When I was a kid, if you didn’t want to be a firefighter, you wanted to be an astronaut. Still reverberating in the air were John F. Kennedy’s words, “we stand today on the edge of a new frontier. The frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science. Unsolved problems of peace and war. Unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice. I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier.”[1] I had seen Neil Armstrong step onto the moon, and so I was delighted when my parents bought me my own rocket. It was one of those water-pressure rockets, the kind where you put some water into the rocket and then you pumped air into it until it pressurized. Then you would stomp on the release, and with a shower, the pressurized air and water would propel the rocket into the sky for a couple hundred feet. I remember how hopeful I was as I watched the rocket rise, and how unaccountably disappointed I was when it started to fall. I knew it was gravity that pulled the rocket back down, but I had hoped… I first noticed the same kind of thing happening in my own life, as a teen-ager, when I would try to do right, how often I would fail, how my ideals propelled my life upward, but then a kind of gravity seemed to always pull me back down again. I remember reading or hearing the words in our passage today, and recognizing in Paul, a shared experience. Why is it that that no matter how good our intentions, they fall short? Why is it we fail to do what we know is right? Paul offers us some great coaching on this.
First, there is indeed a right and a wrong. Even if sometimes we wish it weren’t so, there is in fact an unchanging, universal right and wrong. C.S. Lewis, besides writing the really wonderful children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia, also did a radio series that has been collected as the book, Mere Christianity. For Lewis, the idea of right and wrong boils down to our sense, which we have very early on that things should be fair. Where does that idea come from? It seems to be true all around the world, to be “baked into” our humanity. And morality seems baked into the universe, woven into the very fabric of the cosmos. Even if we are choosing between goods, there is a path that is best, what God wants for us and for the world. Right and wrong exist beyond our own mind.
Second, sin has a spiritual gravity, a natural attraction, human beings cannot fully escape. I have a friend who talks about his life before knowing Jesus as moving from pleasure to pleasure, selfish desire to selfish desire. It’s letting our humanity decide what we will be like. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because we see glimpses of humanity’s greatness in the lives of folks like Henry David Thoreau, Maya Angelou, Richard Feynman and many others. Or more collectively, the Truth Commissions in South Africa, or the creation of the Constitution in America. Glimpses of greatness, but we also have a sense that whatever greatness we intend, humans have the innate ability to completely mess things up. We are destined for lasting greatness, but that we are trapped in a never-ending cycle of wanting better, of trying to reach the truly good and failing. Paul echoes this when he says in verses 22–23, “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.” Our humanity seems to drag us down.
Third, there is an escape from the gravity of sin. What we need to escape is more power, a way to nullify the powerful pull of our humanity long enough for us to get away, to reach escape velocity. That’s where Jesus comes in. Just when we think we are trapped forever, Jesus died for us, and when we choose to follow Jesus, we also become dead to sin. And like Christ who rose, we too will rise to a new life, one in which the attraction of sin still operates, but we are freed from having to answer. Jesus’ death and resurrection open the door to freedom so that we can (and are empowered to) choose the good. We may still feel clueless, but with the massive power of God’s Holy Spirit surrounding and penetrating us, we begin to want what God wants more than what our fallen humanity wants. Indeed, the beauty of God’s redemption is that God can then start using even our mistakes as tools to bring beauty to ugly situations, and forgiveness into the world’s brokenness. Paul’s “Wretched man that I am!” becomes “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Why would God implant in us a desire for goodness and mercy, a longing for steadfast love and generous sacrifice, if it could not be achieved? Ah, but not by ourselves! Part of the genius of the framers of the Declaration of Independence was that they recognized this truth as they wrote, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” The Framers recognized the brokenness of human institutions, but they held out in hope that God has created us to know and seek “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” together! It is the same hope to which Frederick Douglass spoke on July 5, 1852, when he said, “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. … This Fourth July is yours, not mine…” Despite the ugliness of slavery, the virulence of bigotry, and the seeming impossibility of justice, Douglass goes on to say, “notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘… I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. … No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. … Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind.”[2] The same documents which founded our nation, included ways in which we could continue to press forward with hope towards a better day. But ultimately, our hope lies not simply in our Declaration of Independence or Constitution, nor in the individuals who, like Lincoln, called us to be touched “by the better angels of our nature,”[3] but in the Lord who gave up His life for us, and whose sacrifice enables us to form a more perfect union.
The call to explore a new frontier, to a space race where we learn how to slip the surly bonds of earthly gravity, to discover the gravity of other celestial bodies, was a truly powerful one. Who would have thought that we would live to see the day when President Trump would inaugurate a new Space Force? But more than a space race, today, God calls us to a race for making a better, more equitable society that helps the Declaration of Independence even more true today than when it was written and ratified. We can only escape our own gravity with God’s help. We can only create true community when we surrender to God’s new gravity. We can only find our way with God’s guidance. We can only imagine where God can lead us, when we walk in the way of Jesus Christ.
[1]Accepting the Nomination of the Democratic Party, Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, July 15, 1960
[2]https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/nations-story-what-slave-fourth-july. The full text of the speech is here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html
[3]From the conclusion of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. March 4, 1861. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/c/1861%20Lincoln%20First%20Inaugural.pdf