Let s talk about cartoons.

Matt Dodrill 13 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 3 September 2017 8:30 service Dallas, Texas Lowering the Drawbridge Romans 12:9-21 Let s talk about cartoons. Unless you live in a house like mine with 4-year-old children, you might not know about Daniel Tiger s Neighborhood or Dora the Explorer. But there s another cartoon that might interest both children and adults. It s called The Secret of Kells, an animated fantasy picture full of Irish mythology and wild Celtic themes. It tells the story of Brendan, a gleeful and curious boy who lives in the tightly-knit community at the monastery of Kells. Set in the ninth century, the people of Kells are vulnerable to an encroaching hoard of Vikings who pillage towns and leave nothing in their wake but death and destruction you know, like in any typical children s movie. Brendan s uncle, Cellach, who s also in charge of the monastery, is rabid with paranoia and becomes obsessed with constructing a giant wall around the community. Once the wall is completed and the community becomes insulated from the outside world, light breaks through the cracks and Brendan is beckoned to explore the grandeur of the world beyond the wall. His opportunity to escape arrives in Brother Aiden, who is crafting an illuminated manuscript called The Book of Kells, which contains all four Gospels. Brother Aiden commissions Brendan to retrieve special berries from the forest, the secret ingredient for the ink he ll need for the Chi rho page. A quick google search will show that chi and rho are the first two Greek letters in the word Christ. In this stale community paralyzed by fear, only the special ink will bring Jesus name Chi rho to life again. So Brendan climbs over the wall and enters the forest, where a dangerous adventure awaits him. The Apostle Paul knew all about this kind of danger. Writing to the church in Rome, he s aware that this community is enacting its own social and political order amidst the Roman Empire s social and political order. The Christians in Rome are probably refusing to make sacrifices to the deities that protect the Empire, and their profession of faith in the Lordship of Jesus might be perceived as an affront to the emperor s lordship. So here we have two alternative political communities, even rival

communities. And this puts the Christians in a precarious position, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces. Perhaps a wall should go up, yes? But in today s passage, Paul provides a rather jarring assortment of moral imperatives that the Roman Christians are to follow. It s sorta like Paul s version of the Sermon on the Mount: Love one another with mutual affection contribute to the needs of the saints. These instructions are for the Christian community at first, applied within the body of Christ. But then Paul takes us a few steps further and applies this ethic to those who are not members of the body: Bless those who persecute you Do not repay anyone evil for evil If your enemies are hungry, feed them. Now if you re a practical thinker, you might want to take Paul s temperature. If you re surrounded by angry Vikings or Roman soldiers, this just isn t practical advice. Suddenly Paul is Forrest Gump in this scenario, and we re all asking, Are you stupid or something? Surely Paul doesn t actually expect us to do these things! Isn t he just describing an impossible ideal? Yeah, that s it an impossible ideal! I mean, c mon live in harmony with one another? Has Paul even met my next-door neighbor? She drives too fast down our road, lets her dog terrorize the neighborhood, and plays Nickelback songs loud enough for everyone to hear. And if she wags her finger at my kids one more time, I might show them how to wag a certain finger back. Live in harmony? Yeah, right. And what about when Paul ups the ante? Bless those who persecute you? Seriously, Paul? How s that gonna look next to my Don t tread on me bumper sticker? And when the stakes are high and my life is on the line, this advice is not very good for my self-preservation. But if you recall the sermon from last week, you might imagine Paul saying, Do not be conformed to the practicalities of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Paul is doing so much more than offering practical moral advice. He s completely shattering old paradigms and inviting us into new ones, because he believes that the old way of things is passing away. He s asking us to live as though a new creation has dawned, smashing old practicalities and making room for new possibilities. He s commissioning us to climb over the walls of fear so that Jesus name can be brought to life again.

But we love our walls and fortified castles, don t we? Have you ever taken a close look at medieval castles? Their architecture completely revolves around defense and psychological intimidation: To protect against fire, they re built with stone; since corners are structurally weak, they re made round; to keep people from going through the walls, they re made thicker. Most importantly, large ditches called moats are dug around the perimeter and filled with water to make the castle less accessible. The only thing connecting flat land to the front gate is a drawbridge that can be lowered to let people in, or raised to keep people out. Boundaries are very clearly marked around castles, and after spending so much time defining the body of Christ, we might expect Paul to do the same. We need to raise our drawbridge and keep a hard line between the church and world, right? But instead, Paul does something different: He gives us a theology of solidarity. It s a two-way solidarity because we all share the condition of the old Adam, but we also share something in the new Adam. In the book of Romans, Paul is at pains to show that everyone is enslaved by the powers of Sin and Death, the condition of the old Adam. He loves the word all. In various places throughout the letter, he says things like, All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Or, One man s trespass led to the condemnation of all. Or again, God has imprisoned all in disobedience. We have a hard time with this, don t we? We don t want to believe that we re all equally bound by the powers of darkness and enslaved by the great equalizers of Sin and Death. We want to believe that the Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world get their own special category; but when they don t, it messes with the way we carve up the world between good guys and bad guys, angels and monsters, us and them. It reminds me of a song by Sufjan Stevens titled John Wayne Gacy, based on the serial killer from Chicago. After an eerie recollection of Gacy s crimes, the song concludes with these words: In my best behavior, I am really just like him. The powers of Sin and Death are not partial. They show no favoritism and their work is completely invasive. But the good news is that God s act in Christ is equally cosmic and invasive, a definitive act that has liberated the world from bondage. Yes, the whole world everyone all of us without

reserve. There s that word all again: Just as one man s trespass led to condemnation for all, Paul says, so one man s act of righteousness led to justification and life for all... for God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all. You see, the gospel of Paul is the gospel of all, for in Christ Jesus God has already reconciled the world to himself. So, there s solidarity in the new Adam as well. And there s a song for that, too. In Bruce Springsteen s Land of Hope and Dreams, there s a train that carries passengers to a promised land. But it doesn t just carry saints: This train carries saints and sinners, Springsteen says with that distinctive voice of his. This train carries losers and winners. Yes, even those people get to board the train with us. So what does this solidarity mean for the church s relationship with people on the outside? It means that if Jesus has taken on the flesh of their flesh and the bone of their bone just as he has for the church, then in some mysterious way, they re neighbors; so bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. Since the entire cosmos has been drawn into the one Christ, raising a drawbridge between the world and ourselves is like dividing the one Christ. The Baptist minister and activist, Will Campbell, understood this as well as anyone. He knew that the church is important, but he was also worried about locating it too rigidly. When he lived in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, he would drive up the road to Gass s Tavern to drink with the locals. As time went on, he started noticing that the tavern was sort of becoming a church. He would pray for the sick there, visit folks when they went to jail, and perform wedding ceremonies right up on the stage. Now I could make the case that that s my church, Campbell would say, but I won t because if I did, the next thing you know, we d have a bulletin, or drink only Pabst. 1 Campbell wasn t just worried about institutionalizing the church; he was also worried about driving a wedge so firmly between the sacred and profane that the church would cease being a gift to the world. Campbell believed that God in Christ had already drawn the cosmos to himself, lowering the drawbridge between the church and world so that he could rejoice 1 Will Campbell and Richard Goode, Crashing the Idols: The Vocation of Will D. Campbell, 59-60.

with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep, and associate with the lowly even the drunkards whom he had to bail out of jail from time to time. To live in such a way is not about emulating an ethical model; it s about participating in a new reality, the new creation embodied in Jesus Christ. His way is not a set of impossible ideals that point to the far-distant future, but a rule and reign that manifest themselves in our lives now. The ethical instructions in Romans 12 are not just imperatives that say, Do this ; they re also realities that declare the Lordship of Jesus. They re Christ taking up residence in us: It is no longer I who live, Paul says elsewhere, but Christ who lives in me. When we bless those who persecute us and give our enemies something to eat, we participate in the victory that has already been achieved in Jesus, declaring with our lives that he is Lord. When we leap over the wall and venture into that forest, we enter the territory of Golgotha, which sits outside Jerusalem s city gate. Boundarycrossing is dangerous, but it brings Jesus name to life. Harvey, putting their differences aside to help each other in beautiful and inspiring ways. There are no castles or dry land anymore. There s only a moat, and everyone s in the water. In the old Adam, we re all adrift at sea, battered by the stormy waves without any hope of escape. But as we ve seen this week, some people have boats, and their rescue mission includes everyone. These boats carry saints and sinners, losers and winners all the way to safety. In the new Adam, the walls come down, the drawbridge is lowered, and the boat carries us all church and world alike to a land of hope and dreams, even when things seem hopeless. So rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. For in Christ Jesus, we are all already neighbors. May we remember this as we re sent into the world today. Amen. We ve seen a lot of boundarycrossing in the Gulf Coast this week, haven t we? Strangers banding together in the wake of Hurricane