If I could preach tomorrow

For those who are using the Revised Common Lectionary, tomorrow's readings offer a wonderful opportunity. The Gospel is extremely brief, so it would make more sense to preach on the Epistle:

Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Here's an invitation to do something new and actually talk about sin. Here St Paul talks about how we volunteer for enslavement, and to get what? Only death: the death of relationships, of joy, of purpose, and ultimately of our very selves. And while a free person can volunteer for slavery, as we have done, a slave cannot volunteer for freedom. So we must be set free by someone else, a Liberator who must also be Lord, because allegiance is the only proper response to so great a deliverance. But though we have been redeemed from one service only to be pressed into another, there is no comparison between the two, for this new service brings holiness, joy, purpose, and life everlasting.

If we don't talk about sin, we can't talk about redemption. But our bland, innocuous preachers, too timid to remind us of our true state for fear that someone might be offended -- for how could we live with the idea of a demanding, holy, awesome God? -- have thrown out the Baby of Bethlehem with the baptismal bathwater.

OK, that last bit was over the top. Sometimes my Southern Baptist heritage kicks in and I just have to try some alliteration. In any event, I can guarantee you that I won't be hearing about sin in church tomorrow.