This sermon was originally preached on July 5, 2026, at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Waukegan.
Relevant lectionary readings can be found here (first reading and Psalm are semi-continuous). This sermon focuses especially on the Epistle to the Romans.
Today we read a letter from the Apostle Paul to the church in Rome. Anytime we read letters from Paul its important to remember that we are – quite literally – reading someone else’s mail. I don’t know about you, but if someone from another time and place opened up my emails or texts and started reading, they might have a lot of questions.
For some background context, the Apostle Paul used to go by another name – Saul. He did not follow Jesus while Jesus was alive doing ministry on earth. In fact, Saul was a Roman citizen who stood on the side of religious power, using that power to zealously persecute and kill followers of Jesus in the early church. His life was changed when he encountered the risen Christ on the road who asked him, in a blinding light, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” After that, Saul, who was also called Paul, went on to plant many of the early churches and travel throughout the Mediterranean world making disciples and spreading the good news. Paul suffered shipwrecks, beatings, and imprisonment by the Roman Empire, until eventually, he was killed by that same Empire he used to prop up.
During his ministry, Paul wrote many of the letters – or Epistles – in what we often call the New Testament, or the Second Testament in the Bible. The letter to the Romans that we read a portion of today is one of those letters, and one of his more famous ones. Paul is writing this letter to the church in Rome in about 57 or 58 CE, so about 20-25ish years after Jesus was crucified. At this point, Paul had been a follower of Jesus for over two decades and had spent over a decade on missionary journeys to establish and encourage churches.
All of this is important to remember as we read the excerpt of this letter from Paul to the church in Rome. Paul’s life really informed the way that he understood sin. This was a person who devoted his life to righteousness. He was educated in the ways of faith and the law. And he really thought he was doing the right thing by persecuting the early church, only to have his understanding of right and wrong totally turned upside down.
Paul did something that most people are never brave enough to do – he radically changed his mind about a deeply held belief. Thats hard to do. Because deeply held beliefs like religion or politics, they are personal in a way thats hard to overstate…studies show that people will ignore all kinds of facts and data to the contrary to hold onto those kinds of beliefs at all costs. It is vulnerable to admit you might be wrong about something you built your whole life around. It takes courage.
Paul’s sin was not just about his individual moral choices. He was part of a larger system of religious leaders that had cozied up to the Empire for the sake of their own power, security, and safety. He was another cog in the wheel of a large system, constructed to prop up the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was an occupying power. It invaded nations and took them over by deploying soldiers and crushing uprisings and silencing any opposition. The Empire was geographically vast and was held together by what was called, in Roman propaganda campaigns, the Pax Romana – the Peace of Rome. But this wasn’t the kind of peace that comes with true and lasting justice. The Pax Romana was a mechanism of control held together by economic exploitation and brutal violence that today we might call “law and order.”
In the white, Western church, especially in the United States, we have hyper-individualized spirituality. So we talk about sin like a list of rules we have broken. The most common way we discuss sin is within a framework of individualized moral failing.
We often think of sin as something we do. Paul often talks about Sin as something that does something to us.
Look at the way that Paul speaks about sin in these passages.
“I do not do what I want but do the very thing I hate.”
“Sin dwells within me.”
“I have the desire to do good, but not the ability.”
“I am at war.”
“It takes me captive.”
For Paul, sin isn’t merely an act. He talks about sin as something that dwells within.
Sin, for Paul, was an occupying force, not unlike an occupying Roman legion.
Sin invades. Sin wages war. It sets up camp where it is not welcome. It exploits opportunities to prey upon people. It enslaves people against their will.
Paul knows what it means to be wrapped up in a force that is bigger and more powerful than him…he lived under the Roman occupation. He had spent his life navigating a complex social and political world, climbing ladders of religious influence and relative privilege in an occupied land.
Sin for Paul is not about our individual actions. It is a state of being in a system where it is impossible to keep your hands totally clean, impossible to be blameless, no matter how hard we try.
We may not live in Ancient Rome, but we do live under our own Empire. And in this Empire, we have our own systemic sin. The United States was established through the genocide of the people indigenous to this land. It was built by people who were kidnapped and enslaved. These are not realities that are long ago and far away. They continue to persist in modern variations …through the continued disrespect of treaties with indigenous peoples and destruction of sacred native land, through slave labor by incarcerated people here and exploited slave labor abroad. Through redlining and defacto segregation and divested neighborhoods and underfunded schools and environmental racism and lack of access to lifesaving medical care and more.
White supremacy, corporate greed, patriarchy, and all of its unholy variations continue to be an occupying force, the sin that dwells here. It is in us. It is around us. And even when we hate it, as Paul hated the systemic sin he was trapped in, we often feel helpless to do anything about it.
The systemic sin of white supremacy was baked into institutions and culture and written into our laws and founding documents. These structures existed long before we got here. They are bigger than us. They will likely outlast us. And even when we try to do the right thing – and trying matters, our small efforts do matter – but even when we try to do the right thing, we are swept up in an evil death cult that is older and more powerful than we are. Like a demon possession that demands an exorcism.
“Who will rescue me from this body of death?!” Paul cries out.
We are in need of rescue. Our individual hearts and souls, yes, but also our churches, our neighborhoods, our communities, our institutions, our nation.
In the 1960s and 70s in Latin America there were groups of brilliant theologians who began to reclaim this idea of corporate, communal sin. Living under violent and repressive dictatorships put in place by CIA coups, they understood that sin dwelled in society like an occupation- both literally and figuratively. They named that we are all caught up in systems that not only hurt souls, but also affect our ability to thrive in our lives here on earth. That sin was not only spiritual damage, but had material effects on our bodies, putting people into unholy hierarchies, denying people liberty, alienating us from one another, making many people sick and poor for the benefit of the powerful few.
Sin is not abstract or symbolic or spiritual. It exists in the decisions of history.
And because we are trapped in these systems of sin, we are in need of saving. But this saving is not just for the saving of souls. It is also for the saving of bodies…the hungry being fed, the captives liberated, good news for the poor.
This was not just the salvation of souls. It was the liberation of all of humanity – body, mind, spirit, individual, communal, societal. This movement became known as “liberation theology.” Its architects were such a threat to their regimes that many of them were killed. Just like Paul was killed by the Empire that considered him a threat. Messages of liberation are terrifying to the arbiters of the status quo.
But Empire does not have the final say.
One of these faithful pastoral voices of liberation theology, Archbishop Oscar Romero had received repeated death threats because he denounced the Salvadoran military government’s repression and defended the poor. On March 24, 1980, he was shot by an assassin while celebrating Mass. But just weeks before he had made this statement,
“As a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”
As Paul tells us, the condition of sin is a trap we cannot escape on our own. Or, as we say in our liturgies of confession, “We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.” Like Rome, Sin is an occupying force.
These systems are bigger than us.
But they are not bigger than God.
Jesus has come to relieve the burden of these systems that grind us down, take away our humanity, and destroy our dignity.
With Jesus everything is possible. With Jesus there will be an end to Empire and white supremacy and genocide and slavery of all kinds. Jesus has freed us to cast off the yoke of slavery of the current empire and take on a yoke of liberation and rest. And in that freedom, we also have the responsibility to join God in building the kind of world where all people can be liberated.
Instead of pledging allegiance to an empire that promises freedom that never comes, with God’s help, we can commit to following a God who seeks to liberate us, to give us rest and the kind of peace that only comes when we are in right relationship with God, the Earth, ourselves, and one another.
Friends, Paul is right. We cannot free ourselves. And if we cannot free ourselves, then we do not carry the weight of saving the world on our own shoulders.
We cannot free ourselves.
But thanks be to God, we do not have to.
The God who raised Jesus from the dead is still breaking chains.
Still casting out demons.
Still bringing down the mighty from their thrones.
Still lifting up the lowly.
Still making all things new.
So may you leave this place with hope.
May you leave with courage.
May you leave with holy imagination.
And may the peace of Christ, which is stronger than every empire and every power of death, guard your hearts and your minds and keep you in the work of love until God’s kingdom comes in all its fullness.
Amen.
