A Homily on Romans 8.1-11
(Read with Psalm
65.1-13; Isaiah 55.10-13; and Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23)
Prayer of Invocation
Father, mercifully receive the prayers of your
people who call upon you, and grant that we may know and understand what things
we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them
by Your Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Prayer of Illumination
Father, your word is alive and active; it discerns our thoughts
and the intentions of our heart; it interprets us and gives us what cannot
provide for ourselves. We ask that You accompany your word with your
Spirit; work in us that which is pleasing in Your sight--enable us to
discern and do Your will. Help us to see and know Your love, and help us to
know how to live rightly in this world that seeks to divide and devour us; we
pray this in the name of Jesus and by the enabling of the Spirit. Amen.
Proclamation
Let’s step back for a
minute and let’s think for a moment about how all this came to be. By “this” I
mean this phenomenon of gathering together weekly to give praise and thanks to
God through Jesus Christ. By “this” I mean gathering to orient our lives around
the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. By “this” I mean
gathering with a set of people who though we are from different backgrounds,
perhaps even from different political persuasions and different lots in life,
we gather in this place, not because we share a common hobby, but because we
have been called to be together in this place as brothers and sisters to learn
what it means to be a disciple of Jesus; we gather to learn to say no to our
passions of the flesh and the conforming pressures of our world and seek to be
transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern God’s will over
and above our own. By “this” I mean gathering to confess that we have sinned,
that we are sinners, that we have transgressed God’s will and his Law-- to one
another and to God; gathering to confess that through Jesus Christ our
sins have been atoned for, that we have been forgiven and reconciled to God and
now share in His life of love for the world, that we are more loved than we
could ever imagine, more than we deserve. By “this” I mean gathering to profess
that we are not the lords of our lives because Jesus is the Lord of all. By
“this” I mean, gathering and professing that we live to offer our members as
instruments of righteous to God. And by “this” I mean gathering in order to
hear what God says--about who He is and who we are--gathering to learn how to
bear witness to the new reality that God has made through Jesus Christ, this
new reality in which we get to participate in his kingdom, the rule and
reign of God.
How did “this”
happen?
If we were to take a
step back and look at the way the Scriptures tell the story, how did this all
happen? How did we go from being ‘dead in our trespasses and sin’; how did we
go from being ‘under Sin’, ‘sons and daughters of disobedience, following the
prince of the power of the air’ (Eph 2.2) to where we are now hidden with
Christ in God? And how does “this” continue to happen, generation after
generation?
The really short
answer is the Holy Spirit. This is what the larger narrative of the New
Testament says to us, especially when we attend to the Book of Acts and the
Epistles of Paul.
By the end of each of
the Gospels, we find confused, perplexed, terrified disciples struggling to
make sense of the life and teachings, and the death and resurrection of Jesus.
It is not until Pentecost that these disciples begin to really understand what
it all means; it is not until the Spirit falls upon disciples of Jesus that
they begin to boldly proclaim that Jesus is Lord of all, that they begin to
make connections with the witness of the Old Testament and understand the
implications of Jesus’ reign--and what that means at the very practical level
of lived-life with others.
When we step back and
look at the birth of the church, when we look at how Christianity developed to
be a world movement (under daunting odds and all kinds of seemingly insurmountable
obstacles), we see that it was an experience that people shared with the
life-giving Spirit more than it was a new and revolutionary idea about how to
make your life better. From the beginning, Chrisitans have understood
themselves to be a people who have experienced the life and forgiveness of the
Lord Jesus Christ through the empowering and transforming witness of the Holy
Spirit. The shared experience of the life-giving, empowering Spirit was the
center of the Christian faith from the beginning--and this ordinary season,
this season after Pentecost reminds us of this; it tells us to remember this.
And so does Romans 8, our text for this morning.
In Paul’s letter to
the Romans, he reminds us that our sense of God’s presence with us, our ability
to discern God’s will (through Scripture, prayer, and life experience and
circumstances), and our ability to overcome the Sin master and the conforming
powers of our present evil age in order to become conformed to the image of the
Son have all been enabled by an experience with the person of the Holy
Spirit.
The main point of
Romans 8.1-11 is that through the Spirit, God not only acquits the sinner
(there is now no condemnation [Rom 8.1]) but also abolishes the power of Sin by
‘transferring us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of his beloved
Son’ (Col 1.13-14). As Paul says, “the law [read ‘rule’] of the Spirit of life
has set us free in Christ Jesus from the law [rule] of sin and death” (Rom
8.2).
God has done what the
Law (or “biblical principles” we might say) could not do; God has done what we
were incapable of doing because of the weakness of our flesh. What did He
do?
He sent His Son to
condemn Sin in the flesh. And He has made a way for us to fulfill the righteous
requirements of the law by “walking according to the Spirit” (Rom 8.4). That is
to say, “we now serve in the new way of the Spirit” (Rom 7.6). We no longer set
our minds on the things of the flesh, but we “live according to the Spirit by
setting our minds on the things of the Spirit” (Rom 8.5). As we will see, this
means setting our minds on our “in-Christness”, by participating in Christ’s
humanity.
But for now, it is
important to pause for a moment and consider what Paul means when he talks
about “living according to the flesh” (Rom 8.5). “Flesh” is Paul’s shorthand
way of talking about our old life in Adam, our default existence that we resort
to without thinking, without even trying; a life that is ruled by Sin and
death, a life that is shaped by the values, norms, assumptions, and
dispositions of our present evil age, animated by the principalities and powers
of darkness. To walk in the flesh is to orient (often unknowingly) our lives
around self-justification and self-preservation. It is a life in which we take
our cues, where we absorb our assumptions about life from our lived
environment; it is to live as though Christ and His way are not sufficient, as
though the Spirit has not spoken to us. It is a life in which we share in
Adam’s fallen creatureliness, which is hostile to God and his ways. So “flesh”
is not just a term to describe our human condition (we might say, our sinful
nature [NIV]), but also our way of orienting ourselves in this world; to live
in this world according to the standards of the world and not according to our
new life in Christ is to say that death has the last word, that it is the most
powerful force driving our world, that we must live as though our survival
depends upon our work, our self-preservation. This is life in the flesh; it is
a self-centered, self-oriented way of life that puts us in competition with one
another for goods and resources. In the context of the first century and the
battles that Paul was fighting ( in Galatians and Romans in particular),
this looks like going back to the Torah/Law as the basis for our right standing
with God. But today it can take many other forms: rugged individualism, racial
superiority, secular humanism, consumerism, workaholism, a distorted form of nationalism,
or any other orienting form of life that fails to be conformed to the
cruciform, self-giving life of Jesus Christ.
As we reflected on in
Romans 6- 7, Paul emphatically reminds us that in baptism we have been joined
to Christ and His life. Christ has taken up our humanity and healed it. In His
body, he has condemned Sin, atoned for trespasses, and now, as the Beloved, He
sits at the right hand of God. And we are hidden with him in that life of
belovedness. And how does this all happen? The Spirit.
We have been
liberated and can live a new way of life because we are “in the Spirit”, Paul
says (Rom 8.9); and this is because the Spirit makes us belong to
Christ. And because of this, because the Spirit dwells among us, the Spirit
that raised Christ from the dead will also give life to us (Rom 8.10-11).
But how? How does
this work? How do we have the mind of the Spirit? How do we walk according to
the Spirit? How does the Spirit give life to our mortal bodies? One of the
surprising and perhaps frustrating aspects of the Scriptures is that we don’t
get a clear “how”. We don’t get a blueprint or a three-step guide for how to
walk in the Spirit. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps because Paul and others assume
that it is more relational than propositional; that is to say, we
have this shared experience with the person of the Spirit.
We live in an age,
like no other, where noise fills every moment of our lives. Increasingly, our
distracted age is forming us to have dispositions of passive, inattentive
listening (Rom 12.2). We hear lots of sounds, but we are not encouraged to
intentionally discern the voice of God, the leading of the Spirit.
If we are going to be
people who live “by the Spirit”, who live “according to the Spirit”, who “set
our minds on the Spirit”, then we must develop the disposition or posture of
listening to God, discerning the Spirit in our lives. So how can we develop
this disposition? How can we be more attentive to the Spirit?
It starts with
regular, intentional intake of Scripture. The Spirit’s role is to illuminate
our Scripture reading (this is why we read Scripture when we gather, and why we
offer a prayer of illumination as we read and reflect upon the Scriptures). The
Spirit applies the Scriptures to our life; the Spirit mediates God’s life
to us through our Scripture intake. But we must read Scripture in a way that
seeks to hear God’s voice, and not just to amass trivia about God and Bible
stories. We must read with an openness to be corrected and rebuked. “All
Scripture is God-breathed” Paul says, “and profitable for reproof and
correction” (2 Tim 3.16). We can’t just read for confirmation bias; we can’t
just expect the Bible to affirm what we already know to be true.
Additionally, we must
develop a posture of reading Scripture to hear what they say to us about Jesus
and what He has accomplished for us. Since who we are is hidden in Christ, we
can only understand our truest selves through the life of Jesus. In this way,
Christians can never be so filled with the Spirit that they can dispense with
being disrupted by Jesus and His word for His people. We are never so
“spiritual” that we do not need to be judged by the self-giving life of Jesus
on the cross: there is no getting beyond Jesus by means of the Spirit.
In this regard, the
Spirit is like a floodlight. The point of a floodlight is to cast light on
(show the glory of) an object; a floodlight does not call attention to itself;
its function is to illuminate something else. As J.I. Packer has said, “Think
of it this way. It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over
our shoulder, on Jesus, who stands facing us. The Spirit’s message to us is
never, ‘Look at me; listen to me; come to me; get to know me,’ but always,
“Look at him, and have life; get to know him, and taste his gift of joy and
peace.’ The Spirit, we might say, is the matchmaker.”
As the floodlight, the Spirit enables
us to hear and to trust in Jesus. The Spirit enables us to believe that we are
God’s beloved in Christ. The Spirit enables us to trust in the unorthodox way
of Jesus (His way of enemy love, and giving rather than taking). The Spirit
helps us to trust that God is working in and through others for our good. The
Spirit enables us to trust in God’s provision, protection, and guidance mediated
through others--to wait for God’s reply and supply in community. So, to walk in
the Spirit is to pay attention, to listen to your life and circumstances as
formed and shaped by the Scriptures and the life of Jesus in community. This
kind of attentiveness must be cultivated, practiced, learned in community with
the others that the Spirit has gathered for the sake of mutual
edification.
One way to cultivate
this is by developing a “Lord’s Prayer” posture about all of life, a way of
praying that Jesus taught us: ‘Your name be holy; Your will be done’. We can be
sure that if this is our foundational ethos, God will lead us. So, we must take
the time to pray this prayer into our bones, to orient ourselves in this way
each day. We must learn how to be sensitive to the Spirit among the many
voices. (The illustration of the ornithologist who can distinguish the 27
different bird calls in the forest. It is developed over time, by listening,
and checking it against the standard.) Walking in the Spirit is paying
attention to our circumstances and the people that God has placed around us. To
run from our situations, to avoid those who are in our midst, to fantasize
about some other life, to constantly seek escape through entertainment, video
games, sports, drink, food, shopping or any other form of escape is to shut out
the Spirit.
So, our Christian
life begins and ends with the Spirit. Therefore, we must work to continue what
the Spirit began. “Having begun by the Spirit are you now being perfected by
the flesh? (Gal 3.3)”, Paul asks. And this is the question that Romans 8 asks
us as well. Have we shut out the Spirit in our lives? Are we trying to complete
our lives in the flesh?
The lived experience
of the Spirit is the core of Christian discipleship; the Spirit makes knowledge
of God an enacted reality. One way of saying all this is that an
experience of the Spirit is incomplete without being connected to Jesus and the
Scriptures. But another way of saying it is that Jesus is incomplete without
the work of the Spirit. To walk or keep in step with the Spirit is to keep in
step with the resurrected, ascended and ruling Jesus. The Spirit reveals
the divine economy. The Spirit points us to Jesus. When we turn to Jesus, He
points us to the Father and His kingdom. When we look to the Father, He points
us to the Son, who is the faithful embodiment of the rule of the Father. The
Spirit works to conform us to Jesus’ pattern of life, to his faithfulness to
God, to participate in His faithful humanity.
But to participate in
this divine economy requires attentiveness-- solitude no doubt, but also
attentiveness in community. We simply cannot expect the Spirit to lead us apart
from our attentive engagement with him as one would cultivate any kind of
relationship.
And when we pay
attention to the testimony of the Spirit, as the Book of Acts reminds us, we
can expect that the Spirit will always be moving us beyond our comfort, beyond
our given social circles, pushing us towards people who are not like us, who do
not share our “culture”. For the primary work of the Spirit is koinonia--fellowship,
the joining together of people from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation.
The Spirit is ultimately working to connect us with people that we don’t want
to be with, people that we would never gather with left to our own
proclivities. If we find that we are always and only around people that are
just like us, if we demand that people must be just like us in order to belong,
we can be sure that we are not keeping in step with the Spirit.
Eucharist
So who belongs? Who
gets to be part of God’s family? All who are in Christ, all who have
been baptized in His death and share in His resurrection life. That’s why the
baptismal fount is at the entrance of the church. To remind us that we pass
through the waters of Jesus’ death and resurrection on the way to the table of
communion, fellowship with God and His people. Jesus has condemned sin in his
flesh, washed us clean so that we can be acquitted of sin and empowered by the
Spirit to walk in newness of life. Baptism calls us to fellowship with Jesus
and all of his people by the Spirit; fellowship with Jesus renews our lives--in
part by joining us to those whom He loves. And we bear witness to this at the
Table. The Table bears witness to the ongoing work, the
generation-upon-generation work of the Spirit, who joins us to God’s life of
love. So let us give thanks and praise!
Benediction
The grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of the Father, and the
fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
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