I Do Not Do the Good I Want

July 5, 2026

Romans 7:15-25

            Our scripture reading this morning… believe it or not… is from the lectionary and is… I feel… the perfect word for us today.  Listen as God speaks to you from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.

            READ

            To live a life of faith by the theology of grace… or the law of love… is… by its very nature… aspirational.  It’s aspirational because grace is a higher godly ideal that we cannot… in our sin infused flesh… ever attain.  We cannot achieve grace.  We are always living into God’s free gift of grace.  If we say we have attained the embodiment of grace, then we are saying we have become God.  It is God’s grace that sets us free from sin.  It is God’s grace through the Holy Spirit that seeks to bring resurrection life to these dead bodies of ours.  Grace itself is the breath of life that animates us… that shows us what it is to be truly alive as Christ was, is, and will be truly alive.

            I mean… think about the guiding law of love.  The law of love cannot be readily delineated by some set of static rules.  It cannot be fulfilled through culture wars or fever dreams of punishment for the people who are living outside the religious laws we create to glorify ourselves… our feeble attempt of proving ourselves worthy before God.  The law of love is about presence… it is about the act of grace incarnated.  The law of love is Christ meeting people where they are… in whatever sin that is covering them and then restoring… reconciling… resurrecting their humanity.  It’s not about demanding the sinner to be without sin… it’s the connecting of sinner with grace… and letting God do the work of salvation.  Our law of love means crossing boundaries and prejudices… in abandoning slogans and suffocating political ideologies.  It is being present… and it is being merciful as God is merciful.  It is being just as God is just.  It is taking up our cross so that others may find freedom from sin.

            This aspirational theology of grace… this law of love… this is what Paul taught in his letters.  These are the theological words that are to shape our Christian moral character.  And it is also this same theology… this same law of love… that Paul failed.  He knew that.  He understood it.  “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am!”  Aspirational means always falling short… but joyfully striving all the same.  It means always journeying towards a destination that will not be reached.  Paul fell short.  In his writings… in his actions… as he is meditating upon and living into the real-world implications of his faith… as his own inner spiritual journey continues and challenges his cultural context… his heritage… his patterns of understanding and interpreting the world in which he lived… his own temperament and personality… Paul rises… Paul falls.  Paul is able to write the words that he will never fully embody in himself.  These aspirational words… especially in this letter to the church in Rome… these words have the dirt and the grime of living on them.  Old understandings are let go.  He learns through his struggles knowing how some failures in this world are victories in the faith of grace. 

Paul never stops reaching towards the Christ who came to him… who called him by name and said, “You are mine.”  Paul never replaces a realistic cynicism for his aspirational faith.  Paul never replaces grace with other achievable rubrics of success.  Paul doesn’t confuse his ego… large as it was… with the real presence of God.

            We have been gifted these words of his… not so we can get stuck by having to recreate the time and the place where Paul’s faith took him.  We have been gifted these words of his so that we can take Paul’s end and make it our beginning… so our faith can take the necessary journey… can touch some of the aspirations of grace in our own time and place.  And the same for the generation that follows us.  And the generations that will follow them.

            On this Sunday where our country is celebrating 250 year of the Declaration of Independence… this writing that we ourselves declare is the birth of our nation… what we come together to celebrate is not the mundane workings of government… not our politics… nor the dirt underneath our feet… nor some frozen point in history we are never supposed to progress past.  We celebrate the aspirational aspect in the founding of our country. 

I feel like in most people’s minds, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is it… that is the declaration that is being made to the world.  Ask most people and they don’t know that most of the text is full of the grievances of the colonists against the rule of King George.  When we read together the first three paragraphs this morning…  which of the three did you know well?  Which of the three have been quoted to you time and again?  “We hold these Truths…”  That is the aspirational aspect of this document that has gone on to shape the moral character of this nation. 

And as I have been reading and thinking about this… here’s the thought that surprised me.  You could take out the aspirational words from the second paragraph.  You could remove this higher ideal… and the document would still function for the purpose it was intended.  Remove that one aspirational sentence that has inspired throughout these 250 years… and with a minimum of rewriting… the document would still dissolve the political bands… would still give the grounding for a revolution against the king… would still contain powerful ideas like a government deriving its powers from the consent of the governed.  The document itself doesn’t need the aspiration… “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”  But if we were to remove it… whether in print or in understanding… we would lose the heart of this grand experiment.  Remove it and the notion of our country having a higher moral character… disappears.  Remove it and there is nothing here to save us from the low moral character of subsequent leaders and the events of 250 years of this country.  All because we would have no greater vision of what could be.

In my reading to prepare for this sermon, I came across a letter from Phillis Wheatley… who was “America’s most famous black poet of the eighteenth century…”  A letter written in 1774 to “America’s most famous ordained Indian of that time, Presbyterian Samson Occom.”  Two years before Jefferson wrote his aspirational sentence she wrote this, “[F]or in every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same principle lives in us.  God grant deliverance in his own way and time, and get him honor upon all those whose avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the calamities of their fellow creatures.  This I desire not for their hurt, but to convince them of the strange absurdity of their conduct whose words and actions are so diametrically opposite.  How well the cry for liberty, and the reverse disposition for the exercise of oppressive power over others agree, -  I humbly think it does not require the penetration of a philosopher to determine.”

Self-evident truths shaping a moral character… that when violated… we are to fight against.  When we as a nation do not do the good that we want… but instead the evil that offends the sense of decency that springs forth from our aspirational, moral character… what else are we to do?  Sink into cynicism and apathy… forgo this miraculous melting pot of a community built through hard fought equality for a depressive and oppressive rugged individualism… have greed and materialism be our glorious creed?  Without this aspirational spirit quickening our country, we are as good as dead.  Wretched nation that we are.

So… some words put to paper by imperfect men.  Words that were not fulfilled in their time.  Words that are still seeking their fulfillment in God.  I could be talking about Paul.  I could be talking about the signers of this Declaration of Independence.  Aspirational words that spoke to a reality that lay beyond what was to what could be… a higher understanding of our life together.  Aspirational words that will never let us be content with our own exercise of sin. 

In a little while, we will be reading portions of a speech by Frederick Douglass from July 5, 1852 and hear his hope in the belief that these aspirational words put to paper would finally dismantle the institution of slavery in this country.  On this 250^th celebration of these aspirational words… that’s the question for you… what hope do you still hold in these self-evident truths?  Or maybe the better question is… what hope are you passing on to the generations that will follow you.  Government institutions.  Church institutions.  They are repositories of our values… mirrors of what we hold to be true.  Are these words still the means to our finding the will to do the good we want to do… the good that is illumined by these words?  Is there still hope that our national moral character will be shaped by that to which we aspire to be?  Amen.