Text:  Romans 5:12-25                                                                5^th Sunday after Pentecost

“Unfair!”

            Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; dear friends:

            We are all sinners.  Every single one of us, from the instant of conception, all the way up to and including the moment we exhale our last breath, there is absolutely nothing that we think, feel, say, or do that is not infected, and therefore spoiled, by the evil within us.  You are such a sinner.  But, of course, you knew that:  it’s a fundamental principle of your Christian faith – and to a large degree, it’s because of that sad truth that you came here today.  We know we’re sinners.  This is where we gather to hear what God has done to rescue us from sin and its dominion over us.  We know that in a spiritual sense, we are sick; we’ve come to receive the Lord’s great cure.

But what’s rather interesting to me is that even though we are all sinners, and according to the Scriptures our very hearts and the innermost thoughts of our minds are entirely corrupted by our iniquity, each of us does have a fairly well developed sense of justice.  The concepts of right and wrong, and fairness, and equality before the law are very present in each of us, even in the worst of criminals. We don’t always do what’s right, but for the most part, we have a pretty good idea of what right is. We seem to know it instinctively, even from earliest childhood.  You could demonstrate it by taking a couple of children two or three years old.  Set them at the table facing each other and give them both a bowl of ice cream, giving one child a serving noticeably larger than the other.  You know what will happen.  The child with the smaller portion will immediately begin to protest,  “That’s not fair – he got more than me!”  And so you see that even while the child making the complaint is demonstrating a major symptom of sin, namely being self-absorbed and looking out for number one, the fact that he appeals to a standard of justice proves that he understands what justice is.

            And what’s particularly offensive to the child in a case like this is that the benefactor providing the ice cream, probably a parent of one or both of the children, is perceived as being someone who should act justly.  The child expects it.  He understands that not everyone has to play that fair.  A child visiting at the home of a friend understands that all the toys belong to the other kid.  And if there’s a favorite toy, the guy who owns it decides when and if he’ll share. He doesn’t have to be “fair” about it. But if a parent, someone in authority, were to do something that appeared to play favorites, then you’d hear the cries for justice.

And we all have this perception.  We expect those with authority to act justly – with complete fairness.  It’s a rule.  And I know you all think so because I’ve seen what happens at the ballgames of your children or grandchildren.  The referees are supposed to be completely impartial; and when they’re not, specifically if all of their calls seem to go against your team while the other team is getting away with everything short of murder, you’re going to get upset.  It’s funny though, have you noticed that it’s always the supporters of the team that gets penalized when a ref makes a bad call that take exception (kind of like that child who got less ice cream, it’s never the child who got more that complains).  And so while the folks whose team is taking the bum wrap are all grousing and raising havoc about how stupid, blind, or incompetent the ref is, the fans who benefit from a bad call remain strangely silent – even when they know it’s not fair.  So much for justice then.  Instead we see the fans whose team gains from a bad call shrugging their shoulders and making apologies.  They say things like, “That’s just what happens sometimes”, “You know, being a referee must be tough work.  I’m sure glad I don’t have that kind of pressure on me”, and “Hey, nobody’s perfect’.

            And yet we perceive that some things should be perfect. Take the legal system for example. Nobody wants to see an innocent person unjustly accused, much less convicted or sentenced.  That really makes us mad both because it’s just not right for someone to have to suffer unjustly, and because we understand that “if it can happen to that guy, it can happen to me”.  And then, on the other end of the spectrum, we hate to see the guilty go unpunished.  When a killer or rapist gets off on a silly technicality, or because he has a slick lawyer who knows how to bamboozle a jury, or when an appellate judge with his head in the clouds overturns a conviction for no apparent reason, we are likely to display some righteous indignation.  We hold those who enforce and administer the law to a higher standard. So, do you see the irony:  even though we are imperfect and our hearts are perverted and our minds are clouded by sin, which is lawlessness, we want there to be perfect justice in the prosecution of the law. Though we are imperfect, we want those responsible for meting out justice to be perfectly fair.

That’s why we’re very careful about who gets appointed to the Supreme Court. The more authority someone has with respect to the law, the more just and fair we insist that person be.  And that extends all the way up to highest authority there is:  the Lord God.  We expect that everything he does must be absolutely, one hundred percent, unmistakably and undeniably fair.

And so it really makes us feel uncomfortable when we read things in Scripture like the three lessons we heard today where it seems that the Lord God is being unfair.  In today’s Gospel for example, Jesus tells the disciples, “What I tell you in secret, you are to proclaim from the rooftops.”  It’s a relatively minor thing, but if you’re one of the disciples you might be thinking, “Hey wait a minute:  this message you want broadcast around is controversial.  It’s going to get people angry, maybe violent.  How come you get to keep it quiet and safe, but we have to take all the heat?  That’s not fair!”

            We hear that very idea given voice in the Old Testament reading where we find the prophet Jeremiah’s complaint.  He was God’s spokesman during a period in which the people of Judah were notoriously unfaithful.  So the Lord sent him to proclaim a message of dire warning about all the horrible judgments that would fall if they didn’t repent and return to the Lord.  Jeremiah did that for a while, but he was abused terribly by his hearers.  They laughed at him, and beat him, and imprisoned him in a deep, dank, muddy hole in the ground.  So he said to himself, “This is dumb.  These people don’t want to hear what God has to say.  So I’m going to keep my mouth shut from here on out.”  But he found that he couldn’t do that either.  We hear him complain, “Lord, you are not being fair to me.  Proclaiming your message has only got me into trouble.  But if I don’t speak your words and try to hold them in, they burn within my soul so that I’m in agony until I speak up.  I lose either way.  And it’s not fair what you’re doing to me.”

And I suspect that many of you have experienced this.  You come across those situations when you know you should speak up with God’s word on something – but you don’t do it for fear of what people will think or do.  But then, afterwards, you burn with guilt about not taking a stand when you knew should have.  Then you’re stuck like Jeremiah: feeling rotten about not doing what you should have done, and perhaps, a little resentful that the Lord put you in that situation to begin with.  It didn’t seem fair.

And speaking of the Lord putting you in a seemingly impossible and unfair situation, there’s today’s Epistle reading, where St. Paul discusses the problem of original sin.  In the minds of many, this is the granddaddy of all unfairness.  Original sin is the real guilt and consequent condemnation that you inherit from your parents, that they got from their parents, going all the way back to our first parents, Adam and Eve, who sinned when they ate the forbidden fruit.  And just to be sure you understand it, I’ll make it as clear as possible:  you stand condemned in the court of divine justice first and foremost because Adam, your ancient ancestor, ate a piece of fruit that the Lord God told him to leave alone.  You are held personally guilty and sentenced to death and hell for what he did.  It’s that simple.  And surely you’re thinking, “But that’s not fair!”

And it’s actually worse than that.  You see, once a person is a sinner, everything they do is contaminated. They are not capable of doing anything perfectly right.  They cannot help but sin.   But, Paul tells us, “sin is not taken into account when there is no law.”  What he means is that God does not condemn people for sins ex post facto; that is, they won’t be held accountable for sins they committed before he announced the law.  So, take all those wicked people who died in the flood of Noah’s time, long before God gave the law to Moses.  They were evil, violent people; no question about it: that’s why the Lord determined to wipe them out.  And they knew right and wrong instinctively, just like we do.  They knew they were sinning – and yet, because the Lord had not yet given the law, when they stand before him in judgment, there will be only one charge against them.  They will hear the verdict:  “You are guilty of Adam’s sin.  You’re condemned.  Next case.”

            And if you think that sounds rough, in this same chapter, Paul goes on to explain why God gave the law to Moses.  It wasn’t, he says, to get people to obey and do what is right, because we are born sinners and can’t do what’s right anyway, no matter how hard we try.  Instead, Paul says, God gave Moses the law so that the trespass would increase. That is, he gave the law to make you more guilty.  By announcing that from here on out all these commandments that you are breaking all the time anyway are law, he can add each violation to your wrap sheet. Now, instead of charging you with just one count of original sin, he can charge you with every sin you commit – and each one carries the same penalty of eternal death and damnation.  You get condemned to an eternity in hell millions of times over.  (Hmm … makes you wonder if the sentences are concurrent or sequential.  I guess it really doesn’t make a difference, does it?)

Now, you’ve got to admit, that seems pretty unfair, doesn’t it?  You never had a chance.  The cards were all stacked against you from the very start. There was no way for you to win the game of life and make it to the great Millionaire Acres in the sky. It’s just not fair.  And unfortunately, that’s where a lot of people stay stuck.  Like petulant children who don’t like the decision made by a parent, they cross their arms, stick out their lower lips, and pout about how unfair it all seems. “God’s unfair!  So I’m not going to listen to him anymore!”  But that’s kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Whether or not you think it’s fair, he’s still the Lord God, the source and keeper of all life, and you are still his condemned creature.  And since he’s the final authority, the Judge who sits on the bench in the very last court of appeals, there’s no one else to hear your complaint and overturn the verdict.

So, rather than complain about the unfairness, it makes much more sense to see if there’s another way out of the predicament.  And if we do, we’ll find out that the Lord has been giving us the answer all along.  “Unfair, you say?  Okay, but my ways are not your ways.  It’s true, I’m not fair as you understand fairness:  I make the rain fall upon the righteous – and the unrighteous even though they don’t deserve it.  I do not treat you as your sins deserve.  I desire mercy, not sacrifice.  I do not desire the death of the sinner, rather that the sinner turn to me and live.  You complain that it’s unfair that you were born in sin and condemned to death? Fine.  Come to me and I’ll give you a new birth – a new birth to everlasting life in Jesus Christ my Son.”

How does that work?  Well, St. Paul explains that just as you were born in sin as a descendant of Adam – that is, you inherited his guilt and corruption – so also, when you are reborn in Christ Jesus, the Second Adam, you inherited his righteousness and perfection. The same mechanism that allows you to inherit the guilt of Adam, allows you to inherit the righteousness of Christ. It happened when he gave you faith in the Gospel by the power of the Holy Spirit.  And just as you didn’t do anything to be condemned, so also, you don’t do anything to be declared righteous:  it’s a gift.  “[And] the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!”  You see, one sin condemned us all, but on top of that sin each one of us has heaped a big, ugly pile of our own guilt.  All of us have increased the trespass many million fold by our selfish, arrogant, grumbling attitude with respect to God, and the mean, unloving things we say and do to others.  But the gift of the One Man is his own righteous life:  that’s what he gives to us.  He kept the whole law to free us from its demands and penalties. When we receive the gift, that is, when we trust in him, we are taken out from under the law; it doesn’t apply to us anymore – and “sin is not taken into account when there is no law” – so we have no sin.

And no, it’s not fair.  It’s a gift.  And a gift is something you get when you don’t deserve it.  And so we should thank God that he is not fair to us, but rather that he is gracious and loving to us.  So gracious and loving, in fact, that he took those billions of eternities of suffering in the hopeless gloom of hell that we justly deserved, and very unjustly he laid upon them on his Son, our Savior.  You see, in an absolute sense, God is fair.  He’s just not fair to us.  The price had to be paid for the guilt of all mankind, it was only fair, so he paid it himself so that we wouldn’t have to.  And when he increased the trespass by adding the law he gave to Moses, he was actually increasing the penalty that he himself would pay upon the cross of Jesus.

What does that mean?  It means that the Lord in whom we trust is incomprehensibly in love with us.  It staggers the imagination.  We hear Jesus saying the same thing in this morning’s Gospel when he says, “the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”  It’s a way of saying that God cares for you more than you can possible grasp.  And though that’s true, that we will never understand the full extent of his love, we can easily get lost marveling in its magnitude by looking at the cross.  It remains for us a symbol of how wonderfully unfair our God is to us, and what a precious gift he has given to us in his Son.

Oh, and there’s something else that’s unfair about it.  When you have the gift, you have both the honor and desire to share it.  The Lord invites you to join him in the blessed joy of giving the gift to others. You didn’t deserve that privilege either; but there are a lot of people out there who are still complaining that God is unfair.  They’re upset about the way things are in their lives; they’re angry and miserable, and they blame God for it.  You can tell them that they’re right:  God’s not fair.  And you can tell them what incredibly good news for them that is.  These people aren’t to be feared; they are to be rescued.  Let’s reach out and do it, in the name of Jesus and his love. Amen. 

Soli Deo Gloria!