Last week my husband Phil and I were on vacation up in New England.  On our first full day, we stopped in the afternoon for ice cream at Friendly’s.  There aren’t many Friendly’s around here anymore, and so getting one of their sundaes is truly a rare treat for us.  Plus, everyone knows food you eat on vacation has no calories!    We had been back on the road for about ten minutes when I asked Phil, “Which credit card did you use to pay the bill?”  He said, I didn’t pay the bill.  I thought you did while I was in the restroom.  I said, “I didn’t pay the bill—I thought you did while I was in the restroom.”  Turns out the receipt I picked up off the table and put in my purse was actually the unpaid check!  I quickly put the restaurant address in my phone, we got turned around, and went back to pay our bill. Clearly Phil and I were out of practice when it came to dining in restaurants!  We took advantage of the many great seafood restaurants on Cape Cod to get ourselves back into practice!  We learned from our mistake and were very careful to be sure we paid our bill at every restaurant before leaving. But not every situation is so clear cut.  Life is a lot of judgment calls, you know?  It’s not always easy to know what the right thing to do is, and it’s not always easy to do the right thing.   When I first became a Christian, I thought it would ultimately make for a less messy life!  But that hasn’t turned out to be the case.  I find it reassuring that Paul, despite his years of Christian discipleship, despite his many experiences that helped him mature in the faith, wrote that he still struggled with sin.  Life was still messy. A few years ago I went to a continuing ed event at Princeton Seminary on revitalizing churches.  The speaker talked about how when she first started working at a church in Atlanta, their worship services were very formal.  Every man wore a suit and tie, and the ushers even wore tuxedos!  But times change.  Things started to get more casual, and eventually they introduced a contemporary worship service alongside the traditional one. She drew two beakers to illustrate this change at her church, one full and one empty.     At first, the congregation was homogenous.  Everyone was happy with the formal tone of their worship.  There was one beaker, and it was full.  But as the culture shifted, some people shifted position, and started filling up a second beaker, the less formal beaker.  At first, this change was tolerated, because most folks were still in the formal beaker.  But as times changed, more and more people started expressing their preference for a less formal atmosphere and contemporary worship.  When the second beaker started getting more full, that’s when tension in the church increased dramatically.  As the first beaker members become less and less powerful, they got more and more entrenched.  Or, as the pastor put it, the people in the first beaker got, “Ramped Up!” for conflict.    Ironically, as they expressed their preferences for a more formal and structured worship atmosphere, their behavior got more chaotic and ugly. I loved this beaker drawing because it seemed to explain so many life experiences.  Take, for instance, the situation Paul finds himself in.  He is writing to the Romans, some of the most sophisticated thinkers in the world, and he is describing how he, one of the most mature Christians ever, still struggles with sin.  His struggle is hard to explain.  He knows the law inside and out.  He knows it’s wrong to stop at Friendly’s, eat your sundaes, and leave without paying.  He respects the law and is happy to comply on a pretty consistent basis.  He is also aware that the Spirit of God is at work in him, and on his best days, he delights in following the Spirit and sees the Spirit’s fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control–manifested in his life. But that is only part of the story.  Paul says, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”  Sometimes reading Romans is difficult, because there will be whole paragraphs or even several paragraphs that I struggle to understand.  But then all of a sudden Paul will say something so succinct and clear, it’s like wow!  This is brilliant!  Paul does not always do the good he wants to do.  He finds himself doing the bad he doesn’t want to do.  Me too!  Finally, something I can relate to!  But how can this be?   What I think Paul is trying to say in this passage is, he is not all in one beaker.  There is a part of him that is stuck in the “old” ways.  Remember, he was talking to people who came to Christianity by one of two “old” ways.  They were either Jewish in their past, or they were Gentiles.  But before we were Jewish or Gentile, we were all children of Abraham.  We have in common an “old, old” way—a sinful nature that has nothing to do with our upbringing or background.  There is an anti-God, anti-life force, that is at work in all of us whether we were Gentile or Jewish at birth.  Paul says this is a problem for all of us going back to Adam and Eve.  As a Jew, he knows firsthand that there is an “old, old” nature that even the law cannot tame.  And as a Christian he knows firsthand there is an “old, old” nature that even years of Christian discipleship hasn’t tamed.  In other words, despite all of Paul’s accomplishments for the gospel, he is still a man in need of a Savior.  And so are we.  We are prone to sin.  We are capable of evil.  There is no one whose life is entirely contained in one beaker.  All have sinned–and continue to sin–and fall short of the glory of God. Several years ago I read a book called Dangerous Surrender by Kay Warren.  She’s the wife of Rick Warren, who wrote The Purpose Driven Life.    She wrote her book because she discovered in mid-life that God had a different purpose for her life than she anticipated, and she ended up becoming an advocate for victims of AIDS all over the world.  She told a story in her book that has stayed in my memory bank, about how in 2002 she traveled to Rwanda to learn about how Christians could better respond to the AIDS crisis in Africa.  To help prepare herself, she read every book and watched every movie she could get her hands on about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, during which 1 million Rwandans were killed in a 100-day period by their fellow citizens.  She thought when she got to Rwanda she would be able to tell when she met Rwandan people if they participated in the genocide or not.  She would be able to tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys”.  But that was not the case at all.  She wrote, “It slowly dawned on me:  there weren’t any monsters in Rwanda (or anywhere else for that matter)—a special class of people for whom torture, rape, and murder came easily—but there were a lot of people like me:  ordinary people who had gotten caught up in the hatred and passion of the moment and had allowed evil to reign in their hearts for a season.”  She went on to wonder, “Might I, too, be full of depravity, capable of committing the same atrocities if I were ever to allow evil to reign in my heart?”  At first this thought seemed too awful to accept. As she continued her travel and later reflected on her own experiences, Kay Warren came to this conclusion:  the harsh reality is, given the right circumstances, any one of us is capable of any deed.  As one of my experienced mentors used to say, “Under stress we regress!”  When push comes to shove, we might find ourselves shoving back.  If we lived in Rwanda in the early 1990’s, and our country was changing and suffering, we might have taken part in the genocide.  If we were part of that church in Atlanta, and it was our beloved church home that was changing and struggling, we might have taken part in the ugly backlash.  We are all capable of—and complicit in—more sin than we’d like to admit. None of us is all one beaker. That might sound like really bad news.  But Paul’s confession that he still finds himself caught up in sin is actually meant to encourage us.  The world would be very different if we could just work harder, spend more time in spiritual disciplines, read the right books, pray the right prayers, and become sinless.  But that wasn’t Paul’s experience.  Or Mother Teresa’s, or John Wesley’s, or any person’s experience.  And that, it turns out, this lifelong struggle with sin is a gift.  Our struggles prevent us from attaining perfection.  But they are what allow us to attain connection.  They humble us and unite us and draw us closer to the One who loves us, accepts us, and bids us to love and accept ourselves. That day at Princeton Seminary, when the workshop leader drew these two beakers on the white board, she went on to talk about the interventions they used to handle the conflict at their church during a time of great transition.  I wish I could tell you I remember those interventions, because Lima Church—actually, I think it’s safe to say ALL churches in the United States—are in a time of transition.  Post-pandemic, things will look different, and we will need to make many choices to adapt to our new reality.  No doubt there will be some conflict and grief and probably some ramping up and pushing and shoving as that all plays out.  But I do remember her main point–and Paul’s.  The most important thing for us to know is, there really aren’t two beakers of people.  There really aren’t “good guys” and “bad guys”.  All of us are caught up in the grip of God’s grace because we all have a very old nature—an “old, old” nature–that cannot be healed by the law, cannot be tamed by Christian discipleship, cannot be changed by our will alone.  We are all people in need of a Savior. So I would like to add one more thing to this drawing, and that is to gather up both these beakers into one communion chalice.    I’m not very good at drawing.  But I am good at visualizing.  This is a depiction of our congregation here at Lima, our Eastern PA Conference, our denomination around the world, the Church Universal.  We have many divisions—we are great at separating ourselves into groups.  But there is no division in God’s eyes.  We are one.  Every time we take communion we remember that there is One Loaf, and One Cup, because we are One People in need of redemption. Paul wrote, “Wretched man that I am!”  Despite his thorough knowledge of the law, and his years of intense Christian discipleship, Paul was still asking the question, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.