In today’s
reading from the Epistle to the Church at Rome St. Paul tells us, “the wages of
sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our
Lord.”
I grew up outside Baltimore, was
ordained for the diocese of Maryland and served there eight years. We moved to
Asheboro in 1974. Asheboro is a hosiery mill town. The mills closed the week of
the 4th of July and everyone who could left town. I served there six
years, and I came to appreciate the hard work and the generous spirit of the
mill working people.
St. Paul tells
us of two ways to live. One way is the way of wages. That way of wages focuses
on what we get. The other way is the way of free gift. The way of free gift focuses
on what we give. Most of us most of the
time live in the way of wages, the way of barter, the way of exchange. As the
seven dwarfs marched off to work in Disney’s 1937 musical Snow White they sang
what many of us hear as, “I owe, I owe, so it’s off to work I go.” We work to
get what we need to live.
That can
become a mindset. “You get what you pay for.” “There’s no free lunch.” And it’s
not just on the job. What wife has not said to her husband, “We need to have
the Smiths over. We own them.”
A way of
wages mind set influences our understanding of God. Many of us at some time in
our lives come to understand God as a God of rules. In adolescence those are
frequently rules of behavior we don’t want to follow. As in the Christmas song
about Frosty the Snowman, God “knows when we’ve been bad or good” and he punishes
when we’re bad.
We have
to spend much of our lives in the way of wages. We do need to work; we need to
eat, we need to maintain ourselves and our families, and we also need to be
able to help where there is need. St.
Paul says to the church at Thessalonica (3:10) “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”
But the way of wages can be too easily twisted into a
way of getting and keeping all we can, for ourselves alone. It can become greed,
which is a sin. We can seek to charge what the market will bear and then try to
manipulate the market. There is a place for human law and there will always be
a place for law as long as we have human sin. ““The
wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus
our Lord.”
St. Paul shows us an alternative to
the way of wages – the way of free gift and eternal life in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
Our very life is a gift, a free gift
of God. You don’t have to have difficulty having children to know well that children
are a gift from God. The love we have for one another in families and in
friendships is a free gift from God.
As
we grow we change our understanding of God. We give up the notion of a
judgmental and punitive God and to begin to accept the reality that God is
love.
We learn
that God is love in the First Epistle of St. John (4:7-11) “ Beloved,
let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born
of God, and knows God. 8 He that loves not knows not God; for
God is love. 9 In this was manifested the love of God toward
us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might
live through him. 10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but
that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved,
if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”
That is Bible truth, a Bible truth that calls us to a
new understanding and to new action. If God loves us unconditionally, who are
we to refuse to love ourselves with God’s love and to love others with God’s
love. We all misbehave. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of
God, but in Jesus Christ, by Jesus’ death and resurrection, we are forgiven
sinners. We no longer have to do the same old thing again and again looking for
a different result. We can do some new things; we can take some risks, risks to
love, to share, to give.
One place to begin is in our families. In our families
we benefit from natural love. So I invite you to think and to pray to see new ways
you can show God’s life-giving love in your family relationships, And then when
the loving God shows you the way, act on the knowledge the loving God gives you. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors and love
our enemies because frequently they are the same people. Think and pray how you
can grow peace and love among the people you know, and then act to grow peace and
love. Our situation requires us to live
much of our lives in the way of wages. But when the opportunity to live in
God’s way of love and life opens for you, take it.
For “the wages of
sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our
Lord.” Amen.
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