Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
June 27, 2022
The Invitatory
Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
The earth is the Lord’s for he made it: Come let us adore him.
Reading: Romans 6:12-23
Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Meditation: Jo Ann B. Jones
Are we free unto ourselves alone? If so, what are the implications? What Paul discusses in this passage is roughly analogous to the way professional sports used to be organized. Before free agency developed, professional athletes were bound to the team that had first signed them. They were “slaves” of that team. Owners could offer contracts, not offer contracts, or trade players. Players, for their part, had few options. They could sign a contract and play, or they could retire. They were not free to move to another team nor to offer their services to the highest bidder. If people wanted to “play ball,” they had to be owned by one team or another.
The situation is similar to what Paul proposes. For Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, there are two possible places to be: in sin or in righteousness, and there are two kinds of slavery: to sin or to righteousness. One form leads to death and one to righteousness. Yet the outcome will vary with the listener. To be obedient is to hear what is said and then to place one’s self underneath the authority of what is heard. Jesus is the obedient one, par excellence. The outcome of such obedience varies with the listener and what is heard and obeyed. Those listeners have been released from their former slavery to sin and have now “become obedient from the heart” to the message about Jesus. Oddly, that shift results not in total freedom. In fact, the result is the opposite. Believers have now “become slaves of righteousness.”
Paul’s language is not as abstract as it might first seem to be. Paul reminds the Romans that formerly they “presented” their “members/bodies as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity.” He calls them to consider how their bodies are present to or away from God’s will and righteousness. For if presented in slavery to God’s righteousness, this leads to being freed from sin and open to growth in grace and in a life that is grace-directed. For at one time the Romans were totally free in relationship to righteousness. We must appreciate here the double meaning of righteousness can easily be missed. The same Greek word means both righteousness and justification. When people are slaves of sin, they are free not only from living righteously (righteousness), they are also free from a redeemed and positive relationship with God (justification). This would be a huge loss.
For ultimately such a life would yield one type of fruit, death. And we must consider how many of our behaviors lead to death. For Paul, though, all is not lost. Freed from sin and enslaved to God, the outcome we will realize is eternal life, the free gift of God. The good news is that God has freed us from sin as the determinative reality of our lives and has given us God’s free gift of eternal life in Christ. And that remains an ancient message that is new every day. And it remains a message that people still find hard to hear. But it remains what we are called to proclaim.
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
