Years ago, I got to know a Marine who had served for over twenty years. In fact, I was invited to give the invocation at his retirement ceremony. He served all over the world, including several tours in Iraq. He was, in every way, the embodiment of a Marine, a strong and resolute individual with an incredible sense of duty and a willingness to serve. And he had seen some horrible things, things I could not imagine experiencing. From gunfights in some remote village halfway around the world, to holding the hand of a friend who is bleeding out while you are trying to comfort him, assuring him everything will be okay. His life experience was hard to process if, like me, you have never gone through anything remotely similar. Yet, it was not until after his retirement, after closing that chapter of his life, everything seemed to unravel.
What we call “normal life” proved to be the hardest battle for him. Before he was diagnosed with PTSD, he did his best to self-medicate through drugs and alcohol, failing his wife and his children at almost every step of the way. His marriage was unraveling, and moving forward in a career after the Marines seemed insignificant and purposeless. He was desperately searching for meaning in his life. Now, I am not a therapist, but through my conversations with him, something peculiar came into focus. While you could certainly talk about missing the brotherhood of the corps and the regimented life if provided, there was something else which marked the difference between going to war and returning home. The difference was the fact that, while deployed, the enemy was out there, it was the other, it was external, it was identifiable, and it could be engaged and defeated. But back home, in the civilian world, the enemy was internal, it was the struggle within himself. And no matter how horrifying his wartime stories were, that internal war was far more difficult to wage.
The thing is, it is with the struggle within that this Marine and I found common ground, common experience. All Christians, whether returning from the battlefield or enduring the grind of “normal life,” are intimately acquainted with this reality. None are exempt. Saint Paul even expresses this struggle within himself. He says, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the Law that it is good. So, now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”
It sounds familiar, does it not? It is not that you do not know how you ought to live. It is not as if you do not know what it means to walk as a child of God. It is not even that you do not want to live this way. But it remains, the good you want to do you do not do and the things you know you should not do you keep on doing anyway. Paul goes on and says, “I delight in the Law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind…” This war within is not one we can easily fight. Perhaps, it is one we cannot fight, even on our best day, for the enemy is not “out there.”
The phrase Martin Luther made famous regarding this reality of the Christian experience is that we are simul iustus et peccator. That is, we are simultaneously saints and sinners. Listen to what he says in his lecture on Paul’s statement in Romans. He says, “The saints in being righteous are at the same time sinners; they are righteous because they believe in Christ whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them, but they are sinners because they do not fulfill the Law and are not without sinful desires. They are like sick people in the care of a physician: They are really sick, but healthy only in the hope and as far as they begin to be better, healed… they will become healthy. Nothing can harm them so much as the presumption that they are in fact healthy, for it will cause a bad relapse.”
The focus here, for both Saint Paul and Luther, is that as a child of God, as a baptized believer, you are at the same time saints and sinners. It is not that sometimes you are saintly, fulfilling the Law, and sometimes you backslide into sinning, like some sort of spiritual ping-pong ball, bouncing back and forth. No, you are both at the same time. If this were not the case, then our faith would be reduced to moralism. Salvation would become a process of self-improvement in which we team up with God to become increasingly holy throughout our journey. You get some help from your Lord when you are struggling, and then you take off to discover how great you can be on your own.
Many years ago, I had this young mother come to my church with her three small children. She attended for a few weeks and then stopped by my study one day to ask some questions. As I was going through my usual description regarding the distinctives of the Lutheran Church and what our congregation was all about, she stopped me dead in my tracks saying, “Look, I have been around. I have tried a bunch of different churches, and to tell you the truth, I am tired of the games. I am tired of pretending I am doing okay, or that if I just do this or that thing, it will all turn around for me.” She was hurt. She was mad. She was exhausted and fed up. So, I gave up my usual script and said, “I promise I will do my best to simply be honest; honest about the Word of God and honest about your life.”
What this meant, what it led to for both of us, was a confession of the simul, the war that wages within us. Such honesty brings us to the point of despair, despair that we can overcome by our own works, despair that we can fix ourselves and defeat the enemy within. But such despair is precisely what leads us to the sweetness of the Gospel; the more we try to heal ourselves, the more we realize how sick we truly are. And so, with Saint Paul we cry out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And whether you are a battle-hardened Marine or a lifelong believer or a new convert, this cry is our cry. It is the confession that we need a Savior. We need one outside of ourselves to win the war within.
So, with joy and confidence, we turn to the gifts of God. We turn to a crucified and risen Lord, who bore our sins and calls us His brothers and sisters, and so, heirs of eternal life. We echo the hope of Saint Paul himself and say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
