“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our
Lord!” Romans 7:24-25
The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
stories are favorites on our boys’ bookshelves.
They are set in a pleasant suburb in the mid-fifties, the sort of place
where mothers have always just taken sugar cookies out of the oven and daddies
are headed out after work to finish the new treehouse ladder. The stories are populated with
children—accomplished, good natured, obedient children—who just happen to be
passing through unfortunate phases.
Take Nicholas Semicolon,
subject of the story Philip read to all of us as we made our way across Maine
last week. Nicholas is ten, large and
strong for his age, the apple of his mother’s eye. But he also happens to have become a
thoroughly rotten bully. He hits girls
and pulls dog’s tails, upsets baby carriages and speaks rudely to everyone he
meets. His parents have been blissfully
ignorant about all of this until they receive a call from Mrs. Eager, whose
son’s legs are covered in bandages after little Nicky’s latest attack.
The Semicolons talk through
the matter, and decide that Mrs. Piggle Wiggle must simply be consulted. She is the marvel of the cul-de-sac, a sort
of child psychologist-cum-apothecary, with just the thing for every child’s
maladjustments. “Would a bully bath be right?,”
Mrs. Piggle Wiggle wonders. No, we are
told, it must be leadership pills instead, “little green pills that taste like
peppermint..but bring out wonderful qualities of leadership, especially in only
children.” A pill before bed and another
after breakfast, and little Nicky has resolved to give his old tricycle to the
girl next door before starting up a community improvement association among the
neighborhood kids.
Why, you may wonder, have
I wasted two minutes of your Sunday morning on a silly sixty-year old children’s
story? Well perhaps, this story is a
modern parable. Maybe it hints at one of
the deepest and most persistent myths we tell ourselves about who we really
are. In the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories,
there are no bad children—just good ones who pass through unfortunate
phases. The stories argue that the moral
life is important, but that it’s something completely under our own
control. If we try hard enough, or if we
have access to the right sort of mood-altering pharmaceuticals, we will always
land on our feet.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s
leadership pills come in more varieties these days than they did sixty years
ago. There are endless titles on the
self-help aisles, sixteen kinds of yoga and forty different varieties of
therapy. We have apps to track things,
ingenious exercise routines—and of course, there are always
pharmaceuticals. We have methods for
making ourselves happy or calming ourselves down, becoming more mindful or
forgetting it all. To be sure, some of
these things are useful. But they also
constitute a never-ending supply of schemes and tricks to reinforce the
illusion of control, to suggest once more that we really are good people, just
a little off track.
“Wretched man that I am,”
writes Saint Paul, “who will deliver me from this body of death.”
Today’s Epistle lesson
makes for difficult reading—and not just because the syntax is
complicated. Alan has actually managed
that quite well for us this morning.
Saint Paul is opening wide a glimpse into the profound struggle within
the human heart, a debilitating failure to do the good we know we should
do. “I do not do what I want, but I do
the very thing I hate, he says. “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” He reveals a tormented soul, a person who
has become a stranger to himself. He
sees within himself a “a law at war with the law of [his] mind. He has become a “captive to the law of sin
which dwells in [his] members.” He
cannot control his own life, but an evil master drives him to despair. He longs for deliverance, because he cannot
remedy the situation in his own power.
And you are the wretch. I am the wretch. This misery is what we call
the human condition. Man the summit of
creation, the bearer of God’s image, a little lower than the angels—man has
come to this mass of contradictions, this powerless frustration. We are the ones who beg, who cry out, “who
will deliver me from this body of death?”
Difficult reading indeed.
We are under the power of
sin. It’s not just that we make mistakes
or fall short of our worthy aims. It’s not that we just need to know more or to
want to be better. Indeed, the wretched
man knows what God expects of him. He
delights in the law. He desires to do
what is right. Romans 7 describes the
agony of a conscientious person. But sin
is a force, a master who knows us better than we know ourselves. Sin confuses and manipulates and
compels. We can’t get free of sin’s
grip. The more we resist, the more
forceful sin shows itself to be.
We’d rather forget this
story, but it has a part in the biography of every person who has taken the
trouble to understand his or her own life.
Saint Paul is no innovator here.
There are parallels to this passage in the pagan philosophers and the
Jewish rabbis. Most of the world
religions propose some solution to it.
“Wretched man that I am,
who will deliver me from this body of death.”
This is the true word about us, but it is not the final word about
us. This agonizing passage comes from the
heart of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, his summary of the Gospel entrusted
to Him. The Gospel is good news, a
joyful, and hopeful message. It
proclaims God’s mercy, His gift of the Redeemer, the transforming power freely
extended to us. But note this, the
Gospel is the solution to the problem diagnosed in today’s lesson. It is the answer to the wretched man’s
question, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
“Thanks be to God,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.” There is
a Deliverer, sent from God, whose love could not allow us to remain trapped in
such agony. There is One who made
Himself powerless like us. He took on
Himself the burden we cannot lift, and even unto death, He identified Himself
fully with us. He defeated death’s
power, rising from the grave. He
announces the reconciling word: “your sins are forgiven.” He sends forth His Spirit to bring peace to
the troubled soul, a new kind of freedom and courage. Through His work in us, sin is mastered and
cast out. We are no longer slaves of
sin, but serve Christ joyfully, doing His will through the help He
supplies.
Thanks be to God, that we
are not left forever in this agonizing frustration, wretches longing for
deliverance. To be sure, there is always
a struggle, what Saint Paul would call, in another place, the battle of the
Spirit against the flesh.[1] But in this battle, our victory is
assured.
I do think, though, that
we all must pass through this struggle, and many of us more than once. Until we
have faced our own powerlessness over sin, the Gospel will be but an
abstraction to us. If you are living in
the strength Christ supplies, you will see this text as a chapter in the
earlier pages of your spiritual. But if
our lesson’s description seems utterly foreign to you, you’re almost certainly
letting yourself off too easily. You’ve
allowed your conscience to sleep. Your
understanding of what God expects from you is far too small.
But maybe this text does
set forth the theme of your life today.
You want to serve God. You’re
trying as hard as you can, and you come up short every time. You see sin at work in you, and you don’t
know how to control it. There is no
method or system to solve your problem, no Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to stir up the
needful concoction. But there is a
Deliverer, God rich in mercy, who brings joy to wretches and life to those
trapped in the body of death. “Come
unto me,” He says, “all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.” There is peace to be found, and
abundant power. Turn to Him and be set
free.
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