I Want to be a Hilton

Lisa Rzepka, June 26, 2005
Scripture: Romans 6:12-23; Exodus 20:1-6

Text: "So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of freedom that destroy so-called freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act." The Message, Romans 6:15-17

The Romans Scripture passage was read from Eugene Peterson's, The Message.

If I were asked to continue with this contemporary spin on this morning's reading I might borrow from a current Kia car commercial where images flash across the screen while the viewer hears "Start having a great life, it's about living with inspiration…" Cars as the source of 'inspiration' are probably not what Paul had in mind for the great life. Perhaps the contemporary images of life could come from one of the multitude of reality shows that have hit the airwaves in the last three or so years. Last week, as a study in the culture I was watching I Want to be a Hilton when I heard the Kia commercial. It's probably not an accident that the commercial was chosen for play during reality TV. There's so many to reality shows to chose from: I Want to be a Millionaire, I Want be a Rock Star, I Want to be a Soap Star; I want to be a Survivor, I Want to Win the Amazing Race; I Want to be The Apprentice along with a host of reality dating time drains. Could there possibly be a show "I Want to be a Christian"?!

In a certain respect Paul does have in mind the same promise Hollywood is holding out to the lucky participants - a transformed life. Somehow in the minds of the contestants, being the top competitor, sole survivor, and winner on these shows will transform their lives into 'the good life'; securing the future with either a great job, a huge cash award, maybe a great mate, and lots of attention. The dream is that the participants' lives will be different and they'll live happily ever after.

We yearn for transformation and we want it fast and we want it easy. Ever dream that life would be easier if only… Ever want to escape some aspect of life?

Destiny upgrades and transformed lives are the reasons lotteries are so popular aren't they? Ten or twenty million would take care of a lot of worries. Maybe you happen to catch the exposé the Washington Post magazine did over the winter about the West Virginia lottery winner. In 2002, Jack Whittaker won $315 million in what, at the time, was the biggest Powerball lottery win ever. A year later the Post reported that the Whittakers were being besieged with requests for help and hard luck pleas. All of the attention was wearing on his wife, Jewell and their granddaughter, Brandi. Whittaker said he wasn't bashful and had no problem telling people "where to go fast" so he was fine. He declined to talk about an incident where he opened a briefcase with over a half a million dollars at a men's club and was subsequently drugged, and then woke up without the briefcase. The Post returned a year later, this winter, and did an update on the Whittaker family. It seems Whittaker developed a taste for the men's clubs and throwing his money around. He is now separated from his wife and is being sued by a business partner. His granddaughter and one of her friends are tragically dead both suggestively linked to drug overdoses funded by Whittaker's winnings.

We yearn for transformed life and yet often we meet death in the choices we make.

Choice is a characteristic of the freedom we enjoy in our country. We have a long history of fighting for freedom. Nearly 150 years ago the Emancipation Proclamation marked the beginning of the end of slavery, which brought a sense of euphoria to those who had waited so long for freedom. But a century later, in 1969 freedom was redefined, this time with an absence of responsibility. Some of you might remember or remember hearing about Woodstock, which one writer described as four days where "the site became a counter-cultural mini-nation in which minds were open, drugs were all but legal and love was 'free'". A new air of license was inhaled producing an intoxicated forgetfulness of anything that smacked of authoritarian inhibitions or paralyzing parameters. (O'Brien, Christian Century, 19)

I have a Woodstock story. No, I didn't attend - I wasn't quite old enough for the first one and when the second, much less acclaimed, occurred in the early 90s, well, it wasn't something I was into. By that time I had three very young boys, a job, and a summer nanny. One day the nanny rang the bell at 6:30 AM. Usually I worried that the nanny would be on time but on this particular morning she was an hour early. I ran down stairs to apologize for not being clear about her start time when I found her in tears. She cried, "I can't take care of the boys this morning - my husband just asked me for a divorce." Her husband had spent the weekend at the Woodstock revival. Kim wasn't really into the Woodstock idea either but in her desire to please her husband and allow him his freedom, she let him go. Apparently, he enjoyed his freedom a little too much and hooked up with someone else. Perhaps he thought he'd find transformation with someone else. Freedom comes with responsibility. Without responsibility there are casualties.

In our freedom we pride ourselves on the ability to be individuals - we each have the right to make our own choices. And in this era of freedom no one should question another's choice - at least not publicly. It reminds me of a discussion at Montreat youth camp a couple of years ago where I was first introduced to the reality TV concept. The young people in my small group were explaining to those of us who were out of the loop what some of the reality dating shows were about. One of the other older adults was familiar with this form of entertainment and zealously expressed her disapproval. The discussion moved to the idea of exploitation. One thing led to another and we got on the topic of sin and how exploitation is an aspect of sin. Things got passionate and soon a young woman said, "So what if it's sin, it's the person's choice. Besides, don't we believe in a God of love who forgives us of our sin? If we believe God will always love us no matter what, what's the incentive not to sin?"

That's exactly the mindset Paul is addressing in his words to the Romans this morning. Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Are there expectations God brings to bear on our lives? To be fair, this is not a mistaken notion restricted to the young in age or some ancient inhabitant of Rome. It is a currently fashionable and dangerous half-truth; that God accepts us as we are. Yes, it is true that God accepts us as we are but God does not intend to leave us as we are. Do we know where we are?

Paul enables his ancient hearers to identify where they are by employing the language of sin and drawing upon the imagery of slavery. There are some, including the Wall Street Journal, that say 'sin' is lost language in our day and age. Under the headline "When Was The Last Time You Had A Good Conversation About Sin?" the Journal wrote:

Sin isn't something that many people, including most churches have spent much time talking or worrying about through the years of the [sexual] revolution. But we will say this for sin; it at least offered a frame of reference for personal behavior. When the frame was dismantled, guilt wasn't the only thing that fell away; we also lost the guidewire of personal responsibility.

The Journal is correct in their assertion; as sociologist James Davidson Hunter observes the word 'sin' exists less now in church than it does on dessert menus: "Peanut Butter Temptation," "Chocolate Sin," Devil's Food Cake. But as Presbyterian Preacher Tom Long points out there's an irony to the Journal's assertion. "'Sin' for the editors turned out to be a fairly small term, a word almost exclusively about individual moral choices, especially sexual ones, about right and wrong only on a personal scale. Long gives the examples that the Journal looks at sin to be more about Magic Johnson catting around after NBA games than about the whole media machinery that makes glitzy heroes out of sports figures while ignoring inner-city school teachers; sin is some celebrity casually picking up a woman in a trendy bar in Palm Beach and not so much about the economic forces that generate staggering wealth for the few in Palm Beach and grinding poverty for so many. The editorial had its finger on sin, all right, but only its little finger." (Long, 1996, 92)

When was the last time you had a good conversation about sin? Sin doesn't roll off the tongue or onto the paper for some valid reasons:

• "First, almost every intelligent theological conversation in America is haunted by fundamentalist ghosts. Somehow the minority of Christians on the very far right have co-opted our theological language such as 'sin', 'believing in the Lord Jesus Christ', 'receiving the Holy Spirit' making the rest of us a bit nervous to use it and instead finding other language. How many of you find it easier to say you've turned away from God than to say you've sinned against God?



• "Second, in our search for alternative language we've found a workable replacement in therapeutic language. To point to someone's behavior and say it's sinful seems to be heavy handed and condemnatory. It also doesn't always give a full explanation; perhaps behavior is a consequence of childhood abuse, co-dependence, a mental illness. The language of therapy is not merely a trendy pattern to replace the language of sin, but in some cases it genuinely makes more sense to most people in explaining the broken places in their lives and in the lives of others. In one of Peter DeVries's novels the narrator quips that there used to be a time when people dreaded doing something sinful in front of their ministers but now we dread being caught doing something immature in front of our therapists. (Long, 93)

There are more than a couple of reasons why sin has fallen off the theological word lists - and it would be well worth our while to continue the exploration of sin. But more to the point, "Why do we need to talk about sin?"

Almost the entire New Testament presupposes that the hearer of the gospel will have a coherent understanding of the human need for God's saving works. In the very beginning of the gospel story, the angel tells Joseph to name the baby Jesus because "he will save his people from their sins." Simply put, if we're saying God is saving us but have no language for sin, what is God saving us from? What kind of transformation is Paul talking about and why does it matter to us?

There many scholars who believe the culture is giving cues that the theological discussion of sin is yearned for. In his book The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, Andrew DelBanco argues that the "whole society has suffered cultural aphasia" the inability to use words as symbols of ideas and as a result "we have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass before our eyes in the outer world." (Long, 95)

An example of this was documented by writer Ron Rosenbaum after the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City. He noted that many of the public responses were inexplicably chipper and upbeat, immediately claiming that the whole tragic event was about good, not evil. One example comes from Governor Frank Keating who boasted that Oklahoma had emerged "from this muscular, attractive, and lionize. The good-will generated by this tragedy is a door-opening opportunity and one we fully wish to enjoy."

Rosenbaum writes that "it was puzzling, this repeated insistence that the real meaning of the whole murderous event was how it was really about good, about the manifestation of the goodness of Oklahoma to the world, almost as if it balanced out the hundreds of dead and injured…But in a sense, it is about those who have to go on living with the knowledge of the presence of evil…the difficulty we have staring too directly into the heart of the heart of darkness…" (Long, 96)

I would plead guilty to finding difficulty in speaking about sin. As a pastor I'm very sensitive to not sending any 'bad messages' or adding any burdens to people's lives. It is much easier to preach love and hope and grace. But I'd like to share a story that focuses for me why the language of sin is so necessary and sheds some light on Paul's passage this morning. At this point I want to say upfront to the young people this is a very good example to me of God's parental love for each of us. We are all children of a much bigger God. So this story is not intended to make it seem that young people are exclusively sinners or have a higher propensity to sin. There is more than one corner in each of our lives that needs God's grace.

A woman shared a story about the difficulty her family was having with her teenage son. He was using drugs, had been suspended from school, and was terrorizing the whole family. He came and went as he pleased, took the car without asking, took money from wherever he found it, and threatened his parents with abusive speech. The father's response was to retreat into depression.

One night the mother broke down. The son had stormed in, hurled some angry words at his parents, and slammed the door to his room. His mom decided enough was enough and although the young man was bigger than she and she wasn't sure what he'd do, she went to the door of his room. She looked him in the eye, and with all the firmness of her being said, "I love you so much I will not allow you to do this to yourself or to us anymore." This could easily be about any family member.

God loves us where we are but doesn't intend to leave us there. We have the freedom to make a choice - we can choose to be slaves to sin in which the wages are death. Or, we can choose to be a slave to the One who will give us the gift of life. God intends for us a transformed life, a life of wholeness and peace of mind - respite from the sin that is lurking at the door. At the very beginning in Genesis (4:7) we're warned that sin's desire is for us, stretching itself at the door of our lives waiting for us. That's Paul's view of sin - it has a capital S and can make us slaves to its power. But we belong to a God that delivers us from slavery and gives us the ability to magnify all that is good and holy in life.

Being in dialogue with each other about sin is not to condemn but to encourage one another in the Christian life and influence the culture around us. Last week I spoke to you about belonging to God and believing it. The readings this week speak to us about behaving and becoming. How do we live into our baptisms as Christians and become what God most fully intends? Will we allow God's transformational power to permeate our lives in a world where Sin is waiting everyday to take us down dead end streets? Or, will we have a full hearted response to God's offer of life? What transformation will you choose?

Bibliography

Long, Thomas G.

"Learning to Speak of Sin." Preaching as a Theological Task: World, Gospel, Scripture. Eds. Thomas G. Long and Edward Farley. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.

McCormick, Gavin.

"Powerball Winner Besieged by Pleas for Help; Glare of Publicity After $315 Million Jackpot Wears on Wife and Granddaughter." The Washington Post 26 December 2003, pg. A17.

O'Brien, Bill.

"Slave Wages." The Christian Century 14 June 2005: 19.

© Copyright, 2005, Rev. Lisa Rzepka
All Rights Reserved.
Providence Presbyterian Church
Fairfax, Virginia