The Gospel Is Our Story
Midnights become my afternoons...
Romans 8.1-4
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Chris Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Its a thing that happens when I sit with a family planning a funeral. The weight and waves of grief come and go, the confusion and challenges of logistics draw the conversation in all sorts of different directions, and then the stories come spilling out.
Some good and some not so good.
The times when laughter was shared around the table.
The times when tears were spilt in fear or frustration.
I listen and learn of miraculous mountaintops and vicious valleys.
And invariably someone will look across the table at me and say something like, “We want them to be remembered for the good stuff, so please don’t share all of that.”
There are three types of biographies, the stories of a person’s life.
The autobiography is the one we write about ourselves. It can include the good and the bad as we deem fit for consumption by others. Who could ever know us better than we know ourselves, so we know what details to include about what makes us, us.
The biography is the one someone else writes about us. A different person has to do the research of our being, ask questions, interview other people, in order to see the picture of our personhood. And then, looking at the story from the outside are they able to choose what counts to be shared.
And then there’s the third type: This version is very unique because it reads like wildly exaggerated fiction. It’s so heavily edited that when we read a copy we barely see ourselves in the pages. The facts are correct, date of birth, school, job, family, etc. But every bad thing is blotted out. Like a redacted document published by the CIA. And it’s not just the failures that vanish, all the good things, even when done for the wrong reasons, they shine like diamonds. And (!) There are all sorts of details about our goodness that are beyond the scope of our knowing and memory, seeds we planted that bore fruit without us having to do much of anything.
Every chapter packed with such marvelous stories that if anyone else read it, they would think we’re the paragons of perfection.
This third type is not a autobiography, and it’s not a biography, it’s the Gospel. It’s the story of our lives penned by God who sees us exclusively through the lens of Jesus. Who we are, what we’ve done, what we’ve left undone, all of us is filtered through the blood of the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.
God tells our story as Jesus’ story.
It sounds marvelous. It is marvelous. But it feels off.
There’s a struggle with this story. It’s the same spiritual struggle whenever we hear the words “God loves you.” It sounds amazing, until we look in the mirror.
God’s version of our story we know only by faith, whereas our version of our stories we know all too well by experience. We’ve harmed others by our words and actions. We’ve avoided helping people that we could’ve and should’ve helped. We know our knee-jerk reactions we have to certain people. And even if it’s been relegated to our minds, the Gospel frighteningly reminds us it’s the thought that counts.
We, all of us here, have secrets.
But God in Christ says we’re righteous through Christ’s righteousness!
Do we believe it?
Our God calls us saints, but we know (deep down) that we should be numbered among the sinners.
This struggle, the inner tug between our version and God’s version was summarized by the great reformer Martin Luther with a latin phrase simul justus et peccator. It means “simultaneously justified and sinner.” Or, being a saint and a sinner at the same time.
Paul writes of this as well with language that haunts and harrows - I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
That’s from Paul’s letter to the Romans, near the end of his ministry. The great evangelist struggles with his inability to do the good he knows he ought do after years of sharing the Gospel! Paul is reckoning with his story, and the story God tells about him.
Do you know who this is?
For the last three weeks I’ve shared stories of old dead men. This is different. This is Taylor Swift. She is quite possibly the most famous human being on the planet. She’s a singer-songwriter known for her story-telling in her music, her ability to reinvent herself through different eras, and her massive cultural impact. She is the world’s richest female musician, having amassed over a billion dollars from her music, she’s been listed among history’s greatest artists by more publications than I can list, and she is the only individual from the arts to have been named the Time Person of the Year.
In short, she’s got it together. And she’s so popular that her fanbase has their own moniker: The Swifties.
She’s even dating some football player.
And yet, in 2022 she released a song titled “Anti-Hero.”
I will now sing it to you, reluctantly:
I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser.
Midnights become my afternoons.
When my depression works the graveyard shift,
All of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room.
I should not be left to my own devices
They come with prices and vices
I end up in crisis (tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I’ll watch as you’re leaving
‘Cause you got tired of my scheming
(For the last time)
It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.
At tea time, everybody agrees.
I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.
Who knew Taylor Swift was so Pauline?
Even with all the accolades, all the money, all the power, all the influence, she sings of a life that is simul justus et peccator.
In Paul’s letter, as he gets his Swiftie on, sees his own inner anti-hero, he crescendos to these words: “Wretched that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
And notice, Paul doesn’t ask “What will deliver me?” There’s no program of spiritual development or improvement that can overcome this inner turmoil. There is no what that can deliver. There is only a who.
And the who has a name: Jesus.
The proclamation of the Gospel is that Jesus jumps into the pit with us to show us the way out. Jesus climbs the hard wood of the cross on our behalf. Jesus rewrites our biographies so that they mirror his own. Jesus stands to be judged in our place. Jesus baptizes us into his death so that we rise into his life.
To put it rather pointedly: Jesus becomes the sinner atop the cross so that we become saints in him.
That’s why Paul can make such a bold declaration like there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Jesus sets us free from the law of sin and death. To use language from Taylor Swift, even when we’re left to our own devices with prices and vices that end up in crisis, they are no match for the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
God’s love for us is not conditional It comes with no strings attached. Hence the qualifier of amazing when it comes to grace.
God doesn’t love us because of our action or inaction. God doesn’t keep a record of wrongs, or rights. God is love, does love, and will always love because that’s who God is.
There is a tension between how we see ourselves and how God sees us. But that tension is the heart of the Gospel. For, when God looks at us, God only sees Jesus.
Jesus liberates us from what we require to acquire the kingdom. Jesus hands it right to us on a silver platter and the only thing we have to do is reach out and take it.
Does that mean we should continue to sin in order that grace may abound? No. Of course not. That’s why we have the scriptures and the songs and the prayers and the stories that point us to what holiness looks like. The Spirit uses all of these things to show us the way things can be. Not as a requirement that bars us from ever moving forward. But as a sign and foretaste of what will one day come.
God is odd. God is like the Prodigal Father who welcomes us before we have a chance to muster up an apology. God is like the Good Shepherd who goes out beating the bushes of life looking for the one lost sheep. God is like the gardener who keeps fertilizing the plant, whether or not it bears any fruit.
God does all of this not as a response to what we’ve done, but as the enduring action of the God who loves and is love.
And then the strangest thing happens. To be clear: it happens differently for everyone. But it’s a miracle, really. The love of God in Jesus Christ has it’s way with us and we begin to change. It tends to be this oblique out of nowhere manifestation of transformation that we don’t will into existence. And yet, all of the sudden we discover we are not who we once were.
The who that is Jesus works in and through our hearts such that we find ourselves desiring that which God desires.
Think about Zacchaeus, the wee little miserly man in the sycamore tree. When Jesus invites himself over for lunch he does not throw down an ultimatum for Zacchaeus. It’s not “Change or else!”
Jesus simply loves and welcomes this undeserving man whom the neighborhood had rejected and hated, and Zacchaeus responds to the love that is Jesus by loving the people around him. That’s what God’s love does. It flows into us and through us in others.
Among all the scriptures, and there are a lot of them, Romans 8 might be the chapter I have turned to the most. The way it begins with Paul’s promise that there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus is this freeing and fantastic gift particularly when we, like Taylor Swift, can say, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.”
But the way the chapter ends might be even better. It is the promise I turn to the most, particularly at funerals. It is something I can hold onto even when it feels like everything else is falling apart or slipping away.
And it’s not just about the future, though we often read it that way. It’s about the future in the present moment.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will faults or failures or foolishness? Can our sin ever take us away from the love that refuses to let us go?
No. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. Amen.