Thoughts from Culhwch

Thanksgiving. I think our souls cry out to give thanks. Our being is more constructed for giving thanks than we realize. We must give thanks, we must acknowledge the awesome power of God in our lives. But this kind of giving thanks allows us to really see what God’s gift is. If we fail to give thanks, and only consume or enjoy the things we have, we do not understand these things as gifts. We lose track of their meaning. We lose the sense of our being in and for something greater than ourselves. In giving thanks, we recognize not only our deep dependence on God, but also the relationship between ourselves and everything in our world is God’s making. Our reality is knit together with threads deeper than our reality, deeper than our sense of the world, or our slow understanding of God. When we give thanks, we recognize the structure which precedes structure itself. We recognize the Christ in whom all things subsist.

And so I give thanks. I thank God for salvation and the cross. For reaching down to me, for giving me life and freedom from sin. For re-working me into an instrument of righteousness, even if I often see myself as failing to live up to this. I thank God for good friends. For friends whom I can trust, who can help to bear my burdens. For friends who in whose company I taste the bread of heaven, in whose company I glimpse the Body of Christ. I thank God for friends who go out of their way for me. I thank God for a job and a house, for a family, for the beauty of His creation, for the blue sky, for snow, for joy, for peace, for all that makes this life not just bearable, but an image of the life to come. I thank God for the hope of things to come, for the blessings yet unknown, for the healing of the nations, and the peoples, and people. I thank God not just for moments of quiet, but for moments of distress when I glimpse the work of God saving me, saving others. I thank God for strength to live this life, to respond to His calling, to give myself to Him entirely. I thank God for moments when his power and grace shine like the sun, sing like crystal, and smile from the Father. I thank God when they remain hidden from my view, when they sing like bagpipes in the distant hills, and when God convicts me of my sin. I thank God for thankfulness.
As I thank God, I begin to release my own claims on myself an on others, I begin to worship God. To see in him that all things have their being, and that in me, I must leave all in God’s hands. And there, I being to feel His peace.

From time to time I get this incredible desire to write. And I don’t mean that I just really want to write, it’s something much. much deeper. It’s like a fundamental part of who I am cries out and won’t be silenced unless I write something. It’s like if I don’t stop what I’m doing some huge part of me will atrophy or simply stop working. I’ll become paralyzed if I don’t write. Sometimes, it’s different. Sometimes I feel like my calling is to write, like I need to put some really profound message into words, to articulate it for others to hear, as if not my life depended on, but another’s. The problem is, I rarely find anything to write that’s as urgent as the urgency I feel to write. I mean, so long as I’m writing to or for a faceless other, I don’t seem to have anything to say.

Maybe this is the same thing I feel in larger groups of people. After a certain point, I just lose the ability to think of anything good to say. Or if I don’t know somebody really well, I feel like I have no grounds on which to reach out to them.

I don’t always feel like that though, like I need to say something but don’t have the content yet. Sometimes I feel ok, like I can carry on a conversation about anything and nothing and it really doesn’t make a difference at all. Not that I’m feeling un-attached when I feel that freedom for superfluous conversation, or that such conversations are superfluous, but mainly that I don’t have to think it through, and that whatever goes is somehow ok. I think most people get to know me on this level, they see me as probably rather reserved, not giving away deep parts of myself, but then occasionally get these glimpses of the absurd that are my comfortability. I have a feeling that they either think that I’m completely bizarre or am hiding something.

But then, and these are the most rare, and to be treasured, there are times I feel completely able to share myself. Completely free to talk about my experience of being human, frail, sinful, redeemed, and hopeful. I love those moments. Those are moments when I know I am with friends, brothers and sisters, family in deeper than familial ways.

I guess my challenge as a writer is to be able to do just this sort of thing, to talk about exactly what life is like, what hope is, and where all this heading, but with those whom I do not yet know that well. But in light of what I have just written, I think this kind of sharing is a little like an invitation to join a family, to be my friend, to encourage and be encouraged. That must be something important.

I too often try to write important things, and nearly always fail. But when I just try to say what’s on my mind to my friends, I find myself writing things that are really important. If I am to write beyond my circle, though, then, perhaps, I must begin to write in the form of an invitation to join my circle. What do you think?

“I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh” Why does Paul speak in human terms? What are human terms? The more I try to find the answer the less I feel like can grasp any of it. It slips through my fingers. But the effect of this statement is still profound. We need to be spoken to in human terms, we need to hear the word of god in terms related to exactly our situation as frail, weak, fleshly individuals. If all I get in Paul is the philosophic, or the principles of things never enfleshed, then I may be prone never to live out what he says. I think, still, I am prone never to live out what he says. I so often get scripture and only think of it as a nice head game. But here, Paul says he is speaking in human terms. The reason? Our flesh is weak. When I back away from trying to figure out what this means, I realize that I am in need of this. My flesh is weak, my mind wants to do it all, without ever setting my body on its journey, or its work. But here, we realize that yes, our flesh is weak, we may never get that task done, we will never purify ourselves, we will never make ourselves holy before God. At the same time, we learn that God’s word has a vision of how we are supposed to live lives as incarnated beings, here and now in this world. I must obey with my flesh. I must pursue the things of God, the things He has called me to do; and I must renounce sin, dying to it.

“present your members as slaves to righteousness” Don’t miss it. Our flesh is weak; we fail a lot. But God is good, and offers us this, that we can be slaves of righteousness. I can submit to righteousness. Not only the ideal I, the “ego” of some metaphysical existence. But the I that is my body. My members, not just my mind, my hands and feet, not just my will. All of me is to submit before God. But as slaves we have a good master who knows our weakness of flesh, who knows our struggles. We have a master whose burden is light. We no longer suffer as slaves to unrighteousness. But as slaves to righteousness. God has taken into account our failings and given us grace to be slaves to God. This is a joy, for it is freedom from all the bondage that we could never break free of.

“resulting in sanctification” This slavery results in holiness, a holiness we could never attain with our own weak flesh, that we might never hear or take in in some spiritual language that could not be spoken of in human terms. Instead the gift of the gospel is the good news to us as human beings whose flesh is so weak. We should watch for the signs of this in our lives so that we do not miss them.

“and the outcome, eternal life” This whole thing is working to an outcome. Eternal life. Sanctification points us to another transformation. No longer are we bound to death, but in dying to sin with Christ, we gain eternal life.

“Shall we sin … May it never be” Paul keeps asking and I am only more convicted the more he asks this question. Perhaps he does it because we so often feel like we can indulge sin because we have grace now. When once the burden has been lifted temptation sets in in ways we had never imagined. We are free from sin, so we wonder if we can do it whenever we want. To such rambling questions Paul unequivocally responds. NO! Not only no, but never. We should hope never to go back to our former ways, we should exhort each other in temptation, and even in times when we are not tempted, never to go back. That’s something I must depend on. We all need this passage I think. We need to be reminded how silly our thoughts are, how silly we can be when we know we are free but think that is a license to return to sin. Sin is always death, whether we are under grace or the law.

“Do you not know” The rhetorical question is not to be ignored. Of course we know what follows. But so often our actions do not follow. We turn again and again to sin and need more than the exhortation. We need to be reminded of what we already know. We must always be turning back to what we know, turning back to the scriptures, to the gospel. Often we reason more than we let our knowledge guide us to obedience. We must be called back to what we know to be true so that our fallible logic may be shown to be fallacy. Why should we not sin? Paul continues.

“you are slaves of the one you obey” If you go back to sin you will be a slave of that sin, you obey it to the destruction of yourself and others. “You cannot serve two masters, either you will love the one and hate the other…” We often believe that we can play with sin and not be a slave to it, but all obedience to sin is slavery to it. Obedience and slavery are linked together. If you do what sin asks you are a slave to it. There is no in between point. There is no place for sin, we are slaves to God now.

“either of sin, resulting in death” It is an either or situation one choice is sin, the other obedience.  I have often ignored this. I let myself believe that I was not enslaving myself to sin that it was easy to turn back, that I was still in control. Sin lets us believe that we can turn away whenever we want. But we cannot turn away from sin for it controls us. The result of this sin is death. It is death before we met Christ and it is death after we met Christ. When we sin we enter again into death. We submit to death’s power, though we have freedom from it in Christ.

“or of obedience, resulting in righteousness” We are to become obedient to obedience, to do what we have been commanded by God. The result is absolute freedom, freedom from sin by being a slave to obedience. It is enigmatic, but it is how we are. When we obey we become a slave to obedience. When we obey sin, we obey disobedience. We submit to the negation of being, to the negation of God and his will. We submit to destroying ourselves. But when we submit to God, to obeying his commands, the result is righteousness. For me, this means submitting to my calling, submitting to the burden God has placed on me to be an encouragement to others, to use the gifts he has given me to build the kingdom, whether those gifts are writing, or studying, cooking, or music, or a new heart which would constantly seek God. All our gifts are employed in obedience to God, all of our gifts are His since we are slaves. But this is the freedom to serve God, the freedom to turn from our former life of sin and death.

“But thanks be to God” I am called to stop my works, to stop all my agonistic attempts to make myself a better person. I must thank God. I must see God before as the giver of all the good gifts of righteousness that he has imparted to me. Thank you God for your gift of freedom, of life. The believer, when once he has been raised from his life of sin is to give thanks. When the morning is come we give thanks. When we have been delivered from our temptation and may now seek God we give thanks. When our questions are silenced when we are in awe of God, we give thanks.

“though you were slaves of sin, you become obedient from the heart” God’s gift of obedience is his working on our hearts. He moves the very core of our being to obedience. It is not an obedience of the mind, but of the heart. It leads us to be instruments of righteousness, and it operates from the changed heart.

“to that form of teaching to which you were committed.” We were committed to the gospel. So now we obey it’s call in our lives. We were committed to the teaching of one who called us from our life of sin, who called us out of the slavery of sin, and then called us into obedience, genuine obedience from the heart. We do not spend all our time trying to figure out what it means, we obey.

“having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” We are now slaves of righteousness. We are no longer slaves to our own desires, to sin. We are now slaves to righteousness. All of ourselves we submit to righteousness. The entirety of our being becomes an instrument for/of righteousness. Hallelujah!

“Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body” We already consider ourselves “dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (v11). And because of this, this simultaneous hope and and freedom, and hope for freedom, this coming together with Christ and the total body of believers, we are to keep sin from ourselves. But there is another theme here that we have not yet really touched upon. Paul exhorts us not to let sin “reign.” Sin has a tendency to dominate us, to appear royal and somehow full of awe and terror, like a tyrant and yet like a king. Sin seems often to control us, to rule us, to be our master. But Paul tells us not to let sin do that. Sin’s power has been radically revoked. We have been granted mastery over it. It can do nothing. What it can do, it can only do if we let it. We have the power to reject sin’s power. (We acknowledge that that power comes from Christ and in his gift of death.) Sadly, though, it happens in my life that I let sin rule in me. Those are dark nights. But this passage then brings new thoughts. Not only is this exhortation hopeful, for those coming out of sin, but convicting for those Christians who have “succumbed” who have given themselves to one sin or another. To let sin rule in us is to deny Christ’s power, to give back the gift which he gave us. We are further exhorted not to let sin reign in our “mortal body.” Wherever we live in this world sin may come before us. Letting sin reign in us here, is revoking the death to sin that we have already died. But is is a temptation with which we are all familiar. Do not let it into our bodies, or hearts. “that you should obey it’s lusts” The primary area of temptation and sin would seem to be our desire to obey the lusts of our mortal bodies. How often does one hunger or another seem always to be on our minds, always to offer us one path or another. We must resist the temptation to feed ourselves, to feed our lusts. Christ has died, and we have died to sin. We are not to turn that master over sin on its head, making it master once more over us.

“instruments of unrighteousness” We are not to give ourselves over as “instruments” of unrighteousness. I cannot give myself over to lusts anymore. But not just because it is harmful to me, and to my relationship with God, but because doing so makes me not the end of sin, but sin’s instrument to another end. Sin’s lie to us is that we are the telos that sin is tending towards. We think our own satisfaction is what sin is after. But it is not. It uses us when we think we are using it. When we think we control it for our own purposes it controls us for it’s purposes. When we let sin reign in us, we become instruments that produce unrighteousness, the filth of sin bleeds on and bleeds through our lives. We must make no mistake sin will destroy not only us, and our desire, but others around us will be torn, hurt, bound up, and unreconciled.

“as those alive from the dead” We are told to be before God what we can only think of as an enigma, alive from the dead. It is easy to think of a mummy or a zombie, but that is not quite what we are dealing with. Though it may help us to understand. These things are rare, unseen, never seen really. In Christ, we who were dead are now alive. This does not nullify the fact that we were once dead. That is what, I think, Paul is reminding us of. My own sins and lusts are death. They are my death. That I am alive now is precious, is all the more to be valued and treasured. No more can I die, lest I not be granted further life. At the same time, we are called to humility. We are before God not as one alive, but as one made alive. We owe our life to God, we owe our being to Him. We owe everything.

“Instruments of righteousness” Whereas serving sin we were instruments of unrighteousness, now as those made alive in Christ we are exhorted to to present ourselves as instruments of righteousness. In Christ we not only stop acting for sin, or the spread of evil, but we now go on as those through whom righteousness can act upon the world. I go out now not to serve God for my own ends, but that God might through me effect righteousness in the world.

“Sin shall not be master over you” The declaratory phrase forces us to know that we are free. There is no more mastery over us. Sin has been defeated. I must constantly be reminded for often I am tempted to turn back, to consider again the sin I once did. But this word tells us that sin can now be mastered. Christ has mastered it, has destroyed it, and drained death of it’s power.

“not under law, but under grace” We are no longer under law, no longer under condemnation for the sin that we have continued to partake in, for the sin that once bound us, for the sin that we returned to, but we are now under grace. God’s grace has given us a way out of sin, has given us mastery over it, has set us free to serve God, has changed everything.

“Now if we have died with Christ.” The imposition of the “if” forces us to question ourselves. We cannot merely assume that we have died with Christ. We can never presume to be so close to Christ. And yet, we are still called to die with Christ. The phrase will not let us mistake that one call, we must die with Christ, we must find our end, be crucified, take up our cross. But we do not die alone. First of all, “we” die. We die as brothers and sisters in Christ, we die in community with one another, we die to sin and death with those whom we try to bear up as well. We die to sin together. Death is no longer lonely, or lonesome. It is not an ultimate act of separation from those that we love. It does not castigate. Rather, we all share death. We are in community in this moment. Of course, that death is not simply death, the “we” is further united to God. We die with Christ, the body of the church is together with Christ in this dying. This dying unites the church to her maker. Or her maker unites the church to himself in dying with him.

“We believe that we shall also live with him” We believe. This does not mean that we have attained that life, that newness of life is not yet fully established. Our resurrection together is not yet complete. We still see sin in ourselves and in our church. But we do not despair, we have been anchored and so can look forward to our life with Christ. We can lay hold of the event before it happens, have access to a new future that has not yet come to be. Our death to sin, to ourselves, with the church and with Christ is not the final act of the story. There is life to come. But just as the death was not alone, but was in community with the church and Christ, so too our life will be in community with the church and Christ. “We” are called to believe.

But the two phrases are linked together, they form an inseparable unity. We do not choose one without the other. When we die to sin; we also must believe in the life to come. When we believe in the life to come there must also be (or have been?) a death to sin.

And there is still more… but I think I’m losing track of it.

“Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again” When we experience this death and look forward to this life we are also acutely aware of that which makes it possible. That Christ was raised from the dead. Without that there is no hope. There is no reason to believe, the faith would be a fraud. But with that, we also have not only hope in the resurection, but hope that Christ’s death to sin provided the final answer to sin, the final death of sin in Christ’s dying to sin. So then, we have hope to be free of sin -as Christ was free from sin. We will finally be made free from sin too. We will not always live in belief alone, but belief will be perfected. The time will come when we are made new, made whole, made to live. And at that point we will not die again either. The whole point of this is not simply that we are free from sin now or tomorrow, but forever freed from sin, so that no more death would ever be needed or happen again. The death of death is upon us, demonstrated in Christ, and we cling to his death looking forward to the time when our death to
sin will be complete, and at he same time our life to God, our living before him will be made complete as well. We look forward to life and life abundant, while we cling to the hope that our own sin and sinfulness will not last forever, but will, praise God, come to an end.

“Death is no longer master over him” Death is no longer master of Christ. Death cannot happen again, Christ has died and cannot die again. Why? because death itself is powerless, it has lost it’s sting. So what do we do? In Christ do we have a claim that death is no longer master over us? Yes. Because the power of death is defeated. We no longer have eternal separation from God. Death is not the end, the grave does not hold us. So death, having been mastered by Christ, is fully under his control. Death to us is no longer the terror of night, the evil that befalls or the cause of anxiety. Death is mastered and can do nothing to harm us. In fact, we daily master death, by dying to sin.

If we are dead to sin, how did we die to it? v4 links us to Christ’s death through baptism. v5 links us to Christ’s death by some kind of analogy. I am tempted at first to say that baptism serves as the analogy, but would first century christians have practiced immersive baptism? I think there is a great deal of opinion there. Neverthless, we have been united with Christ “in the likeness of his death.”  What do these words tell us about how we should live? We should live our lives in such a way that they are always shaped to look like Christ’s death. We are always to be finding ways not just of giving up ourselves, and our own self-interest, but also of taking on other’s burdens, carrying their load, even to the point of our own undoing, especially to the point of our own undoing. We must reach the end ourselves in bearing one another’s burdens. But we cannot stop short merely at the ambiguous “burden” A christ-like death involves us even suffering for the sins of others. Of course that suffering can never be salvific, can never make others or ourselves righteous, that rightly falls to Christ himself. But the way we live should  recreate that, refract it or, analog it. We should live Christ’s death in our bodies, toward sin, and maybe toward evil generally. We must die to sin, but must we die for it, because of it, to resist it, and seek its end? I think the answer is yes.

When sin confronts us, we are to be dead to it, Christ having already suffered and died for it to bring us freedom from it. But we must also be dead to it in the way that Christ died to sin, giving up his life for all of us, to free all of us from sin.

But this also comes with a promise, being like Christ in his resurrection. Christ did not just die, but rose again. So there is a promise of hidden life for being united with Christ in his death. When we die to sin, when we die to set free from sin, we are given life, the kind which allows us to “walk in newness of life.” But we wear out Christ’s resurrection if we fail to be astonished at it. We take it for granted when we accept it as if this was an easy thing to believe. If we are like Christ in his ressurection, then our new life should be astonishing, should seem completely unexpected, should break the mold of how others think we live. Remember the medieval descriptions of Christ’s death as the trick played on the devil. Our dying to sin is like the trick played on sin itself. When sin had thought it defeated us, when we thought ourselves defeated by sin, Christ comes and unites us to him in his life. We are now ready to be made and remade by God, and sin has been defeated. But in ressurection, we are also called to testimony, called to bear witness to what God has done, to open other’s eyes to the truth of what has occurred. We become story tellers, preachers, proclaimers of the gospel.

This death brought us freedom from sin, and entailed nothing less than that our old self be crucified with Christ. This union with death is clearly not pain free. It will hurt, it will thrust a huge burden on us, which will stretch us beyond the limits of the ethical treatment of another human being. To call it uncomfortable is an understatement. Dying to oneself is perhaps one of the most difficult and painful ways to die. But the result is freedom, true freedom, because this death exhausts sin’s claims on upon us. By uniting with Christ we not only die a terrible, awful death, shameful to look at, or speak of, but we gain life, abundant life. And as v7 reminds us, we are freed from sin. At such a point the Christian has no other claims but Christ upon his life.

Paul tells us that we must not continue to sin. We know this of course. So why do it? Probably because we all still struggle with sin. (Or saying that we all still struggle with sin makes us feel better when we do?) But I think the truth is that we are still weak, and though redeemed, cleansed, purified and alive, we still do acts of sin, death, impurity. But we have died to sin, so we are called no
longer to be alive to it. What is “alive to sin”? What does that mean? I think it means having a life that still interfaces with sin, that still makes use of sin, or that still is open to sin. We should not be open to it, but must always close the doors between us and sin. We do not present a living body to sin, or a body able to be molded, melded, or supple to sin. We are dead, stiff and unmoving in the face of sin, we do not live to it. Neither do we grow to it, or near it, or before it. We present ourselves as inanimate corpse before sin.

Neither is our death to sin something that we do alone, for we die to it with Christ. We are buried like Christ with the sign of baptism marking it. We do not only die either, praise the Lord. But we live also, or are raised (even better). How do we know we have been raised? We “walk in newness of life.” A new walk. We can move about, we are free to come and go and serve our maker. We are not bound to stay with our sin but an get up and walk away from it. We can carry on, move about, and walk with God, like the sound of familiar footstep of Adam and God before the fall. We are dead to sin and now alive in Christ, alive for his calling. And if we are alive to and in God, then we can be molded, melded and are supple to Christ, we are open to him united to him, in contact with him and he knows us. He sees us move when we do not see ourselves. He makes us live when we are dead, he makes able to serve him.