Flesh And Spirit
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Object:
Chapters 7-8 of Romans are among the most important words in the Bible for us in the twenty-first century. In these chapters, Paul wrestles with the issues of human consciousness, human will, and the Trinity. In chapter 7, he reflects a profound understanding of our struggles as human beings, whether we are a first-century Jew in Palestine or a twenty-first-century American Christian. He writes these words in chapter seven to the church at Rome and to churches everywhere in every age:
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 that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
-- Romans 7:15-20
In a world dominated by addictions and compulsive and impulsive behavior, in a world always being stimulated by coffee or television or cell phones or other drugs, in a world driven by money and its definitions, these words from Paul resonate deeply within us.
As he moves into chapter 8 of Romans, Paul begins a study of the contrast between "flesh" and "Spirit." It is a contrast that he describes as a struggle, as we seek to shift our focus from "flesh" to "Spirit." His words in chapter 8 point to our struggles for meaning, struggles about who we are, about who God is, and about the meaning of our lives. In today's lectionary reading, we see that Paul is emphasizing that focusing on the flesh brings death, while focusing on the Spirit brings life. What is Paul talking about? What does "flesh" mean? What does "Spirit" mean?
When we hear "flesh," we usually think of the body and especially of sexuality. With the American church's current emphasis on sexuality as the key to everything, it is not surprising. Flesh and sexuality have been connected in the church for a long time, however. The strongest connection was made by the most influential theologian in the history of the church since Paul -- an African named Augustine. Augustine connected sinfulness with sexuality. He asserted that original sin was passed from one generation to the next through sexual intercourse. Ever since then, Christians have tended to portray sinfulness in its most powerful form as sexuality, and thus "flesh" and "sex" came to be synonymous.
For Paul, however, flesh is not just the body or sexuality, though they are part of the meaning of flesh. Paul's concept goes far beyond our use and abuse of God's gift of sexuality. "Flesh" is rather a whole way of being oriented toward ourselves and toward life itself. For Paul, "flesh" describes the process by which we seek to answer the anxieties of our lives by turning to the fallen powers of the world, known as "idols" in the biblical context. Flesh, then, is a process. It is the human response to our historical existence, a response in which we cling to the idols of the world in order to ease our anxieties. This process begins in us as individuals long before we know anything about it. It is passed on to us through the culture in which we live.
How does this happen? How do we end up in a place where we count on the idols of the world to bring us security rather than counting on God? How do we end up living in the power of the flesh, choosing death instead of life? Part of the answer is to be found in our being creatures with consciousness. We have an awareness of our finitude and our dependency and our mortality. We are aware of our limits and our dependency: We don't choose when we come into the world, and for the most part, we don't control when we leave the world. There is within us a deep, primordial awareness that we are not in control, that we are dependent, and that we are mortal.
Yet, we are also aware that we are individuals, that we are separated on a profound level from every other person and every other being. In the first stages, this discovery is terrifying. Almost every Sunday we witness it in our nursery, when young children cry as their parents leave them. I experienced this with our son, David, when I was a pastor of a church in Nashville. He was two years old, and we would leave him in the nursery, which was right under the sanctuary. During the worship service, we could hear him wailing away. It evoked in me a sense of guilt and inadequacy and anger, because it touched a voice deep inside me, a voice that tells me that like my crying son, I often feel cut off from the source of my life.
This sense of being dependent on the one hand and being separate on the other is not bad in itself, though most of us are taught to be anxious about this condition. Indeed, it is part of God's created order. God has made us so that we belong to God and to one another. God has made us so that we need God and one another, so that we nurture one another, learn from one another, challenge one another, and take care of one another. However, we have taken God's created order -- God's good gifts to us -- and made it a problem. We have allowed our sense of dependency to be seen as a weakness. We have allowed our individual consciousness to become alienation. We have become dominated by anxiety, by the sense that we are lost and lonely. In our sense of being lost, we turn to the idols of the world to ease our fears and our anxieties. This process is what Paul means by "flesh."
Paul wants us to understand that this sense of anxiety and domination permeate our existence as individuals and communities. We learn this process long before we are aware of it. As a white person growing up in the South in the 1950s, I learned racism long before I was aware that I was learning it. I was taught racism not by mean and evil people but by good and decent people like my mother and the leaders of the church in which I learned about the grace of God. I was taught the grace of God and the necessity of racism by the same wonderful people. I learned that racism was a necessity -- that white people were superior -- from good and decent people who had learned it themselves from good and decent people. This is the power of the "flesh," that it permeates our existence as we are taught to turn to the idols of the world in order to cope with our dependence and our separation.
I want to share one more example of this process. As we all have come to know, the church in today's world talks about sex all the time and rarely ever talks about money, while the biblical witness about Jesus indicates that he talked about money all the time and rarely ever mentioned sex. Why this reversal? It is the power of the flesh. Jesus emphasized money so much because he knew that money has the capacity to answer our existential questions of dependence and separation in a demonic way. In our modern world, materialism has become the answer to the questions of the meaning of our lives. We may indeed have the same sense of dependence and separation that troubles every generation, but in our time we have come to believe that if we can just get enough stuff, we won't need anybody. We can answer the anxiety by seeking to get enough money so that we can fool ourselves into believing that we don't need anybody, that dependence is a weakness, and that separation and disengagement are the way life should be.
We hear it on talk radio and television every day -- money is the god that will make us whole. We get the culture that we have, a culture driven by materialism, where the goal of life is to deny dependency by getting enough stuff so that we think that we don't need anybody. We become a place dominated by the flesh, where property is more important than people, where the comfortable exploit the poor in the name of globalization -- so that we can get more stuff.
This is the process that Paul means when he talks about "flesh." It permeates our laws and our consciousness and our bank accounts and our bodies. For Paul, "flesh" is the process by which we answer our anxieties as human beings by turning away from our true calling as children of God and turning toward the answers from the idols of the world. And, though flesh involves the human will, it is much more than the will, much deeper. It involves our imaginations, our very view of ourselves and of God and of the world. It becomes intertwined with our very identities as individuals and as communities.
Are we totally depraved, to use language from another theological era? Are we powerless -- unable to know life, unable to know ourselves, and unable to know God? On our own -- yes. Though the question may have been reformulated, the answer remains the same: on our own, we are captive to the flesh. That is why Paul equates it with death: "for if you live according to the flesh, you will die." In his life, in his journey to Damascus and beyond, Paul found a new and stunning answer, an answer that we have come to call the Holy Trinity. Paul suggests an answer to our captivity: In Jesus Christ, God is offering us a new way of seeing ourselves, a new way of seeing the world. Paul calls this answer "life in the Spirit," the life we have through the God we know in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul lifts up this good news at the beginning of chapter 8: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." For those of us trapped in the flesh, captive to racism and materialism and a host of other powers, there is now good news. In Jesus Christ we have the message -- the Word from God -- that we are loved and accepted in our dependency and finitude, that we are loved and accepted in the messiness of the flesh, that we are known and loved in our individuality. Paul emphasizes that we are offered a new opportunity in our lives in Jesus Christ, an opportunity to "unlearn" the ways of the flesh, an opportunity to affirm our dependence and our individuality and our neediness. In Jesus Christ we have an opportunity to encounter the true source of our lives, the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. In the humanity and the divinity of Jesus Christ, we have this opportunity to find life in the Spirit.
Paul affirms that Jesus Christ has entered into the struggles of our existence, into this process of the "flesh." And Jesus shows us a different way of responding to the anxieties of our lives, turning toward God rather than turning toward the idols of the world. Paul calls this process "life in the Spirit." By "Spirit," Paul does not mean flight from the world or flight from human existence. Paul's point is not to get us out of the world or out of our lives but rather to get us back into the world and deeper into ourselves as children of God, as authentic human beings. When anxiety strikes us, as it surely will and does daily, Paul tells us to refrain from fleeing from our anxiety by running to the idols. He urges us to cry out "Abba" (Daddy), to ask God to preserve us and lift us up.
Jesus knows our finitude and our individuality and our anxiety. He was one of us. He knows the ways of the flesh -- they were taught to him by his culture. Yet, he shows us a different way to respond, and we are asked to see a whole new way of life. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are asked to hear some stunning and unbelievable good news: God, who is the source of all of life and of our lives, loves us and wants us. God knows us -- all parts of us, all of our identity, all of our idolatry. God knows us and wants us. God loves us and calls out to us to hear and receive and believe the good news. This is the good news by which we are saved; this is the good news by which we have life; this is life in the Spirit.
At my mother's funeral several years ago, the pastor of the church in which I was raised read powerful words from Dorothy Sayers as a comment on the passage from life through death to God. It struck me then, and continues to do so, as comments as well on movement from life in the flesh to life in the Spirit:
This is it. This is what we have always feared --
The moment of surrender, the helpless moment
When there is nothing to do but to let go ...
"Into Thy Hands" -- into another's hand
No matter whose; the enemy's hand, death's hand,
God's ... The one moment not to be evaded
Which says, "You must," the moment not of choice
When we must choose to do the thing we must
And will to let our own will go. Let go.
It is no use now clinging to the controls.
Let someone else take over. Take, then, take ...
There, that is done ... into Thy hand, O God.1
Praise God from whom all blessings flow! May it be our guide as we cry out "Abba! Father!" and seek life in the Spirit. Amen.
____________
1. I do not know the source of Dorothy Sayer's writings where these words appear. They were used by the Reverend Richard Goodman at my mother, Mary Stroupe's, funeral at First Presbyterian Church, Helena, Arkansas, on October 31, 2004.
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 that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
-- Romans 7:15-20
In a world dominated by addictions and compulsive and impulsive behavior, in a world always being stimulated by coffee or television or cell phones or other drugs, in a world driven by money and its definitions, these words from Paul resonate deeply within us.
As he moves into chapter 8 of Romans, Paul begins a study of the contrast between "flesh" and "Spirit." It is a contrast that he describes as a struggle, as we seek to shift our focus from "flesh" to "Spirit." His words in chapter 8 point to our struggles for meaning, struggles about who we are, about who God is, and about the meaning of our lives. In today's lectionary reading, we see that Paul is emphasizing that focusing on the flesh brings death, while focusing on the Spirit brings life. What is Paul talking about? What does "flesh" mean? What does "Spirit" mean?
When we hear "flesh," we usually think of the body and especially of sexuality. With the American church's current emphasis on sexuality as the key to everything, it is not surprising. Flesh and sexuality have been connected in the church for a long time, however. The strongest connection was made by the most influential theologian in the history of the church since Paul -- an African named Augustine. Augustine connected sinfulness with sexuality. He asserted that original sin was passed from one generation to the next through sexual intercourse. Ever since then, Christians have tended to portray sinfulness in its most powerful form as sexuality, and thus "flesh" and "sex" came to be synonymous.
For Paul, however, flesh is not just the body or sexuality, though they are part of the meaning of flesh. Paul's concept goes far beyond our use and abuse of God's gift of sexuality. "Flesh" is rather a whole way of being oriented toward ourselves and toward life itself. For Paul, "flesh" describes the process by which we seek to answer the anxieties of our lives by turning to the fallen powers of the world, known as "idols" in the biblical context. Flesh, then, is a process. It is the human response to our historical existence, a response in which we cling to the idols of the world in order to ease our anxieties. This process begins in us as individuals long before we know anything about it. It is passed on to us through the culture in which we live.
How does this happen? How do we end up in a place where we count on the idols of the world to bring us security rather than counting on God? How do we end up living in the power of the flesh, choosing death instead of life? Part of the answer is to be found in our being creatures with consciousness. We have an awareness of our finitude and our dependency and our mortality. We are aware of our limits and our dependency: We don't choose when we come into the world, and for the most part, we don't control when we leave the world. There is within us a deep, primordial awareness that we are not in control, that we are dependent, and that we are mortal.
Yet, we are also aware that we are individuals, that we are separated on a profound level from every other person and every other being. In the first stages, this discovery is terrifying. Almost every Sunday we witness it in our nursery, when young children cry as their parents leave them. I experienced this with our son, David, when I was a pastor of a church in Nashville. He was two years old, and we would leave him in the nursery, which was right under the sanctuary. During the worship service, we could hear him wailing away. It evoked in me a sense of guilt and inadequacy and anger, because it touched a voice deep inside me, a voice that tells me that like my crying son, I often feel cut off from the source of my life.
This sense of being dependent on the one hand and being separate on the other is not bad in itself, though most of us are taught to be anxious about this condition. Indeed, it is part of God's created order. God has made us so that we belong to God and to one another. God has made us so that we need God and one another, so that we nurture one another, learn from one another, challenge one another, and take care of one another. However, we have taken God's created order -- God's good gifts to us -- and made it a problem. We have allowed our sense of dependency to be seen as a weakness. We have allowed our individual consciousness to become alienation. We have become dominated by anxiety, by the sense that we are lost and lonely. In our sense of being lost, we turn to the idols of the world to ease our fears and our anxieties. This process is what Paul means by "flesh."
Paul wants us to understand that this sense of anxiety and domination permeate our existence as individuals and communities. We learn this process long before we are aware of it. As a white person growing up in the South in the 1950s, I learned racism long before I was aware that I was learning it. I was taught racism not by mean and evil people but by good and decent people like my mother and the leaders of the church in which I learned about the grace of God. I was taught the grace of God and the necessity of racism by the same wonderful people. I learned that racism was a necessity -- that white people were superior -- from good and decent people who had learned it themselves from good and decent people. This is the power of the "flesh," that it permeates our existence as we are taught to turn to the idols of the world in order to cope with our dependence and our separation.
I want to share one more example of this process. As we all have come to know, the church in today's world talks about sex all the time and rarely ever talks about money, while the biblical witness about Jesus indicates that he talked about money all the time and rarely ever mentioned sex. Why this reversal? It is the power of the flesh. Jesus emphasized money so much because he knew that money has the capacity to answer our existential questions of dependence and separation in a demonic way. In our modern world, materialism has become the answer to the questions of the meaning of our lives. We may indeed have the same sense of dependence and separation that troubles every generation, but in our time we have come to believe that if we can just get enough stuff, we won't need anybody. We can answer the anxiety by seeking to get enough money so that we can fool ourselves into believing that we don't need anybody, that dependence is a weakness, and that separation and disengagement are the way life should be.
We hear it on talk radio and television every day -- money is the god that will make us whole. We get the culture that we have, a culture driven by materialism, where the goal of life is to deny dependency by getting enough stuff so that we think that we don't need anybody. We become a place dominated by the flesh, where property is more important than people, where the comfortable exploit the poor in the name of globalization -- so that we can get more stuff.
This is the process that Paul means when he talks about "flesh." It permeates our laws and our consciousness and our bank accounts and our bodies. For Paul, "flesh" is the process by which we answer our anxieties as human beings by turning away from our true calling as children of God and turning toward the answers from the idols of the world. And, though flesh involves the human will, it is much more than the will, much deeper. It involves our imaginations, our very view of ourselves and of God and of the world. It becomes intertwined with our very identities as individuals and as communities.
Are we totally depraved, to use language from another theological era? Are we powerless -- unable to know life, unable to know ourselves, and unable to know God? On our own -- yes. Though the question may have been reformulated, the answer remains the same: on our own, we are captive to the flesh. That is why Paul equates it with death: "for if you live according to the flesh, you will die." In his life, in his journey to Damascus and beyond, Paul found a new and stunning answer, an answer that we have come to call the Holy Trinity. Paul suggests an answer to our captivity: In Jesus Christ, God is offering us a new way of seeing ourselves, a new way of seeing the world. Paul calls this answer "life in the Spirit," the life we have through the God we know in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul lifts up this good news at the beginning of chapter 8: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." For those of us trapped in the flesh, captive to racism and materialism and a host of other powers, there is now good news. In Jesus Christ we have the message -- the Word from God -- that we are loved and accepted in our dependency and finitude, that we are loved and accepted in the messiness of the flesh, that we are known and loved in our individuality. Paul emphasizes that we are offered a new opportunity in our lives in Jesus Christ, an opportunity to "unlearn" the ways of the flesh, an opportunity to affirm our dependence and our individuality and our neediness. In Jesus Christ we have an opportunity to encounter the true source of our lives, the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. In the humanity and the divinity of Jesus Christ, we have this opportunity to find life in the Spirit.
Paul affirms that Jesus Christ has entered into the struggles of our existence, into this process of the "flesh." And Jesus shows us a different way of responding to the anxieties of our lives, turning toward God rather than turning toward the idols of the world. Paul calls this process "life in the Spirit." By "Spirit," Paul does not mean flight from the world or flight from human existence. Paul's point is not to get us out of the world or out of our lives but rather to get us back into the world and deeper into ourselves as children of God, as authentic human beings. When anxiety strikes us, as it surely will and does daily, Paul tells us to refrain from fleeing from our anxiety by running to the idols. He urges us to cry out "Abba" (Daddy), to ask God to preserve us and lift us up.
Jesus knows our finitude and our individuality and our anxiety. He was one of us. He knows the ways of the flesh -- they were taught to him by his culture. Yet, he shows us a different way to respond, and we are asked to see a whole new way of life. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are asked to hear some stunning and unbelievable good news: God, who is the source of all of life and of our lives, loves us and wants us. God knows us -- all parts of us, all of our identity, all of our idolatry. God knows us and wants us. God loves us and calls out to us to hear and receive and believe the good news. This is the good news by which we are saved; this is the good news by which we have life; this is life in the Spirit.
At my mother's funeral several years ago, the pastor of the church in which I was raised read powerful words from Dorothy Sayers as a comment on the passage from life through death to God. It struck me then, and continues to do so, as comments as well on movement from life in the flesh to life in the Spirit:
This is it. This is what we have always feared --
The moment of surrender, the helpless moment
When there is nothing to do but to let go ...
"Into Thy Hands" -- into another's hand
No matter whose; the enemy's hand, death's hand,
God's ... The one moment not to be evaded
Which says, "You must," the moment not of choice
When we must choose to do the thing we must
And will to let our own will go. Let go.
It is no use now clinging to the controls.
Let someone else take over. Take, then, take ...
There, that is done ... into Thy hand, O God.1
Praise God from whom all blessings flow! May it be our guide as we cry out "Abba! Father!" and seek life in the Spirit. Amen.
____________
1. I do not know the source of Dorothy Sayer's writings where these words appear. They were used by the Reverend Richard Goodman at my mother, Mary Stroupe's, funeral at First Presbyterian Church, Helena, Arkansas, on October 31, 2004.
