The Devil's Protection Racket

Sermon for the seventh Sunday after Trinity

How do you understand the word yield?

Saint Paul tells us that we have yielded our members servants to uncleanness. We often understand the word yield as meaning to give something up after a struggle. For example, we might think of soldiers yielding to the onslaught of the enemy. All we might think of a yield of grain, that is what the wheat gives up to us at harvest time. If we have yielded to unrighteousness, does that mean evil has conquered us?

[PAUSE]

It's true that we are in the midst of a battle with sin. Every day we are tempted to sin and often we fall into sin. Often we lose our battle against temptation, does that mean we are in danger of death?

It's important to understand what St Paul means here. When he says yield, he doesn't mean that our life is ripped away from us as the spoils of our war with sin. He actually means that we offer ourselves to sin in some kind of protection racket led by the Devil. Look at him tempting Our Lord with an easy life if only He would bow down and worship him. The Devil means that we see sin as the stronger power and so we pay it service so that we choose the path of least resistance in order not to get hurt and rather live a quieter life. If we don't, he promises us a hard life of persecution and temptation.

St Paul is saying that before we encounter Our Lord’s Incarnation, we live lives which trouble us least and this means sinning in order to go with the flow. We allow ourselves to become servants of uncleanness because that’s what everyone else is doing, and what everyone else is benefitting from.

The temptation is to see ourselves as victims of sin and that we cannot do anything but sin against God. If we succumb to this temptation then we spend our lives cowering in fear of sin and death and this is not the life that Christ wants for us for perfect love casts out fear.

St Paul says that the Devil’s protection racket is a sham. We have a choice. We always have a choice. We are not so far conquered by sin that our service to uncleanness is inevitable, for he tells us to yield ourselves as servants to righteousness and holiness. He is presenting us with a different narrative for our lives.

Before we meet the Lord, the stronger pull on our lives is our own belly, our own righteousness, our own intellect blinded to the truth of God. When Christ Our God appears, our eyes are opened. No longer are Sin, the World and the Devil the strongest forces in our lives, but Christ is. We see Christ the conqueror on the Cross, crucifying the powers of evil. We see Christ bursting the gates of Hades in triumph to open the way of righteousness for all those who have died. We see Christ rising again and destroying the sting of death.

This means that our battle has ceased to be a foregone conclusion. We may be weak in the face of the temptations of evil, but we have one who has already won the war on our behalf. It means that while we often fall into sin, we need not see ourselves as victims anymore. To define ourselves as victims means that we have been utterly conquered by our oppressors so that we cannot accept that in paying dues to sin, we make others victims too. To be a victim means that we cannot forgive because to forgive would rob us of our identity as a victim. To say that our sin is inevitable means that we have given up the fight to be with Our Lord.

Our lives are not defined by victimhood but rather by growth in Christ. This means a life of struggle against sin in which we fall many, many times in the same old ways. It means struggling against our weakness, struggling against our need to be accepted by the world, struggling not to take the path of least resistance and to swim up against the flow. If we truly believe that Christ has conquered sin and death then our focus and duty is in the service of righteousness and holiness whereby God makes us right with Him and sets our lives apart for Him.

[PAUSE]

The Devil’s protection racket tempts us to focus on being a victim. If the Cross shows us that Christ is the perfect victim then His victimhood bursts the power of Hell wide open. There’s no need for us to pay any more heed to sin but rather to turn and grow in Christ.