Sermon 5.3.26 Just When You Thought It Was Over

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVHigz7M_I

The 1970’s R&B group the Sylvers once sang, “Just when I thought it was over, just one look at you, and here I go again.”

I think this is probably true of all weeks, but in a week where so many things seem to be happening on so many fronts,

And we can’t even keep track of how many things have been happening in the world around us,

From Royal state visits from the sitting British monarch to the aftermath of last weekend’s assassination attempt to new revelations about the way that AI chatbots manipulate people’s emotions to keep them engaged, and maybe most significantly on a week where we will be able to exercise our constitutional right to vote in this week’s primary to see another blow to the Voting Rights Act,

It’s always good to go back to the fundamentals.

And today’s fundamental, as the Sylvers opined in their song about a lover who cheated, but wants his girl back anyway,

Is that while human sin remains, God’s Grace is never over.

So, let’s dive in.

One of the struggles that we have on a theological basis with the continuation of sin, the continued presence of sin after the resurrection of Jesus in this Easter season…

Is what Romans 6 recognizes about the way that Jesus resurrection changed our relationship to sin.

In that passage, the Apostle Paul writes that “we have died to sin.”

Or at least that is the most famous piece excised from the broader context of the passage.

Paul goes on to talk about how we are buried with Christ in baptism, therefore we are raised with Christ in his resurrection.

He says that our “old sinful ways have been crucified, so that we may no longer be slaves to sin.”

Therefore, we, like Jesus are dead to the “power of sin” and made living for the “glory of God.”

What we notice, if we do a close reading of the text, is that while Paul asserts that “we have died to sin,” he does not say – as is sometimes thought – that somehow sin ceased to exist.

St. Thomas Aquinas says as much in his Summa Theologiae, in question 69 of part 3,

And Paul himself goes on to say in Romans 7, just after this, that he himself continues to “do the thing that he doesn’t want to do.”

And so, what we see is that even after the resurrection, human sin remains.

What has changed is the way that God deals with our sin through Grace.

I thank you for letting me go on this small digression.

Though it’s not one of our lectionary readings for the day, Romans 6 is the main back drop for how I want to think about our Scriptures for today, which shows us that indeed sin does exist after the Resurrection.

We see it plainly today in the lectionary, but maybe we don’t often think about our readings this way.

In St. Peter’s letter to the church, from our lectionary today, he talks about each one of us as stones, which make up the new temple.

In a sophisticated amalgamation of scriptures, Peter recognizes that Jesus’ work will not be recognized by all people.

The result is that sin remains in the world.

For the believer in Jesus’ Word, the stone is the chief cornerstone of faith’s holy of holies, but for those who do not believe, he is a “stumbling block, a rock that makes them fall.”

We might be a little uncomfortable with seeing this as sin, because it makes it look like Jesus then causes people to sin,

But, as with conversations that often occur within my hearing at elementary school pick up, where it is very normal to hear something like, “it’s not my fault that I ran into (fill-in the blank with inanimate object), when I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going;”

We often blame other things as causes of our falling, when actually we were the ones who got ourselves into trouble.

“don’t blame me, I just jumped from ten feet in the air, it’s actually gravity’s fault that I fell.”

Sin is the failure to recognize and pay heed to the unchanging thing of the universe and to think that we know better or can avoid the consequences of ignoring it.

In other words, Peter, writing well after the resurrection, knows that while Christ ultimately solved the problem of sin, free will means that “just when I thought it was over, here I go again.”

Similarly, in Acts 7, we hear the story of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen.

This is also well after the resurrection sightings.

And what we see, in brief, is the continuation of human violence as the means by which to solve political and religious problems.

The main culprit is the very person who will later write to the Romans about being dead to sin, St. Paul, who at this earlier time is still a persecutor of the church named Saul.

We read in Acts 7, “The witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul,”

Which is a biblical way of saying that he is the one leading the group, who has stoned this young, outspoken Christian martyr.

Paul, who writes so eloquently about the us being “dead to sin,” this man who calls himself the least of the apostles, and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for being a persecutor of the church, and the leader of a group that killed St. Stephen,

He of all people knows the power of sin, and equally that the cross only solves the problem of individual sins, if you die to the ways of this world that crucified the living God.

If you ignore the reality of the universe, then your sin continues to cling so close, and “just when you thought it was over, here it goes again.”

And this is the really troubling things about the world that surrounds us and things like the overturning of another piece of the Voting Rights Act, or the pre-patented responses to another episode of violence that does not take any accountability for the role we all play in its continuation, or Artificial Intelligence as just another industry that seeks to exploit people’s weaknesses for a profit.

All of these things seem new and unprecedented in human history, and yet they all operate on the same substrate level of human sin that fails to learn the lesson of the cross.

In 2013, when Shelby County vs. Holder overturned Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which had enshrined pre-clearance of voting changes in counties that had shown a history of racial discrimination after Reconstruction,

The high court decided that “in light of current conditions” the departure from the equal sovereignty of states to control their own voting was not justified.

Saying that more plainly, because I’ve always been told to “make it plain, preacher,”

“we don’t think that racial discrimination and voter suppression are still a problem that allow the federal government to oversee states that have historically disenfranchised voters based on their race.”

And, unsurprisingly, as soon as Section 5 was weakened… “just when you thought it was over, here it comes again.”

We all thought that electing Obama solved racism forever, turns out we were wrong.

In the aftermath of more violence and an attempted assassination, which I talked about in detail last week,

What I want to notice this week is how we keep getting the same responses.

Each side of our political aisle saying, “well if only the other side weren’t terrible, vicious monsters, we’d all be fine and the violence would go away.”

Each side pretends that the other is the one who created violence, or created violent rhetoric, or has been the sole proprietor of the denouement of our democracy.

Our responses to violence are a clear misunderstanding of the role that human sin plays in these episodes,

A clear misunderstanding of what the causes of violence are.

It is not this person or that person saying this or that.

While those things can move the needle on individual events of violence like the January 6^th attempted coup, where a direct line can be made between the speech of one person and the subsequent actions of a group,

Even that is more complicated, because we live in a cultural ecosystem, powered by the internet and capitalism, that is making money hand over fist on the violence that so many abhor.

And that was even before Artificial Intelligence got involved.

In a landmark episode of his very well-researched weekly show, Last Week Tonight, John Oliver did a deep-dive on the way that AI Chatbots affect the mental health of its users.

For those unfamiliar with AI chatbots, you have certainly noticed that anything you type into an internet search engine recently will immediately give you an overview of the thing that you’re looking for.

It is an Artificial Intelligence amalgamation of the pertinent details of what you’re looking for.

Pretty handy.

What a chatbot does, is it allows you to have conversations and ask questions to a sophisticated computer program that can feel like you’re texting with a human being.

AI companies have spent billions of dollars on these programs, which are based on a concept called large language models.

Essentially, give a computer access to as much of human knowledge as possible and at a certain point it gets smart enough to mimic human thought processes and knowledge.

Now that these companies have spent all of this money, though, their investors would like to make money.

The result is that many of the guardrails that would be necessary to keep people safe from an ultra-intelligent human-like computer that can process information millions of times faster than a human mind, are simply not in place.

And the reason… people wouldn’t use it as much, and companies wouldn’t be able to profit.

What Oliver uncovers in his expose is that AI Chatbots are programmed for positivity.

That sounds nice, doesn’t it?

No matter what you say, the chatbot is there to support you.

It’s what we all want from friendships and deep relationships.

We want to be understood, appreciated, and built-up.

In some instances, chatbots have used overt and covert sexual intimacy to keep users glued to their screens. People have gone for advice on recipes and found themselves stuck in a validation loop that supersedes their actual human relationships.

In one instance, a man was convinced for an entire month by his AI chatbot that he had discovered a new form of algebra.

So, one of those gets into a hot topic, sex, on which so many preachers would get stuck and continue to pontificate.

One is kind of amusing.

But, beyond that, when it comes to violence, because chatbots are meant to stay positive and validate you to keep you using them, they also have been known to support and aid people who are thinking about doing violence to themselves and others.

They can become a confidant for the dark innerworkings of our minds.

This is not new.

People have been joining hate groups, planning violent attacks based on internet resources, finding comfort in groups that validate the worst part of them for centuries and millennia.

The issue is that we thought that the internet would make us better, that Artificial Intelligence would be a universal good to discover things like cures for Alzheimers and cancers that escape us because there is too much data for one person to analyze, which is something that AI has also been doing.

We always think that technology will make us better,

But “just when we thought it was over, here it goes again.”

What I want to say to you today, the message of Grace and the Good News that I want to share with you today is that, “just when I thought it was over, here it goes again,” is not just the problem, but it is also the solution.

We have big issues in our world, there is no doubt.

The issues get even bigger when we focus on the surface of the problem, though, and not on the bigger principles that lie behind.

All of these things that we deal with are a manifestation of human sin.

And, while human sin did not go away with the cross, the solution to sin did come into the world,

The realization that we can conquer sin, if we can name it, and if we can nail the power of that sin to the cross.

The promise of God’s Grace overcoming sin is that at the resurrection, Jesus said an equal and opposite, “Just when you thought it was over, here I come again.”

People, who persecute the church, at whose feet the coats of those who stoned St. Stephen were laid can recognize the error of their ways and turn toward Christ.

People who believe in the rock of our salvation can use it as a stepping stone into the holy of holies rather than falling back into the ways that world tries to lead.

People who are victimized by the violence of others’ sin can find refuge and never be put to shame.

We need people to come to the faith of Jesus that doesn’t get bogged down with political stances in the face of human sin.

We need people who can take a fierce moral inventory of their own actions and hold them up to the light of Christ.

We need to be people who understand how our penchant for falling back into sin can be manipulated for the benefit of others, so that we can inoculate ourselves from the ways of this world

And reset our focus on the chief cornerstone of our faith.

Jesus’ gift is a supernatural gift.

He is able, if we are willing.

“Just when I thought it was over, here I go again” can be the weight around your shoulders or it can be your freedom from the power of sin.

And now, before “just when I thought it was over, here it goes again” takes on a third meaning,

let me leave you with this final thought, Jesus has given you the power to renew your mind and your heart through his resurrection.

Jesus has tilted the balance in the universe away from sin and toward Grace, he has ensured the final victory,

But each of us as we continue to live in this creation that rejected and crucified him need to know remember that our individual and collective sins still cling so close.

We overcome the power of sin, through the power of Christ and through our perseverance and belief in Him.

Jesus has brought you here to let you know that you can do it and that you can spread that message of hope, if you choose.

“just when you thought it was over…” can be your excuse or it can be your battle cry.

The wages of sin are the same death that we have been experiencing, but the gift of pursuing righteousness is eternal life.

Doesn’t seem like too difficult of a choice, but I’m going to leave that to you.

Just when I thought it was over, here it comes again…

Is that going to be the mantra of your sin?

Or, is that going to be the mantra of your eternal life?

Amen.