ZECHARIAH 9:9-12

PSALM 145:8-14

ROMANS 7:21-8:6

MATTHEW 11:25-30

Sermon - 7/3/05

By what are we held captive? And what will happen when our “captivity” is over?

St. Paul describes how he is “captive to the law of sin that dwells in [his] members.” This is not because he is ignorant about right and wrong; he knows the difference all too well – which only increases his anguish, because while intellectually he knows what's right and that he should do it, his intellect is not always in charge of his behavior.

Paul writes, “I find that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” Ever felt like that? Make New Year's resolutions, “go on the wagon,” promise to change your behavior – and the temptations seem even more tempting than ever. And the rationalizing slips in – “Just once won't be that bad,” “No one will ever know,” “I'll do better in other areas of my life,” “Next week I'll change.” Before we know it, we're right back doing the things we wanted to stop, or avoiding doing the things we wanted to start. And if we're both thoughtful and religious people who know the rules, all we get is guilt and depression...if we try to do it all ourselves.

In a burst of late Victorian existential arrogance, the poet William Ernest Henley wrote, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

A Christian, reading those words, might easily believe that was only the pompous declaration of an atheist – and write a sermon with arrogant atheists as the target. Ah, but cosmic arrogance is a more subtle snare than that: good Christians might equally believe the same thing! That is “good Christians” who think they have complete control over their own behavior and that they can earn their salvation by their deeds might think they were “the masters of their fates.”

St. Paul went down that road and learned what a dead end it is. His years of meticulously following the minutiae of God’s rules had bred in him an arrogance that made him never doubt his own rightness – until he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and discovered he had been persecuting the very Lord he claimed to be serving. According to the rules he'd been playing under, Paul would have expected to have been struck dead and sentenced to Hell at that moment because he had not been doing right. Instead, by the grace of God, he learned, he was given a second chance for salvation.

He learned from that experience that salvation can be attained only by grace through faith, that we can never earn our salvation like “the ultimate merit badge.” He recognized that even the most slavish devotion to obeying God’s rules could not turn him into a perfect person who did not sin. Rather, he became all the more conscious both of temptations and of how far short of perfection he came.

An awareness, or heightened awareness, of right and wrong and God's expectations of us is a necessary “consciousness-raising device.” When combined with an awareness of how far short of the glory of God the best human beings are – for we are able to go to heaven on our merits as easily as we could jump to the moon on a pogo stick – the two awarenesses can lead us to spiritual anguish. As Paul writes “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

And then Paul joyfully declares, “Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Christ has taken all of our sins, things done and left undone, on his own shoulders on the cross, and “taken the rap” for us. Not because we're always wonderful, because we're not always wonderful. Not just for the goody-goodies, but for all people, even the meanest and lowest, so that all people could have a chance to turn from their sinful ways, accept God's grace and forgiveness and become new people.

By nature, we all are “captive to the law of sin which dwells in our members,” our bodies. Our own desire to set our own rules, follow our own impulses and make ourselves our first priority leads us all to an inevitable collision with God's will for us.

None of us obey the greatest commandments – love God with all our hearts, souls and minds and love our neighbors as ourselves – all the time.

So we are captive – captive of our own desires to be totally our own bosses! We are in prisons of our own design and construction, but prisons nonetheless. Our very efforts to escape under our own power merely make the prison walls thicker and higher.

Only when we admit we can't do it alone, only when we truly “let go and let God” can we be released from this prison of our own sin.

Our release comes with a cost. Our prison cells can only be unlocked from outside, and the key which unlocks them is the cross of Jesus Christ. His most precious suffering and death unlocked the door for us. Being a Christian at a deep level means accepting one's liberation by the cross and walking out of the prison of sin and into newness of life.

Liberation is not mandatory. There are millions of people whose prison cells have been unlocked by Christ who stubbornly stay inside, insisting “I don't need God. I can manage all by myself.” They have free choice to be liberated by Christ or imprisoned by themselves, what Paul would call “living according to the flesh.”

As Paul declares, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”

If we let Christ liberate us, “let go and let God,” set our minds on the Spirit, the only experience we have of being captives is the one described by the prophet Zechariah in today's Old Testament reading: we are “prisoners of hope.”

The phrase “Prisoners of Hope” and this passage from Zechariah were used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to lift up the faithful during the years of suffering and struggle under the apartheid regime in South Africa. Whatever we face as individuals, as a nation or as a world, we too can be lifted up by the vision of Zechariah.

We can begin to experience life and peace ourselves now, do our best to spread the life and peace that come from accepting and following Christ, and live “captured by hope,” hope for the transformation of the world by the power and love of God – beginning now, and coming to its culmination in the Kingdom of God.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church