July 5, 2026

I speak to you today in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

There’s something about today’s passage from Romans that sounds familiar to those of us in recovery from addiction.  In many ways, we can imagine this letter coming out of a recovery meeting.  “Hi, my name is Paul, and I’m a sinner.”  “I don't do the good I want to do”, Paul writes to the Romans, “instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do.”

But in reality, Paul isn’t writing about himself.  His “I” statements are really the voice of humanity.  In our hearts, we know how true that is.  Each of us can easily think of examples of this in our own lives.  We mean to do the right thing.  And somewhere along the way, we really mess things up.  We can all empathize with what Paul is saying.

One of the fundamental things about being in recovery is that you have to see things for what they are.  We have to be honest with ourselves about our limits and we can and can’t control.  We have to see our powerlessness over the addiction.  We have to see things for what they are.

And that’s what Paul is writing about today.  Seeing sin for what it is.  So today I want us to be thinking about what sin is – what it really is – and how that shapes our lives as disciples of Jesus.

It’s easy to read Paul’s letter as a moment of utter frustration with impossible burdens.  Paul wants to keep the Jewish Law – all those hundreds and hundreds of commandments in the Old Testament – but finds that he can’t.  It’s too hard to do.  Instead, he seems to despair as the Law just tells him how sinful he is. 

But in his other letters, Paul never seems overly troubled about whether or not he’s following the Law.  So I don’t think this is Paul springing us from following the Law.  I think what Paul is really doing in this passage is telling us what sin is.  Helping us take the first step toward breaking our addiction to sin.

Our temptation is to see sin as something personal.  All those times we’ve failed to live up to our own Law.  Our own moral code.  And the belief buried in that is: “I’m in control over this.  With just enough effort, I can make myself a better person.”  Or maybe we even believe that our sins aren’t a problem.  Ater all, they don’t hurt anyone.  All the things an addict tells themself.

And that’s what sin wants us to think.  But in Paul’s theology, sin isn’t about our failings.  For Paul, sin is an aggressive power that seizes hold of everything and twists it toward death.  And in his letter today, Paul writes that even something holy and God-given – something intended to point humans toward God’s purposes for creation – the Law – can be corrupted by the power of sin. 

Paul knows from personal experience how powerful sin is – how it can subvert anything to its purposes.  When Paul persecuted the early Christians, be believed he was following the Law.  And maybe he was.  But on the road to Damascus, he discovered that on a deeper level, he was doing the opposite of what he intended to do.  He discovered that sin had hijacked the Law for its own twisted purposes.

Sin didn’t have power over Paul because he couldn’t keep the Law.  Sin had power over Paul because he could keep the Law, and did.  Paul’s letter teaches us that sin shapes the world in such a way that even keeping a good and holy thing like the Law can extend the power of sin and death.

And that’s the challenge.  Sin isn’t only our failings to love God and love our neighbor.  If that were the case, it would be much easier to resist.  Sin, though, also flourishes in our best actions.  Like Paul persecuting the Christians, we intend to do God’s work for peace, justice, equality, and hospitality.  But then our sinfulness blinds us to the patience and dialogue and wisdom those things require, and we end up further from where we started.  We intend to proclaim the Gospel, but our rigid beliefs and hardness of heart alienate those we want to reach.  Sin deforms this world so that even our ethical actions are bent toward death-dealing ends.  We do the opposite of what we intend to do.

And yet, this leads to the very weakness of sin.  That when it seizes the good and transforms it for its own purposes, it shows itself for what it is.  Ugly.  Despicable.  Nauseating.  It loses the attractiveness on which its power depends.  What Paul describes for us is a cosmic drama – sin seizes something good – like God’s Law – and twists it.  But then it overplays its hand, reveals its own ugliness, and then collapses under the weight of that revelation.

Think, for example, of those non-violent marchers in Selma, Alabama in 1965.  Pictures of the violence as those marchers were clubbed – as the dogs were set upon them – showed that sinful power for what it was. 

If the problem of sin were simply human weakness, then solving it would require nothing more than Jesus being the best life coach imaginable.  Someone who could give us tips and strategies to help us keep our resolutions, so that we could live our best lives now.

But if the problem of sin lies in its power to twist even the best gifts of God to evil ends, then we need much more than that.  We need the defeat of that power – Jesus’ decisive cosmic battle and triumph over the oppressive forces of darkness, sin, and death. We need liberation from the power of sin that corrupts human dignity.

That’s why the final line of our passage today is so important.  As addicts to sin, we need to despair over our condition but also to have great hope because of what God has done for us in Christ.  Because that is how we start to see the world for what it really is.

So as we surrender ourselves to the power of Jesus –as we confess our mistakes and find welcome in the support of our fellow disciples – as Jesus reveals the ugliness of sin through the Cross – we begin to see the path to abundant life.

Amen.