Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

In the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” --a comical take on King Arthur and his knights--there is a famous scene where a group of monks walks along while chanting, and hitting themselves in the forehead with a board. “Pie Jesus Domine, dona eis requiem” BONK (Here's a link to the clip: https://youtu.be/YgYEuJ5u1K0?si=qRxP5SKNFNmDbi0c)

You might think this is just slapstick humor, but it was meant to depict those religious people in the Middle Ages who would go to extreme lengths to discipline their bodies. “Mortifying the flesh,” it was called. They probably didn’t hit themselves with boards, but there were all kinds of things that people were doing, some good and some bizarre. Take fasting—that is held up in the Bible as a good practice for Christians, and is a sensible counter to the sin of gluttony.

But some other practices were just strange, like the wearing of shirts made of hide, with the hair turned inward so it irritated your skin. Some monks of the middle ages used to have a small whip, called a flagellum, to whip themselves with whenever they had impure thoughts, or just as a regular discipline for the body. They would literally whip themselves, sometimes walking in groups through the town square and singing while doing it—which is where Monty Python got the idea for their monks in the movie.

There were other, even more bizarre practices-- things that seem cruel and horrifying to us and were really more about works that people were doing to try to earn God’s love and forgiveness.

Getting the flesh under control didn’t start out that way. The purpose of mortifying the flesh was to do exactly as Paul writes in Romans 6: to not let sin exercise dominion in our mortal bodies, to resist obeying our bodies’ passions. It was to make the flesh obedient to the will of God. Those medieval monks thought that by literally disciplining their bodies, they could present their bodily members to God as instruments of righteousness.

When the Reformation happened, most of those old religious practices fell out of use, thankfully, but I wonder if the church didn’t also lose a seriousness about Paul’s words.

Few people now fast, for example, though it is a wonderful spiritual discipline, as I always tell you during Lent. Fasting is properly done not to be righteous before God, but to remember that you don’t live by bread alone, but by God’s word. It is a real shame that it is not practiced regularly in our churches, but most Lutherans have convinced themselves they don’t need all that, or that it’s too catholic, or whatever other excuse. We forget or ignore that both Jesus and the prophets fasted in order to pray, and Jesus expected his disciples to do so, too.

Another example: in this day and age, few people deprive themselves of a  couple extra minutes of sleep, in order to have time to pray or read their Bible. Instead, we rush out of bed and rush to work and come home and eat and do chores at home and fall into bed, exhausted. As a nation, we’re so busy and we get so little sleep that it’s hard to think about offering an extra fifteen minutes of sleeping time to God. And so we don’t read or study our Bibles and don’t make much of an effort for prayer in our homes and families.

A third example: almost no one in this sex-saturated culture talks about the virtues and difficulties of disciplining the flesh, of abstinence, of waiting to experience God’s gift of sexuality until marriage. As a nation, even as Christians, we have accepted sexual sin with hardly a whimper. Pornography is absolutely everywhere. And it has damaged a whole generation of men--ask the young people in your lives, if they're willing to tell you, you will get an earful.

That might shock you. But collectively, what happens? Nothing. We shrug our shoulders at our super-sexed culture and say, “Well, times have changed. That’s the way things are now. I don’t like it, but whatever.” What we get from every institution, the culture, the media, social media especially, is “if it feels good, do it. I say what is good for me. Nobody can tell me what to do or judge me.”

That’s what I mean by a lack of seriousness about Paul’s words. Paul here in Romans 6 writes about the fight against sin in our mortal bodies. He is not speaking on a spiritual level, or about a mystical body—he instructs us to be slaves of God by fighting against sin in our mortal flesh.

It is very difficult, as I am sure you know, to live a righteous spiritual life, close to God,  if you indulge your flesh in all sorts of sin. We humans are one whole person—you cannot separate the spirit from the flesh and have a “church side” and “regular side.”  If you let sin have dominion over your mortal bodies, then your spirit is also sticky with that sin.

There is a reason that the seven deadly sins are called deadly—they are deadly to the body and the spirit. Sloth, anger, greed, gluttony, lust, covetousness, pride—they wreck our bodies, our souls, our hearts, lives. We are called to struggle against them, so that they don’t get the upper hand and begin ruling us, making us obey their passions.

We don’t struggle against sin to make ourselves righteous, but we struggle in order to become obedient from the heart to God’s teaching in our lives. We struggle because that is a daily part of dying and rising with Christ—putting to death of the old self so that a new person comes forth. Like an athlete training for a race, or a musician practicing their instrument—we do this in order to train ourselves to live our lives in Jesus and witness to the world as Christians.

At the beginning of chapter 6 to the Romans, Paul writes about all this. He says “Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who have died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

That is the purpose of being slaves of righteousness, as Paul says: to walk in the newness of life that Christ has won for us on the cross. We are made holy—sanctified-- by Christ’s blood and God puts to death in us everything which is against him, everything that would make us slaves to greater and greater iniquity.

Hear me clearly here: we can never make ourselves righteous—that belongs to Christ, who buried us in the tomb through baptism. Our old self was crucified with Christ so that the body of sin might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. But like you heard last week, the old Adam and the old Eve like being a slave to sin because it feels good, and they don’t want to be a slave to God’s righteousness because that means dying to what THEY want. They don’t want to be drowned in baptism and are excellent swimmers.

Sin may feel good, even great, but the end of all our sin is death. The wages we get for our sin is death. We cannot NOT sin, and so we die. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. You see the beauty of this? You cannot make yourself right with God—you are a slave to sin, and yet you are also a slave to righteousness through the blood of Christ.

You live your whole life in this tension between liking sin and also wanting to please God. You are called to struggle against sin in your mortal bodies, and discipline your flesh, and yet you know that all such efforts have to proceed from, and go back to, God. You know that your mortal bodies must die as a penalty for sin, and yet you also know that if we have died with Christ we will also live with him. Forever. If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.

This is what Paul is saying here: for this life, we are to live as people who have been brought from death to life, obediently presenting our members to God as instruments of righteousness. We press on toward the goal of eternal life with and through Christ.

The good news is that Jesus will not leave you stuck in your sin, caught in the tension, trying to get yourself clean, looking at a paycheck full of death. Instead, God freely gives you wages that you do not deserve, the wages of mercy and pity and freedom from sin, freedom for righteousness. The advantage you get is sanctification—being made holy. And the end is eternal life. Amen.