"Put up a sign" - Sermon for 1st Sunday in Lent, 2-22-26

I’m friends with a bartender in Flint, Michigan. She tells the story when once she delivered a round of drinks to a table and one of the men grabbed her backside. She wheeled around and walloped him. “What?” he shrugged. “I didn’t know you couldn’t do that. You should put up a sign or something!” – Thus beginneth today’s sermon on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

Theologically-speaking, Paul is correct. Sin is not reckoned when there is no law. But, as the bar owner later said to the groping patron, “Put up a sign? C’mon, man! You know better!”

So should we. Hot coffee will burn if we gulp it too soon or spill it on our lap. Do we need a sign on the cup? We will get a jolt if we stick a knife into a plugged-in toaster. Do we need a warning notice? Well, apparently we do, because some did and some have.

Sin, unreckoned, was indeed in the world before the law, as Paul wrote. But there has been, from the beginning, the reckoning agents of common-sense and conscience. Adam and Eve knew they had sinned when they ate the forbidden fruit. Cain knew he had sinned when he killed his brother Abel, long before Moses brought down the tablets from the mountain with the commandment “Thou shalt not commit murder,” to say nothing of “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

Along comes Jesus, Paul writes, the second Adam, to undo the damage the first Adam had done. The free, life-giving gift of the Incarnation – of God-made-human in Jesus – is greater than the death-dealing trespass of our spiritual first parents.

This divine un-doing sparked a debate between the greatest minds of the Church: “Why the Incarnation?” One side, the dominant one, claimed that it was Adam’s sin that prompted God to become human. The other side, delivered by our Franciscan friends and others, said that the Incarnation was God’s Plan-A, God’s great idea from before the beginning. Our sin did not cause God to act. God’s love, God’s very self, can do nothing but outpour into creation. The good news is that God works out our salvation, whichever side of the debate you prefer.

Paul’s overarching point is that God’s grace, God’s free gift of unearned, unmerited love for us, outweighs the burdens of obedience that the law imposes. We cannot help ourselves but to disobey the law. Thus we are imprisoned by the law. Jesus’s obedience, not to the law, but to God’s very self, is what makes us righteous and sets us free.

“So does that set us free to sin at will?” is the rhetorical question Paul poses elsewhere. “C’mon, man!” is Paul’s answer, in so many words. Common-sense and conscience remain the reckoning agents. We still ought to feel remorse and seek forgiveness and confess our sins. Or, even better, we ought to resist the temptations that bedevil us, less so because we fear punishment, and more so because we remember and give thanks for God’s great love for us, by what we say and do.

Jesus reminds us how. After he was baptized and heard the Father’s voice say “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well-pleased,” Jesus then went into the wilderness, with all its temptations. Worn out and famished, Jesus never forgot who he was and whose he was.

Famished and worn out in our own ways, we soon will receive Jesus’s very Body and Blood, the great sacrificial gift of his obedience and his enduring presence with us. The sacrament reminds us who we are and whose we are. We receive what we are and are to become. And then we will go back out into the wilderness, where bedeviling temptations abound. We may not grab a bartender’s backside; we know better than that – if you didn’t before you came to church today, you do now! But we will fall in other ways. We cannot help ourselves. Yet God’s love and grace help us fall less often. Not, I pray, out of fear of getting walloped, but rather in gratitude for God’s free gift of salvation. God knows the weaknesses of each of us. Let each of us find God mighty to save.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

1^st Sunday in Lent A – February 22, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Put up a sign?”