EXODUS 20:1-17

PSALM 19:7-14

ROMANS 7:13-25

JOHN 2:13-25

 

Sermon – March 19, 2006

 

      Institutional religion has long been lampooned for trying to make people feel guilty.  There is, for example, the one about the Catholic Church and the Synagogue which owned adjacent pieces of land and decided to build a fellowship hall which one congregation could use on Friday nights and Saturday daytime, and the other could use Saturday nights and Sundays.  After a short search for an appropriate name for this interfaith building, the two congregations settled on “Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt.”

 

      Then there was the Scottish Presbyterian preacher who wrote a 95-point sermon on the depravity of the human race based on the biblical text, “Arise, shine, for thy light has come.”

 

      And, not to leave out Anglicans, of course, Queen Victoria truly is reputed to have remarked that “Easter is too joyous a day to celebrate with a Book of Common Prayer service.”

 

      So, how about living life guilt-free?  How liberating!  No more lectures about morality from sour-faced, preachy prudes who, as H.L. Mencken once said of the Puritans, had as their greatest fear that “Somewhere, somehow, someone is happy.”

 

      So, what do you get when you live life guilt-free?  Liberation?

 

      No.

 

      You get Charles Cullen.

 

      The notorious serial killer and ex-nurse, now facing eleven consecutive life terms in prison, is the most dramatic example in our state of the results of living life guilt-free.  It’s called being a psychopath, a moral monster, a walking piece of Hell.

 

      Alas, though, he is only the most extreme example of guilt-free living today.

 

      The phrase, “If it feels good, do it,” has been with us for a while, allied with the phrase, “It’s O.K. so long as you don’t get caught,” a philosophy beloved by too many baseball players, members of Congress, corporate executives, and ex-UMDNJ administrators.  A more contemporary version is “It’s all about what works for me” which, among many other professions, has corrupted an appalling number of members of the clergy in this country and elsewhere who used (or use) their positions of trust and power to seek their own perverse sexual gratification.  And let’s not let off the hook the schoolteachers who have been found in sexual liaisons with their own High School or even Middle School students.  Wow, living life guilt-free sure opens up worlds of opportunities!

 

      Of course, guilt-free living has financial aspects, too.  Ever seen the bumper sticker, “We’re spending our grandchildren’s inheritance?”  Every U.S. Senator, member of  Congress, the President, every New Jersey state legislator and the Governor should have bumper stickers on their cars saying “We’re spending your children’s and grandchildren’s gigantic tax increase.”  Because all these huge deficits and bond issues are going to have to be paid for sometime by somebody, but guilt-free living says, “Not now and not by me.”  Last-minute sweetheart public pension enhancements?  “Hey, if it works for me.”

 

      Responsibility?  Is that word still in the language?  Who in the government of the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, or the vast reaches of the federal government has been held responsible for the massive foul-ups before, during and after Hurricane Katrina?  Who resigned or got fired?  Michael Brown is it?  And will we ever get beyond holding lower-ranking NCOs as the only ones responsible for the abuses of prisoners in Abu Ghraib?  Has anyone been held responsible for the myriad failures of American intelligence which have cost so many lives?  How about the mine inspectors and mine owners in West Virginia? 

 

      I miss Harry Truman.  Whatever happened to “The buck stops here”?

 

      Rules.  Responsibility.  Accountability.  They’re just so 20th Century.

 

      Actually, rules, responsibility and accountability are so 13th Century B.C.  That’s when the Ten Commandments were handed down by God.  Across the social and political spectrum in America today, we have (with hand motions over eyes, ears and mouth) “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”  It’s time to remember and obey God’s rules, and when we don’t, yeah, a little guilt is absolutely needed if we create, condone or try to ignore evil.

 

      God knew that freedom from slavery would not be enough to make the Israelites truly free.  God’s people had been living at the business end of Egyptian whips until God miraculously liberated them from the hands of the greatest army of the greatest human power on earth, and led them across the Red Sea to the Sinai peninsula to freedom.  Whether you buy the Cecil B. deMille/Charlton Heston version of this story or not, the fact remains that the Israelites would have had as much chance of  defeating or escaping from the Egyptian army without God’s help as we here would have of defeating the first Armored Division while armed with whiffle bats.

 

      God liberated the Hebrew people from slavery, at God’s initiative, purely due to God’s unilateral love for them and God’s desire to adopt and shape a people who would start to learn to know God, to love God, and to love each other and eventually other people.

 

      It’s been a long, hard road.  When Moses first descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments he discovered that the people had already lapsed into idolatry seasoned with pagan-style revelries and orgies.   Getting them into shape morally was long, hard and painful.

 

      And once they knew the Law of God, said they would obey it, and committed and re-committed themselves, still, every generation had to make that commitment its own.  Or not.  Sometimes those faithful to God were in a small minority in their own homeland among the very descendents of those God liberated from slavery in Egypt.  But the faithful, whether many or few, persevered.

 

      One of the traps that lay in wait, especially for the most devout of the faithful, was arrogant pride, which can help a good person slide downhill as fast as anything, as Paul discovered dramatically when his life was turned around by the realization that Jesus was the Savior and that faith in him was the truth, not a dangerous heresy to be stamped out.

 

      Paul reckoned that temptation afflicts those devoted to good as well as those who give in to the temptation at every possible opportunity.  So he writes in today’s Epistle, “I delight in the law of God with my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

 

      This is where we are when we accept rules, responsibility and accountability for the sins we have committed and for our sins of omission – ignoring opportunities to do right.  This is where we are when, having done that and resolved to change, we backslide.  And backslide again.  And start to despair, knowing that we have not loved God with all our hearts, souls and minds, nor our neighbors as ourselves, and that our ultimate final grade, the one for our lives, the one which really matters, is “F.”

 

      And just when the awful enormity of that sinks in on us, God grants us a vision of “an old rugged cross” “on a hill far away.”  We step up to that cross and see a list nailed to it – a list of all of our sins, things done and left undone.  And at the bottom of that list is a handwritten note: “I paid the price for your sins.  You are forgiven.  You have another chance; now use it well.”  Signed, Jesus.

 

      For as important as rules, responsibility and accountability are for societies and individuals, as much as we need guilt to help us remember right from wrong, ultimately, we as individuals are saved not by laws, but by the grace of God.  “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast,” as it says in the Letter to the Ephesians.

 

      “`Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved; how   

               precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed.”

     

 

      The author of those words had done great wrong in his life before he came to know the Lord Jesus Christ.  Christ gave him another, totally undeserved chance to get his life right.  That was grace.  The man started to change, and fumbled for direction, until Christ steered him towards an opportunity to do more good than he ever could have imagined on his own.  More grace.  And as part of his thank you to God for saving and transforming his life, John Newton, one-time slave trader turned expert witness for the anti-slavery lobby, wrote that song, a song which has become an anthem of hope for millions of people for 200 years.  Grace happens.  Grace multiplies.   Pass it on.

 

      Rules, responsibility and accountability are essential, or we have chaos and rule by sociopaths.  Honest personal accountability produces personal guilt.  Guilt sends us to our knees.  But the process doesn’t end there.  For by the grace of God we can be forgiven and empowered to live new lives, multiplying grace, multiplying love, multiplying life.

 

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

 

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church