March 18: Sin Leads to Death
♫ Music:
Monday, March 18
Sin Leads to Death
Scriptures: Romans 6:16, 23
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? For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Poetry:
The Ambassador of the Interior Has a Talking to With the Minister of the Cabinet of Vengeance
by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer
God started small At the first showdown
between good and evil God didn’t come at anyone
like a cowboy God didn’t open with solar flares
or asteroids or mass extinction or planetary heat death
God didn’t outgun anyone God outmanned them
God made man in the face of the beast
And in the face of the beast God made —from inside
the great and gaping maw while languishing
in the hot damp In the face of that
great terror God summoned the smallest—
adrenaline serotonin hemoglobin oxytocin motes
of possibility God started by making—
light into land masses sand into vessels preservation
as civilization and sometimes God won
SIN LEADS TO DEATH
One of the great paradoxes of humanity is that God has endowed us with such authority that some of us will judge angels—yet our authority only reaches its fullness when we fully surrender it to the service of another. Unlike true slaves, however, we are free to choose our master (an alternate translation for the Greek word used here, doulos, is “bondservant”: one who voluntarily gives up his or her freedom in order to serve another). Paul makes clear that we have only two choices: sin or God.
Sin masquerades itself as freedom. It promises us instant pleasure, the upper hand in every situation, full control over our destinies with no strings attached. In reality, sin’s grip is like the golden handcuffs on the man in the mural — distracting us with luxury so we won’t realize we are enslaved. Yet we, like the man, are bound by time. Looking at the image, one can almost hear the ticking of the watches on his wrists. As long as the man remains chained, he will never escape that infernal noise; it is a constant reminder that there will never be enough time to satisfy his desires.
By contrast, Jesus tells us plainly that He has a yoke and a burden for us, and that we must die with Him before we can truly live. Many hear the words “yoke,” “burden,” and “cross,” and assume that slavery to righteousness is excruciating and unrewarding. Yet, as anyone who has entered into fellowship with Christ can attest, when we surrender our lives to Him, the fetters of the world fall off and we become truly free. Free from the backbreaking work of fleshly striving; free from the anxiety of proving our own self-worth; free from the fear of running out of time. The insidious payoff of sin is death, but free gift on the other side of the Cross is eternal life—of which these freedoms are only the first fruits. The more we journey on with Christ, the more we realize we have not even begun to imagine its fullness.
The poem, “The Ambassador of the Interior Has a Talking to With the Minister of the Cabinet of Vengeance,” alludes to another paradoxical quality of humanity: that in the face of great evil, God made small, vulnerable men and women. Yet, in the end, these seemingly puny creatures become a kingdom of priests, triumphant sons and daughters washed by the blood of the Lamb and empowered by the word of their testimony. The end result of our slavery to righteousness is that we will overcome evil.
Prayer:
Jesus, I offer myself to You again today as a bondservant. I am Yours, spirit, soul, and body. What are You saying to me today? What lies are You instructing me to let go of? What truths are You inviting me to claim? Thank You, God, that I am no longer a slave to anxiety, self-preservation, fear, or despair. Thank You that I need not even fear death—that even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I can be confident that You are leading me deeper into eternal life. I believe that everything I need for abundant life is in You and Your ways. Help me to take on Your beautiful yoke today.
Amen
Christina Gonzalez Ho
Writer
Co-founder of Estuaries
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Untitled Street Mural
Blu
Berlin, Germany
Public artwork can be a powerful means for an artist to make a statement. Street art has become a more readily accepted form of expression and Berlin has a thriving scene of international contributors. Many of the world's top artists have contributed to the urban landscape, changing the ever-evolving face of Berlin. This street mural, painted on an apartment building in the bohemian district of Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany, depicts bondage to avarice and time in the form of the gold watches.
About the Artist:
Blu is an Italian street artist that currently lives in Bologna, Italy. He started painting in a capital of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna Region and has been involved in the street art scene since 1999. His works can be seen through the world and his style is easily recognizable. They are known to be “epic scale murals.” Blu prefers to paint his works around the urban and industrial landscape. Blu’s aesthetic search is motivated by a belief in an open source philosophy. His amazing work stands as truth against political events and other socialistic controversies in today’s modern age.
About the Music:
“The Water Rises” from the album Landfall
About the Composer/Performer:
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director who has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. Initially trained in the violin and sculpting, Anderson has toured the United States and internationally numerous times with shows ranging from simple spoken word performances to elaborate multimedia events. Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance-art shows. As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films, dance pieces, and theatrical scores. In 2002 Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA, which culminated in her 2004 touring solo-performance The End of the Moon. In 2007 she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. Anderson was married to musician and singer/songwriter Lou Reed until his death in 2013. At the 2019 Grammy Awards, Laurie Anderson won her first-ever Grammy. She received the award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Landfall, her collaboration with Kronos Quartet. The 70-minute multimedia piece is about Hurricane Sandy, which flooded Anderson’s New York City studio in 2012.
About the Performers:
Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco, California. They have been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for over forty years. The quartet covers a broad range of musical genres including: Mexican folk, experimental, pre-classical early music, movie soundtracks, jazz and tango, as well as contemporary classical music. More than 900 works have been written for them. Violinist David Harrington from Seattle, Washington, founded the quartet in 1973. With almost forty studio albums to their credit and performances worldwide, they have been called "probably the most famous 'new music' group in the world", and have been praised in philosophical studies of music for the inclusiveness of their repertoire. They have worked with many minimalist composers including John Adams, Arvo Pärt, George Crumb, Henryk Górecki, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Kevin Volans and Laurie Anderson.
About the Poet:
Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is a poet and installation artist in St. Louis. She is the author of the poetry collection Cleavemark (2016) and The Cloud Lasso (2019), her debut children’s book. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her poems and art have appeared in Best New Poets, Bomb Magazine, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, The Offing, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Colorado Review, Fence, on the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere. She frequently collaborates with other artists, most recently with Cheryl Wassenaar on the installation The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs at the Des Lee Gallery in St. Louis, MO.
About the Devotional Writer:
Christina Gonzalez Ho
Writer, Co-founder of Estuaries
Christina Gonzalez Ho holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. In 2018, Christina co-authored Los Angeles: Mestizo Archipelago, the culmination of a yearlong research project on the complex and disparate nature of the L.A. art world and its relationship to faith and spirituality.