A Homily on Romans 8.12-25
Read with Matthew
13.24-30, 36-43; Genesis 28.10-19a; and Psalm 139.1-12, 23-24
Prayer of Invocation
Father, you are the fountain of all wisdom, you
know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion
on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not,
and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and forever. Amen.
Prayer of Illumination
Father, who can discern his errors? Deliver us from our hidden
faults; keep us from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over us! May
the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your
sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. (Adapted from Psalm 19.12-14)
Proclamation
The Spirit is our
floodlight and our matchmaker. On our road of darkness He casts light over our
shoulders so that we can see Jesus and all that He has come to offer us. He
breaks through our own self-deception, our enslavement to Sin; He defeats the
powers and principalities of this age that work to alienate us from the life of
God, and He bears witness to our spirit that we belong to God, that we are no
longer orphans left alone to fend for ourselves; He insists that we
are sons and daughters of God, and fellow heirs with Jesus, the Beloved
Son of God.
What is Christ’s is
ours. As such, we have nothing that has not been given to us! As Paul
says in 1 Corinthians, we have been given the Spirit so that we might
“understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Cor 2.12). As we explored a
few weeks ago, this is perhaps our greatest challenge in life--to believe this,
that together with Christ we are God’s beloved; to embrace this--about
ourselves as well as about others-- is an ongoing work that we have to attend
to regularly. We gather to remember this. We need to gather to remember
this! We gather to practice this!
But two of our texts
this morning, Matthew 13.26-30, 36-43 and Romans 8.12-25, remind us that life
in the Spirit, life united to Christ, life in which we seek the kingdom of God
and His righteousness above all else generates conflict in this world. It must;
for now. But it is important to underscore that when Jesus and Paul talk
about the “world” they do not mean that our physical, material world is
bad. Our problem is not embodiment, or matter, or physicality. Neither Jesus
nor Paul are here suggesting that salvation is ultimately an escape from
creation. No, matter indeed matters to God. The resurrection screams this to
us. And Romans 8.20-23 strongly affirms this; it is here that we are
reminded that the ultimate work that God is doing in Christ and by the Spirit
is redeeming all of creation, restoring it to its proper order and end. All of
creation, Paul reminds us, will participate with us in redemption.
Creation’s liberation from corruption is bound up in our liberation from sin
and death (read Romans 8.19-21).
So when Jesus and
Paul talk about suffering in this world, what they mean is suffering in this
present evil age, this age of Adam which continues to be influenced and
molded by the principalities and powers of darkness (Col 2.8) which seek to
develop patterns of life, institutions, and systems that divide and conquer us,
that distract and dismay us. To be an heir with Christ, to be born of the
Spirit, to be led by the Spirit is to be a disciple in the midst of weeds; it
is to begin to see how these powers work against us; it is to begin to see how
our social environment, our culture, the patterns and “normal” ways of life are
like weeds that try to choke out life in us; weeds that have been planted by
the enemy to distort our humanity. For this reason, life in the Spirit, life as
an heir with God in this present age brings with it suffering. (Read Romans
8.17-18).
But the Spirit, Paul
says, bears witness to the firstfruits of total, radical redemption. (Read
Romans 8.23). Firstfruits are the first part of the harvest that God claims
for Himself. The Spirit, as Paul reminds us both here and in Ephesians
1.14, is like a down payment or deposit, a token of what is to
come. The Spirit gives us a taste, an experience, of the coming glory that far
outweighs our present circumstances of suffering. It produces what so many lack
today, hope.
In the past month
we’ve had several moves in the One Hope community. On moving day you can feel
the tension as the movers think to themselves, How are we going to get from
where we are to where we are going? It feels daunting, overwhelming, even
impossible. And then out of nowhere trucks, trailers, and helpers emerge! Hope
rises; and soon, as everyone does her and his part, behold a family passes from
old to new. Slowly chaos becomes order; a fitting home is being made.
This in some
ways is like the work of the Spirit in our lives and in this
world--individually and corporately. Out of nowhere help and strength arrive.
The Spirit bears loads that we cannot carry on our own. And together, by
sharing what the Spirit provides to each of us, we pass from the domain of
darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son; we find a home; we move from
chaos to order.
Here is what Jesus
and Paul tell us in our texts this morning: our world, this world that still
belongs to God, that is still valued by God, will not always be filled
with deadly viruses, systemic inequality, racism, political corruption,
loneliness, cancer, despair, sadness, injustice, deception, and entropy in its
various forms. Hang on! Help is on its way. “Aslan is on the move!”
The Spirit enables us
to get a taste of this new life that is breaking into our present evil age. The
work of the Spirit is a disruptive force that enables us to say no to the status
quo of this present conforming age, and empowers us to suffer for
righteousness’ sake, to willingly suffer because what is to come is worth the
fight, it is worth the wait. “In this hope”, Paul says, “we were saved (Rom
8.24).” We have been saved from this present evil age in the hope that God is
making all things new (Gal 1.4; 2 Cor 5.17).
This one hope orients
us to participate now in this new way of life, a life that doesn’t interpret
suffering and hardship as warning signs that we are doing something wrong.
Rather, suffering because of our allegiance to Jesus Christ is something we
expect, anticipate. Why? Because we know we live in a world that is undergoing
judgment and decay; because we know that we live in a world in which weeds sown
by the evil one are also growing; because we know that because we live in a
rebellious world, our allegiance and obedience will be met with fierce
resistance. Doing the right thing, loving, following in Jesus’ footsteps will
be hard--it will cause trouble, “good trouble” as John Lewis would say . We are
swimming upstream, against the current--but we know we are going the right way.
Why? Because we are debtors to the Spirit. And by the help of the Spirit we put
to death our bodily impulses and desires that have for years been shaped by
this present evil age and the institutions and systems that have been formed to
develop habits and patterns of life that seek to alienate us from God and one
another.
The Spirit tells us
we belong to a new family. And if we belong to God, we no longer belong to this
present evil age--we no longer fit in. John says it this way:
“Do not love the
world or the things of this world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the
Father is not in him. For all that is in the world--the desires of the flesh
and the desires of the eye and the pride of life--is not from the Father but is
from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but
whoever does the will of God abides forever (1 John 2.15-17).”
The challenge in our
day is what we understand to be “the world.” I imagine that if we were to do a
survey in our own congregation and ask for concrete examples of “the world”, we
would get a number of different responses. Because of our social locations and
backgrounds, we are all tuned into different aspects of the “world”. We would
no doubt find common ground, things that would match up quite nicely; but
I also imagine that some of what we would identify as “the world” would
probably not match up. We might even disagree at some points. It is not hard to
identify “the world” in others; it is not hard to identify “the world” in
institutions like the media, education, and politics that stand against our
values and assumptions. But the really hard work of Christian
discipleship is to see “the world” that is still in us--individually and
corporately. This is why we must pray, as David did in Psalm 139, to the
one who discerns our thoughts, who knows us better than we know
ourselves--”search me, O God and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be in me an idolatrous way, and lead me in the way
everlasting! (Psalm 139:23-24).” This is the point of Psalm 139: God, is there
anything in me that is idolatrous? God, You know everything about me. Help me
to see what I cannot see on my own. We can only pray this Psalm if we are open
to correction and rebuke, if we recognize that “the world” runs right through
each of us. And if we pray this prayer with Romans shaping our imagination, we
know that “the world” does not just work at an individual level; rather it works
in systems, institutions, patterns of life that we participate in every day.
With the help of Paul, we know that Sin deceives us, it creates in us biases,
it colors the way we see the world. But the world is overcome by the Spirit.
May the Spirit give us eyes to see the world as it really is, and hearts open
to His correction and rebuke. For we are a people founded on confession and
repentance; we are a people who have the courage and the safety and security in
Christ to acknowledge our sin, our error, our wrongdoing. Our belonging to God
does not depend on our performance--so we do not need to pretend; we can take
off our masks. Since there is now no condemnation for those in Christ (Rom
8.1), we can get real with the sin that so easily entangles us like
weeds.
So in the midst of
all the disruption and tension going on in our lives through this pandemic and
the racial tension in our community, let’s not waste a good crisis. Let me
suggest that we be patient, open to dialogue; open to correction; let me
encourage us to be people that listen to our brothers and sisters, born of the
Spirit, especially those from backgrounds unlike our own--and not just the ones
that affirm what we already believe. Let’s be slow to speak and quick to
listen; let’s not label people before we listen to their ideas and experiences.
And in this way, we manifest our trust in the ongoing work of the Spirit, not
just in our own lives, but also in the lives of others.
Eucharist
This is what the
table speaks to us. We all belong. We have all been inherited by God through
the work of the Spirit. The Spirit is working in all of our lives. We have the
firstfruits of the Spirit, and we celebrate that at the Table.
Benediction
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty
deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the
world, and not according to Christ.
Colossians 2.8
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