Don't Break Your Compass
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I would wager that the woman at the well is perhaps the best-known passage among Anglican Christians. I say this because in our lectionary it comes the same Sunday as the second half of Romans 1. Where Paul begins his long masterful argument on the righteousness of God. This passage touches on themes that wade into the tribal political waters that are not just ready to explode, but already have. Romans 1 is offensive. If it were a Disney Plus show it would have that long text disclaimer about how outdated the content is. Where it confidently proclaims it was wrong then and it is wrong now. A culturally relevant church will choose the woman at the well every time. Obvious choice. No brainer. But to constantly ignore the tough things of Scripture, is to set them aside as Scripture. When we encounter the tough things in Scripture, we have a lot of choices for how to handle the situation and most of them are wrong. It may not be wise to identify them for you, if you haven’t thought of them already. But I think it’s helpful for maturing Christians, especially in the season of Lent, where self-examination is a heightened concern, to get a sense of what we’re up against in ourselves.
First, we can water down the message. Get out the old Thomas Jefferson razor blade and slice the offending passage out of the collection of words I am obligated to listen to and shape my life around. Second, we can corporately agree to hide behind the lectionary. Surely I can go with a different one of the four readings. Let’s just go with the woman at the well, like sensible culturally relevant humans. Third, there’s the “That’s just Paul” route. Sure Paul was an apostle, sent by the Lord Jesus Christ to proclaim the beautiful, but sometimes hard, truths of God, but he wasn’t Jesus himself. He’s bound to have gotten some things wrong. There’s also the argument that this was for a different time and place. Different cultures thought differently about some things. We can set those things aside. Or the more smug variation, what C. S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery, that humanity has come so far since the first century AD, if only Paul knew then, what we know now.… And then there’s the tough choice, the right choice of actually trying to submit to Scripture as if it is the very word of God and we are finite humans made out of dust, destined to return there. While it’s not nearly as fun as some of the others, and definitely not as easy, I opt for the last choice. So, against the woman at the well, the cultural waters, my sense for how it will be received, indeed common sense, and possibly all sound judgment, let’s look at the second half of Romans 1 together this morning.
We’ve talked a lot about orienting our lives toward God in the last few weeks and months together. If you have your sermon BINGO cards out, you can at this time cross out the word calibrate. I’ve used this unusual word in many of my sermons recently. I’ve tried to find a better one. It’s not a Bible word, but it is a biblical concept. I think it’s the thing that’s most needed in our increasingly post-Christian context of society today. And that is partly because so many Christian leaders, most visibly, have just fallen, failed miserably in their love for their fellow Christians and for the world around them. So many Christian leaders have disqualified themselves from leadership and some have shown themselves to be absolute villains. And all along the way, they use religious language and concepts to justify their wickedness. Their hearts were so badly out of alignment with Christ, that in some cases, it’s clear that their consciences had been seared long ago. It’s as if there was nothing left to recalibrate.
And of course this isn’t just an issue for religious leaders. It’s an issue for all human beings. It’s a human need to rightly calibrate our hearts and minds, to see up as up and down as down, good as good, and evil as evil. Without this ability, we are lost, spiritually blind. Paul starts off his treatment on spiritual blindness in our passage today by giving us the thing to be calibrated to. We’ll look at Paul’s epistle in sections this morning and we begin with verse 16:
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Our entire discussion this morning could revolve around these verses. What is the gospel? The gospel is the good news, in Greek, the euangelion, where we get the battered word evangelical. The word “Evangelical” is not going away completely until seminaries stop teaching Greek, which could be any day now. The euangelion, is the heart of Christianity. It’s the good news of Jesus Christ, his life, death, resurrection, and how those things affect all our lives and reality itself. Though the news media might cause me to be ashamed of the word evangelical sometimes, with Paul, I cannot be ashamed of the euangelion, this good news of Jesus Christ.
This good news itself is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. Hearing and believing is enough to bring salvation. The simple moment of belief flips a switch in our hearts and the dimmest light turns on and we see God for who he is and us for who we are and the light begins to grow brighter; our hearts and lives begin to change and we begin to be characterized by Jesus and the good news about Him.
And it’s for everyone, for God’s chosen people, the Jews, who carried the things of God, the events and wisdom of the first 3/4 of our Bible, for so many generations into the time that the Messiah Jesus came and fulfilled them. It’s right that this good news is for them first and then for the rest of the world. But it is for everyone, which is good news in itself. It’s part of the big good news package.
From faith for faith, from belief for belief, the righteousness of God is revealed in the good news. When Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, we learned a new thing about righteousness. That it doesn’t have to be stoic, disciplined, and rigid. It can be as simple as hearing something true and thinking about it, letting it hit the senses, and aligning our hearts to it. Believing something true from God is something God counts as righteousness. And so, how much more so is believing the good news of who he is and what he has done through his Son Jesus Christ counted as righteousness. And so, we learn that if you want to be righteous, you need to be characterized by believing the true things, the content of God’s words that he places before you.
And that’s why having a heart that’s calibrated toward God as God is so important. Because when our compass becomes demagnetized and stops pointing North, we find ourselves lost, and we may not discover this for a while, if ever. That’s a disheartening thought to imagine. But Paul describes an even worse situation, where people begin to resent their compass and break it on purpose. Look at verse 18:
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
So if simply believing true things from God is counted as righteousness and brings salvation. The opposite brings wrath. So these choices when faced with a piece of God’s truth, the choice of whether to believe it or to ignore it, are monumental. And the bigger the truth, the bigger the consequence. Belief becomes righteousness which brings salvation, but disbelief becomes unrighteousness which brings wrath. Suppressing the truth, breaking your compass so you can call any direction North is not only bad for you, it breaks your good categories you have for the world, of what a God is, what a human is, what a culture is, what love is, and it eventually breaks your mind and your heart and begins building a system of lies and lying. Not only this, but in addition to breaking you in a number of different ways, suppressing the truth breaks your relationship with God. Don’t break your compass. It’s the worst thing you can do. Literally.
In the end your religious reflexes pick up what Paul calls mortal man, a person like Donald Trump, or a bird, like a Seahawk, or an animal or a bug and bow down to it. Paul is telling us we will worship something. Worship is an intense thing. We don’t even have a category for it in our society any more. Who talks about worship outside the walls of a church? If a normal American is going to go through the mental and spiritual steps of identifying something as worthy to be bowed down to, why, in your intrinsic dignity would you offer that much of yourself to something that doesn’t deserve it, something other than the person who created you and died in your place to have a relationship with them? Why worship anyone else? The answer is that people just want to break their compasses. They want to do whatever they want to do. Better to worship a bug that I can easily squash or a man that can be killed than to have to follow someone else’s agenda, even if it’s the person who holds my molecules together and causes my eyes to see and blesses me with children and friends.
And now for the difficult piece to say out loud in our day and age. Verse 26:
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And so, with broken compasses, humanity moves forward, keeps going, but not in a discernable direction. People with broken compasses continue to fall in love but as they worshiped what they shouldn’t have worshiped, they began to have romantic relationships with people they were never meant to have romantic relationships with. Forward, forward, directionless, forward. Progress for progress’ sake. Of progress, C. S. Lewis tells us this: When two people are walking in the wrong direction, when they realize that they are walking in the wrong direction, the truly progressive person is the one who turns around. We need our compasses fixed. In our passage today, Paul is talking about more than homosexuality. I am as much a sinner as anyone engaging in homosexual behavior. I am just as guilty of transgressing against the righteousness of God. Further, someone who has built their identity around being L or G or B or T is just as much made in the image of God as I am. And many of us have people, close family members, who build their identities around these things. And we do and should love them just as much as we love the rest of our family and friends. And we can do that because we believe that sexual identity is not a primary identity. They may see it that way, but we cannot. We have to see through someone’s sexual identity and love them as Christ would love them, even if they see their sexual identity as their main identity. But we have a responsibility to God not to break our compasses for the sake of their broken compasses.
Instead, humans need to recalibrate our compasses. He shows us that if a compass points West when it should point North, something is wrong. It’s not calibrated to the truth. And Paul tells us that choosing to engage in sexual behavior outside of God’s design for marriage is an indication that the compass has been broken. Just as giving your worship to a human or something other than God is an indication of a broken compass.
Lest we get too political and tribal and triumphalistic, Paul doesn’t close the book after mentioning homosexuality as if it’s the only sin. He’s coming for the rest of us as well. How are we doing in these areas? Look at verse 28:
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Who is the they here? They did not see fit to acknowledge God. Paul isn’t referring to the previous section on homosexuality, he’s referring to the top. This list isn’t a list of things that homosexuals do, it’s a list of things that people with broken compasses do. People who refuse to see God as God. That is the disease and the list above are the symptoms. When we break our compasses, stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes, and run away saying la, la, la, la, we make bad decisions, and we reinforce them, and we become characterized by them. If we remove God from the equation, he removes himself from the equation, and us created beings, made in the image of God, continue to create things just like our Creator creates things. And with him out of the picture we build our own systems, our own towers that reach into the heavens. And without God, and eventually in opposition to God, our systems produce a horrible mix of the worst of human nature that we just read. They do those things and give approval to those who practice them. When we break our compass, we fall apart, we dis-integrate and we Frankenstein our own morality together from the pieces we find ourselves in. And notice that Paul applies the death penalty to all of them. They are all indications that the compass needs to be recalibrated. And that is what Lent is about.
Do not break your compass. Do not approve of people breaking their compass. But you need to know that compasses can be repaired, if you want them to be. This Book of Romans that Paul has written takes us from broken compasses to more than conquerors. There is hope. But that hope is not in making peace with misalignment with God as God. In this penitential season of Lent, we’re called to better alignment. And that sometimes goes against everything we hear in our culture and around many of our Thanksgiving dinner tables. In this season of Lent, we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And in doing so, we look to God as God and we find our rest in him, even when he says or does something we don’t like. It’s our job to wrestle with the hard truths and in the end orient ourselves to them. So I pray for us that God gives us eyes to see and hearts to love all of his words, because without them we are lost. Without them, we are left to hold our own molecules together.
So let us not be ashamed of the gospel, but continually seek him and worship him alone as God. Let us find our identity in him alone. Let us strive to understand and conform our lives to his righteousness and after that striving, after believing the good and hard truth God has set before us, we can trust the promise that we will be saved.