Thomas J Parlette
“Stained Hands”
Romans 5: 1-8
6/14/20
There are many ways one could go with a sermon on these verses from Romans. It’s a rich passage to be sure, with allusions to being “justified by faith”, boasting in our sufferings”, “suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and hope does not disappoint.”
All of those phrases are worthy of a deep look. But not all in the same sermon. As one of my preaching professors used to say – “Don’t preach on everything a passage has to say, save some for next time.”
So instead of trying to dive into all the possibilities this passage contains, I’m going to zero in on the final couple of verses, in fact the very last phrase of the text, that says “while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.” To help us do that, I’d like to tell you about Rachel Held Evans.
When RHE, as she was known online, a wife and mother of two small children died on May 4th, 2019, at the age of 37, it was not just her family, friends and acquaintances who were saddened. Thousands of people across the nation who’d never met her face to face also felt a deep sense of loss. The bond was forged because of what Evans had written about the Christian faith in her popular blog and books.
Such was the power of her words about moving from the evangelical faith of her youth to a progressive stance on Christianity that a writer for the The Christian Century called her “the most influential mainline theologian of her generation, the C.S. Lewis of her time.” While Evans herself was neither trained nor credentialed in religious studies, and was not ordained and never pastored a church, she influenced many people who entered the ministry, especially women.
Although she was raised in a conservative Christian home and environment and as a teen embraced that expression of Christianity, she eventually found herself pushing back against traditional evangelical positions. She challenged gender roles in the church and advocated for LGBTQ inclusion. “At times, she was a friendly dialogue partner,” said journalist Kaye Shellnut, writing in Vox. And other times, Evans was “a watchdog against the tradition she grew up in-earning the title ’the most polarizing woman in evangelicalism’ per The Washington Post, and being described as ‘saying the things pastors can’t in the Christian magazine Sojourners.” The Atlantic dubbed her a “hero to Christian misfits.”
Evans had a broad appeal, even among her critics. While she lay in a coma before her death, her well-wishers ranged from conservative evangelical leaders who openly disagreed with her as well as people so theologically liberal that they disagreed with the very idea of prayer.
Katelyn Beaty, editor at large for Christianity Today, commented that Evans “wrote unflinchingly about how hard it is trust God, to forgive church leaders, to wrestle with Scripture. There was a quiet sadness to her writing, a grief over having lost a simpler faith and faith community.”
“RHE taught the beauty of a messy and complicated faith,” wrote an Evans follower, Christina Rosetti, on twitter. “She showed us how to hold multiple perspectives in tension. She made people feel safe to talk about doubt.”
Although Evans eventually moved away from her evangelical faith to a more progressive position, she never left the church, instead moving to a congregation of a mainline denomination. In her book Searching for Sunday, she says that she remained a Christian despite all her doubts and objections to traditional theology “because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is present in ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition – that we are not okay.”(1)
Which, of course, is what Paul says in different words in Romans 5 - “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly…But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”
We are not okay.
Of course, Paul was not the first to say this. Centuries earlier, the prophet we sometimes refer to as “Second Isaiah” or Isaiah of Babylon” wrote about a Suffering Servant and declared, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way,” and as a result, the Lord has laid on that servant “the iniquity of us all.” And many generations before Isaiah, the Lord told the Israelites to put fringes on their garments so they would remember “all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes.”
It’s always been true – we are not okay.
But we don’t need to go way back into Scripture to know this. Many of us are aware that we individually and collectively have piles of moral garbage that we don’t want others to see.
In Searching for Sunday, Evans spoke of the stark language in prayers of confession, which acknowledge plainly our sinfulness, and likened them to the kind of introductions that are typical at Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “My name is----, and I’m an alcoholic.” In the sme way that those introductions equalize attendees at AA meeting, Evans said, prayers of confession equalize worshipers in church.
These prayers, said Evans, “remind us that all move through the world in the same state – broken and beloved – and that we’re all in need of healing and grace. They embolden us to confess to one another not only our sins, but also our fears, our doubts, our questions, our injuries and our pain. They give us permission to start telling one another the truth, and to believe that this strange way of living is the only way to set one another free.”
But, Evans noted, our churches sometimes feel more like country clubs that AA meetings, especially when we mumble through rote confessions and merely exchange pleasantries with fellow worshipers “while mingling beneath a cross upon which hung a beaten, nearly naked man, suffering publicly on our behalf.”
She said she suspects this habit stems from the same impulse that told her she should drop a few pounds before joining the Y (so as not to embarrass herself in front of the fit people), “the same impulse,” Evans said, “that kept my mother from hiring a housekeeper because she felt compelled to clean the bathroom before the Merry Maids arrived (so as not to expose to the world the abomination that is a hair clogged shower drain).”
“The truth is, we think church is for people living in the “after picture,” said Evans. “We think church is for the healthy, even though Jesus told us time and time again he came to minister to the sick. We think church is for good people, not resurrected people.”
Stan Purdum writes about an experience he had a country church he pastored years ago. He decided one Saturday in October to harvest the black walnuts that were falling to the ground, encased in tough green husks as large as baseballs, from a large tree behind the parsonage. He collected a couple of baskets full of nuts. He knew that the nuts were buried deep inside these tough outer skins. While he supposed the husks would eventually split open in time – he saw no reason to wait, and he tried to speed up the process with a knife.
After some effort, he got a couple cuts made through the shell and began trying to peel off the husk. It was tougher than he expected, so he went after it with a screwdriver, with the clear juice from the meat of the husks running onto his hands. After about a half hour he had succeeded to opening up two walnuts – so he gave up.
When he washed up, however, he found that the husk juice had left dark stains on his hands that would not come off, not even with undiluted bleach.
Then it dawned on him, it was communion Sunday the next day. He was going to have to serve communion with his stained hands. So in church the next day, before starting communion, he told the congregation about his walnut adventure, and despite appearances, his hands were clean. The whole congregation had a good chuckle at his expense, and nobody seemed to mind being served communion by a pastor with stained hands.
After the service, one of the older farmers said, “You know, there is a way to get the nuts open if you still want them. Just dump them in your gravel driveway and leave’em there for a few days, running over them with your car as you come and go. That’ll loosen most of the husks and you should be able to pry the nut out no problem – just remember to wear gloves.”
In his book New Mercies I See, Purdum writes that “ it was only later that I realized I had missed a good opportunity for a solid theological statement: Nobody comes to the Lord’s Supper with clean hands.”(2) Everybody who comes before the Lord has stained hands.
Fortunately, God doesn’t require that our hands, or our souls, be clean before welcoming us. The gospel message tells us that God sent his Son NOT to condemn us, but to save us. And although Psalm 24 says that only those with clean hands and pure hearts can stand before the Lord, the point is that God cleans our hands and purifies our hearts so that we can stand in the Holy Presence.
Whether we actually say these words or not, we come before God, as Evans indicated, with the AA-inspired statement, “My name is----, and I am a sinner.”
And God responds with, “Your name is child of God, and you are redeemed.”
That’s what Paul tells us in our text: But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” He’s the servant upon whom, Isaiah said, “the iniquity of us all” – our moral garbage- is laid, and he carries it away.
Rachel Held Evans, despite her persistent doubts and knee-jerk cynicism, found the right reason to stay with the church – “because Christianity names and addresses sin,” our stained hands, and directs us to the Lord, who cleanses us and redeems us.
And for that, may God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline.com, retrieved June 1st, 2020.
2. Ibid…
