Reading St. Paul with Dylan, Screwtape, and the Didache (Proper 8 Sermon 2026)

I invite you to begin this sermon by closing your eyes, so that you can use your imagination to bring a scene to life. (If you are used to closing your eyes in the middle of a long sermon, then consider this invitation to do so right from the start a gift from me to you!)

Here is the scene:

You live on a small homestead right on the border of two competing Landlords. It’s quaint, but it usually provides what your family needs to survive, even after accounting for your Master’s share of the crops. It’s next to a river, which is wonderful outside of flooding season.

The river means something, not just to you and your family, but to your Landlord. That river is the barrier between his kingdom and the neighboring Lord. It always has been. As far back as you know, these two opposing Lords have been planted squarely where they are, divided by a river.

Your Landlord is not kind, to put it mildly. When he wants to wage war against other Lords he forces you into his service, with all sorts of threats if you refuse. Ruin your crops, burn down your house, kill your children. You know, Landlord types of threats.

And so you comply. He says jump, you say “how high and may I come back down now, sir?” No matter the cost.

Because while he is cruel, you also believe he is right. You trust what he says about the Landlord on the other side of the river.

That the Lord across the river is the real tyrant. That he is out to cramp your style, to make you live a life of boredom and prudishness—constantly telling you to stop doing what you want and start doing what he wants.

Your current Master has no delusions about his own harshness, but you believe him when he says that at least he allows you to follow your desires wherever they take you.

As long as you occasionally join with him in following his desires wherever they take him.

To an outside observer you are clearly enslaved to your Master. You may even know this deep down. But the fear of what other sort of tyranny dwells on the other side of the river keeps you where you are.

You have done things for your Master that make you ashamed … but at least he leaves you to the devices and desires of your own heart most of the time.

We’ll pause the story here to make a point. (You can open your eyes if you have not nodded off yet.)

Scenes like this have happened in every generation of human history. As the story began, perhaps many of you pictured an ancient roman landscape—something like the recurring glimpses of Russel Crow’s homestead in The Gladiator—while others of you may have found yourself picturing what you imagine life in the Middle Ages to look like. Still others might have in mind what we consider to be a more modern scene, like occupied Poland in World War II.

Whatever cinematic or historical or literary scene you saw in your mind, you likely also noticed something familiar in the story.

This vignette captures something true about the human experience. A reality that we find ourselves in on a cosmic scale, which is why we have seen it play out in every human society. It is the scene inside our own hearts.

We know what it means to serve a cruel master that we don’t know how to quit.

We know the feeling that we must indulge our appetites whether they are good for us and those around us or not. That we must take what is ours regardless of the ripple effect it may have on others. That we must run down whatever path pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed invite us to follow.

Regardless of the hesitation we feel at times to go down those roads, and the resolve we try to muster up within ourselves to change, we find ourselves believing the lie that our limbs and joints and mind and heart must serve our own desires.

It would appear that this is simply what it means to live as a human person.

In his letter to Christians living in first century Rome, St. Paul recognizes that this way of life is the default. It is what we find ourselves trapped in.

Sin is our Master. We must obey. Our bodies and minds and hearts must serve our own desires and the desires of the evil one.

But St. Paul’s message in this part of Romans is this: All of this would remain true—it would be our inescapable reality—if it were not for Jesus of Nazareth.

The Messiah came to establish his kingdom here and now. And in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, he invites all of humanity to cross the river to live under his rule. A kingdom in which temperance, fortitude, justice, wisdom, faith, hope, and love replace the vices we formerly embraced.

Earlier in this chapter, St. Paul tells us that our baptism was not merely a sweet ceremony that meant a lot to our family and the church.

It was a death. A dying to a former master.

In our baptism we crossed a river, leaving behind our service to our former master. And we setup a new homestead, pledging fidelity to a new master.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey your passions. Do not yield the members of your body to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield your whole self to God as someone who has been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness.

Yield your whole self to God.

We are a freedom-loving people. Which means that we can be quick to misunderstand what Christian freedom means.

It absolutely means freedom from slavery to sin and the evil one. But Christian freedom does not mean to be without a Master.

In the Gospels, Jesus tells us that we cannot serve two masters. But this morning St. Paul reminds us that we also cannot serve zero Masters.

As Bob Dylan—one of the wise sages of our age—puts it:

Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Our new Master, the Lord on the other side of the River, is a good Master.

Our old master was lying to us about him, and in many ways is still trying to lie to us about him. He tells us that God wants to limit who we are and who we will be; that he wants to restrain us, to hold us back. That by serving God we will become shells of who we could be if we were to follow our own desires without restraint.

But that simply is not the case; in fact, reality is quite the opposite.

In The Screwtape Letters, a seasoned demon writes letters of advice to a junior demon as he seeks to tempt his human patient away from God.

In one of those letters, the demon Screwtape is ashamed to admit that:

“To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which God demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as we demons would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth.

… We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.”

It is by renouncing our former Master, and embracing our new one as Lord that we are set on the path to become more, not less, of who we were made to be.

When you were slaves of sin, you were “free” from righteousness. But what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.

I’ll close with the opening line of an ancient discipleship manual called the Didache, used in the early church to prepare adult converts for Baptism—for the crossing of the river from the domain of a former master, into the domain of Our Lord.

“There are two Ways, one of life, and one of death. And great is the difference between them.”

There are two Ways.

You, Christian, have crossed through the River and now serve a Good Master. Do not turn back to the way you used to live; do not seek to return to your old master. That Way leads to destruction and death.

Embrace your new Master; live out your Baptism with your mind, your heart—even your body—this week, and watch as you become more fully who you were created to be. Amen.