospel, friends. History is headed in a very positive direction. That’s not because of us. But God has loved us anyway. Even when we were at our worst, God loved us, and God has salvaged us. God has salvaged his creation. It’s good after all. Now it’s not the perfect thing that God created yet, but it’s going there. At the end of the day, even though the news continues to be bad, even though you’ll often hear dour sermons from this pulpit, we can still have some peace. So go out there, regardless of how your future may look, and rejoice in the fact that “Christ has regarded our helpless estate, and has shed his own blood for our souls.” Or, as the Eagles said, we can have a peaceful, easy feeling after all.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
