Shadow And Light

"Shadow and Light"

Romans 7:14-25a
July 6, 2008

For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I
do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I
hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no
longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells
within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do
the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it
is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I
want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in 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? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our
Lord!

In my opinion, the letter to the Romans is an especially difficult read, because perhaps
more so than any other of the major letters in the New Testament, Paul is spending a
large portion of the epistle answering questions that no one in the 21st century is
asking. In this text, Paul is seeking to reconcile his Jewish past with his Christian
present, wrangling over the meaning of Jewish law, trying to explain, in a way, the role
of the Jewish people within his new understanding of the Christian faith. And, I would
also say that he is trying to justify, frankly, why the followers of Jesus, had no success
in attracting his fellow Jews in the first century. When Paul writes Romans between 55-
60 CE, the lines between Jews and Christians were not so distinct as, say, for example,
they would become by the time the Gospel of John was written some 35 years later—
very quickly, Christianity had become a religion that attracted vastly more non-Jews
than it did Jews, that is, people of Jesus’ own religious and cultural background. For
me, reading Paul as he wrestles with these issues is, to be perfectly truthful, its like
watching paint dry—in this letter, at least he’s not struggling with the issues the people I
know are struggling with. Again, I think, that’s primarily because the questions he’s
trying to answer, are not ones people in our modern and postmodern times are really
struggling with—no one I know personally has struggled terribly with reconciling
Judaism and Christianity, though I know that this book has become an important
centerpiece of Jewish-Christian dialogue, even now.

And I just want to be frank here—this is not an easy passage to read, or understand, or
sometimes even to resonate with, nor particularly an easy one to preach from—it is a
difficult passage, if only because of the somberness with which it tackles the topic of
human sin, of the human struggle with the shadow side of the human self. In the
passage I just read, I think Paul shares that deep human struggle with his first century
readers, he even personalizes, using language that seems to tell not only of the
broader human struggle but his struggle with these issues—this is personal for Paul, in
ways that you don’t always see in his other writings. What he does here is to lay before
his Roman readers the human inability to do the good we all know we should do, and
yet we so often choose a different direction, a different way than the one we should go
towards. Paul here confronts the demons of the human soul, those places and spaces
within us that seem to refuse to do the right thing, even when we know what the right
thing to do is. It is the knowing that we are asked by God, even by others, to care
about others, the world, strangers, friends, all of creation, the child who is not our own,
but who is wasting away from hunger—and yet finding ourselves caring not a bit,
especially not in our actions, about the one, all of those ones, who has fallen by the
side of road at the hand of thieves, as in Christ’s famous parable about the Good
Samaritan.

“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He is like an addict who is
struggling with his addiction--Paul wants to put down that drink, we want to put away our
bitterness, we want to submerge our pettiness and ego, we know what is killing us,
literally and figuratively—and yet, we pick up the drink, we wallow in the wrong we think
has been done us and stay with our bitterness, we obsess over what really does not
matter, opting instead for our petty issue when half the world is wondering where their
next meal is coming from. We know what the right thing to do is, but its almost as if that
knowing about what the right thing to do is, actually compels us to do the wrong thing—
this is essentially Paul’s struggle with the Jewish law which he adores and believes in,
and yet which, ironically enough, seems to create the sin (behavior) it seeks to
eliminate. Its an odd argument and I am not sure always coherent, but one can see
where he is coming from.   I mean, I think we’ve all experienced something like that,
haven’t we?—the moment something becomes forbidden to us is the exact moment it
becomes the most desirable—tell me “no more cookies” and at that moment, nothing
sounds better than that 12th but final, I promise, chocolate chip cookie. Of course, on
the other hand, tell me I can have all the cookies I want, there is a good chance I’ll have
stopped at a half dozen cookies on my own—probably stop, because, after all its
chocolate chip cookies, and that kind of temptation for me is almost unfair.

So, Paul describes one of the most human of dilemmas—knowing right from wrong and
yet doing the wrong instead of the right: being hateful instead of being loving, and yet
knowing that hate will eat us alive; being selfish rather being generous, yet knowing
that all is a gift, and, in the end, we have no right to be selfish with what was never ours
in the first place; being suspicious of others and even of life itself, instead of trusting life
and others, knowing that we are not responsible for the actions of others, only for our
actions, our lives. For Paul, the explanation for this human dilemma lies within—a war
wages within us all, he seems to indicate, shadow and light struggling for dominance—
and its an odd—maybe even disturbing—moment here in this passage, I think, because
Paul talks as if there is some sort of separate entity different from himself doing this
wrong he so often does, as if there was something alien within him, as if he was captive
of this shadow side of himself, unable to do and be what he wants to be. I suspect that
this is one of the beginnings of what the church would later call “original sin”, an idea
that became an obsession of the later medieval church. This shadow side of the
human self is something that the Christian Church has no doubt overemphasized over
the centuries, this belief that human beings have within them a corruption of spirit—the
body of death—Paul says here, that has caused great harm in us and in the larger
world.

Another human tendency, the other human frailty Paul mentions in other places, but
not in our text today, one that we often fail to remember is our tendency to be excessive
in many things, and no doubt that the church has run with the idea of original sin a little
too vigorously. Paul’s advice towards moderation in all things doesn’t get a lot of play,
back then or even now , at least not as much as this idea of original sin has gotten, but
it’s probably the more practical of the two ideas here. Still, despite the overemphasis
on this shadow side of ourselves that happens here in Paul’s thought, I do think there is
something to remember here, something we instinctually know—and that is simply that
we humans really are capable of great evil, sometimes randomly, as we heard in the
chilling testimony of the BTK killer in Wichita we heard a few years ago, a former church
council president. Or maybe the evil we do is situational, humans caught up in a wrong
moment in time as we saw in Rwanda a decade or so ago, or even in Darfur, Sudan,
right now. The complexity of human evil, something I had the privilege to study during
college in a series of courses I took on the Holocaust, is something that has always
come home to me in knowing the shadow and light dancing within the particular people
that composed the destructive machine that was the Final Solution in Nazi Germany.
The SS men and women at Buchenwald and Auschwitz would, after a day of
participating in the killing machine that was the Holocaust, they would tenderly tuck their
own children into bed at night, a few yards from the gates of these infamous places of
mass murder. Those moments of tenderness from these men and women after a day
of murder, that just somehow captures the deep ambiguity of the human soul, the
human contradiction that Paul hints at here in his letter to the Romans.

Walker Percy, the well-known author, essayist, and winner of the National Book Award
in 1962, tells the story of an older priest in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome, a priest
who has locked himself up in a fire watch tower at the end of life, much to the surprise
of the characters in the book. The priest is finally visited by another character and is
asked why he is there, why he has locked himself away from the rest of humanity, and a
story begins to unfold about the young man he once was, about his visit to some
cousins in Nazi Germany during the 1930’s. With his cousins, he attended the Nazi
mass rallies at Nuremberg, and like some of his German cousins, he was enthralled by
the pageantry of it all, and the vision of this charismatic man, Hitler, who stood upon the
dais and called the people of Germany to become the super race that history had
destined them to become. This young man begs his parents in the United States to let
him stay in Germany and become a part of this movement, this great and powerful tide
of history, but, thankfully, they refuse and he goes back home. What haunts him in that
tower, so late in his life, is what could have been, how tenuous the choices are that
lead to who we become, and how, if things had been different, if his parents had
relented and said yes, how he too could have been one of those men making their way
home to their houses, to their wives and children after a long day of murdering the
children of other parents. Percy’s priest, in that fire tower, cannot shake the shadow in
his own soul, and, perhaps the way he has lived his whole life, and certainly his
vocation as a priest, has been a sometimes futile attempt to atone for a path that could
have been taken. The philosopher Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil, the
ordinariness of human evil, done by ordinary human beings.

And yet, even Paul cannot leave that priest alone up in that tower, struggling with the
shadows without any sort of hope—Paul doesn’t share his dilemma in the letter to the
Romans for no reason, that human dilemma of knowing the right thing to do, but doing
the wrong thing instead. No, instead he writes to offer his hope, and to share with his
readers the Christian hope that the shadows within the human self are not all there is.
“Wretched man that I am!” he says—again, note the personal language he uses—“who
will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our
Lord!” Really, the whole next chapter in Romans is what Paul offers as a solution to
that shadow side within human beings and for him, I think, that means nurturing the
light within us, the Spirit within us, the God within us, so that the shadows become
increasingly less deep, the darkness becomes more thin because the light within us
becomes stronger, more vibrant. The next chapter, right after he asks this question
about who will rescue him, is, I think, Paul’s attempt seek out of that more gentle and
light yoke from the Christ, whose presence within us—and within everyone and within
all the world—will one day mean the eventual aligning of our beliefs with our actions,
that one day what we know to be the right thing to do, will be the very thing we do. The
reality is that the church’s overwhelming witness over 2000 years has been that the
world is becoming more full of God, more filled with light. Certainly there has always
been a minority position within the church that believed that the world was indeed
getting worse and worse, that the light of God was growing ever dimmer. But it always
been a minor voice—the greater voice has been saying that the dominion of God, the
kingdom of God, is growing, though it may be slow in spreading, for whatever reasons,
certainly too slow for my taste, and yet it grows, the realm of God growing outward and
inward.

I think this truth was really brought home to me a few years ago when I was sitting with
the youth of First Congregational UCC of Houston, sitting in a Wednesday night prayer
meeting in an African-American church in Biloxi, MS, on a work trip in summer 2005,
much like the one we did early this year—me, a child of the deep South, a white
Mississippian from Meridian, doing what even a generation or two ago my ancestors
would never have ever considered doing, which was worshipping with those whose skin
color was different. The Spirit of God, the light of God in this world, though dim
sometimes, it shines on, the breath of God in this world, though shallow sometimes, it
breathes on—within us, within the world. Again, our work in this world is to tend to that
light within us and to tend to God’s light within creation, so that the one day the
shadows will be no more, both inside of us and within all of creation. Paul shares his
own demons, his own shadows, not so much in order to show us that there are
shadows within us—I mean, we already know those exist within us—but to show us that
we are in the presence of light, and that even the shadows in us, in some crazy way,
give witness to the presence of the light within us and around us. “Wretched man,”
Paul writes in h is own melodramatic way, “who will rescue me from this body of death!
His answer: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Amen and amen.