Life In The Spirit
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Object:
Chapter 8 of Paul's letter to the Romans is one of the greatest chapters in all of scripture. It has many verses that we know by heart. For instance, verse 18: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us." Or the verse that follows it: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." And then there are the powerful closing words of the chapter that are often read at funerals: "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
These closing words of Romans 8 remind us of the mighty power of God, which we know through the Spirit of God. On this Day of Pentecost we recall that same mighty power who drove those first men and women disciples out into the streets of Jerusalem to proclaim a new and inclusive vision of what it means to be a child of God. On that day 2,000 years ago, God's Spirit filled up the men and women who had been waiting in fear and in hope.
Twenty years after the Day of Pentecost, Paul is writing to the church at Rome, and he is able to connect with the struggles of those first disciples because he has known them, too. In Romans 8 he recalls the power of the Spirit who came to the men and women in the midst of their struggles, came to them in their fear and their hope. It was this Spirit who came to them and sent them out into the streets to astonish the Jewish pilgrims from all over the known world who had gathered for the Festival of Weeks called Pentecost. In these particular verses for today in Romans 8, Paul reflects upon God's Spirit moving in the midst of our struggles and our longings, moving in those places where we dare to hope but also where we are not certain that there is much hope. Paul has known these struggles -- he has participated in the murder of Stephen, he has been knocked down by the Spirit on the road to Damascus, and he has wrestled mightily with his fellow Jewish Christians and with the Gentiles who are beginning to stream into this new community called the Way.
Paul himself is not certain what the finished product will be. He compares this painful process to a woman giving birth -- it is filled with pain and hope. It is not clear what the baby will look like or act like. Though he has never given birth to a baby, he has given birth to many churches, churches such as the one in Corinth that has given him so much trouble and yet he loves so dearly. In the midst of this kind of birthing process, Paul asks the Romans and himself (and us) to trust in this process of the Spirit of God producing that which we need and desire: to be grounded in the presence of God.
In these verses, Paul emphasizes that it is the Spirit of God who will keep us grounded in the presence of God. It is the Spirit who will give us hope and life. The Spirit has many manifestations, but we should note that the essence of Spirit is God working in our lives -- calling us, seeking us out, wanting us to know that we are loved, that we are known. This is the vision of the Spirit that Peter notes in his quote from the prophet Joel when he speaks on Pentecost. "Spirit" is not another god, nor an angelic messenger from God. "Spirit" is God, longing for us to see and to experience and to live in a new reality, the reality established in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
One characteristic of the Pentecost experience of God's Spirit is reorientation. Paul urges us to be reoriented to a different way of life in the midst of our lives. Paul knows that one of the powerful threats to the Pentecost vision is the continuing power of chaos and death in our lives. The groaning in travail that begins today's verses is Paul's acknowledgement of the deep struggle for power in our hearts. He asks us to hear that God has come among us in Jesus Christ to give us a glimpse of hope and freedom. He urges us to hear and see that there is a whole different way of perceiving ourselves and perceiving reality, and he emphasizes that God has come among us in Jesus Christ to help us to understand who God is and who we are.
It is what Jesus meant in the first chapter of Mark when he burst upon the scene proclaiming the arrival of the reign of God: "The time is fulfilled, and the reign of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news" (Mark 1:14-15). The word "repent" means to "turn around," to reorient ourselves and our lives. It certainly means that we should change our behavior, but it also means something deeper and even more difficult. It means a change in our attitudes, to change the way we perceive reality and ourselves. Jesus (and Paul) urge this shift not because we are so bad but because we have such limited imaginations. It is difficult to imagine life without the power of the idols of the world in our consciousness. That difficulty is what Paul means by "flesh," and we will look at that concept more in depth in the next sermon.
In chapter 8 of Romans, and especially in today's verses, Paul urges us to hear about the power of the Spirit, to hear the good news: In Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity to see that God loves us and wants us, that God knows us -- all the parts of us -- and still God loves us. Life in the Spirit, then, is characterized first of all by a reorienting of ourselves toward God.
The problem for us, of course, is that we are mired down in the struggles inside ourselves and outside ourselves. We groan inwardly and outwardly -- our own motives are complex, and the world seems to be filled with death and destruction. Our anxiety gathers strength, and we lose our grounding, giving ourselves over to the powers of death. Paul thus emphasizes a second characteristic of life in the Spirit: hope. This sprinkling of hope gives us a bit of room to wiggle -- we gain a glimpse of freedom and possibility. We are not totally defined by despair and death, for God's Spirit is moving in our lives. By using the ideas of hope and freedom, Paul does not mean a lack of constraints. In today's world of talk radio and television, we have come to believe that hope and freedom mean that there is no one to bother us, that we are disconnected and disengaged from everyone. In his use of hope and freedom, though, Paul means room to move in our consciousness -- room for us to move, and room for God to move.
For Paul, the hope that is not seen is the idea that we are not tied down to the idols of the world, that we can imagine ourselves and the world and God differently. Paul proclaims to the Romans and to us that God's Spirit is moving in our lives, at precisely the times when we groan in travail, at precisely the times when we see very little hope or possibility on the horizon. He proclaims this not because he wants us to be unrealistic but because he wants us to be realistic -- that life is much deeper than we have previously imagined. He asks us to hold on to that which we cannot see, not by repressing our lives or our passion but rather by reorienting and expressing our passion. Paul emphasizes that because of God's Spirit we can never be confined to the world's definition of ourselves or even to our own definition of ourselves. Because of God's Spirit, there is always the possibility of discovering God's definition of ourselves: children of God.
This is not a particularly new insight, but the church has often proclaimed it by urging us to withdraw from the world and its troubles and struggles. Yet, here in these verses in Romans 8, Paul emphasizes that a third characteristic of life in the Spirit is a commitment to staying in the world, staying in this life. Paul reminds us that we are called to stay in the world -- that is our calling from the Pentecost experience. The goal of God's Spirit is not to get us out of the world so that we can be free of anxiety and struggle. The goal of God's Spirit is to get us back into the world in an authentic way, finding our roots and our place not in the demonic powers but in the power of God, who is the center of our own particular lives and indeed is the center of all life.
Paul is not asking us to escape from the struggles of the world but to go back into those struggles, go back to them with a renewed sense of God's love for us and for the world, with a renewed sense of hope and possibility. Because we are asked to stay in the world, Paul reminds us that life in the Spirit will be characterized by struggle. Life in the spirit is not all sweetness and light -- it is often marked by struggle. The power of the idols is so deeply rooted in our view of ourselves, and our view of God and the world, that we will often find ourselves in dilemma. This is not news to us -- we know what Paul means when he says, "we groan inwardly while we wait for adoption." Paul's point here is not that we will fly away from our groaning but that God knows our struggles and our groanings, and that God is moving in our lives to help us find hope and possibility, to help us recover that vision of the Day of Pentecost.
It is in this description of the movement of the Spirit of God in our struggles that Paul's language is most powerful. He speaks of the Spirit interceding in our prayers, in our longings, in our fears, in our hopes, and in our inability to pray. In those places that are so overwhelming and scary that we can hardly articulate them -- in those places, Paul emphasizes God's movement, the Spirit moving in us "with sighs too deep for words." I remember one such moment in my ministry, although there have been many similar moments. One of our elders in his forties was near death in the hospital, dying from a rare blood disease that would not allow his blood to clot. This disease had thinned his blood so much that it was coming out of his body in many places. On this particular day, as the nurses and doctors worked frantically to save him, his wife came and pleaded with me to go to the hospital chapel and pray with her. We went, and she fervently prayed for God to spare her husband's life. We held hands, and I did not know what to pray. I groaned inwardly -- her husband's death was imminent, yet his wife and I both wanted him to live. So, I prayed, too, for his life to be spared, though I felt inwardly that this prayer would not be answered in this way. At that moment, I felt the sting of death in his wife's despair, and I felt my own weakness that Paul describes in these verses -- I did not know how or what to pray at that moment. I hoped that God's Spirit would intercede -- the situation was clearly beyond my control; indeed it was beyond my power to comprehend enough to even know what to pray.
Our elder died a few minutes later. I discerned the intercession of God's Spirit in his room after his death. His mother came in to view his body and to say, "Good-bye." I sought to console her by saying that her son was a good man and that we would all miss him. She thanked me, and then the Spirit spoke through her to me and to his wife and to many others. She prayed with the power of the Spirit, thanking God for this son, thanking God for all the gifts that she had received from God through her son's life, and asking now for God to give her son safe passage into the arms of Jesus. As the tears flowed down my cheeks, I thanked God, too, for this reminder that death is not the final word, that loving is the final word. Here in this most painful moment of the death of her son, this momma had reminded us all that the point and the meaning of life is loving, is engaging, is the connection. In that very engaging comes pain because of the power of death, but the promise of the Spirit is that it is in the loving and the engaging that we find our lives and that we find our meaning as the adopted daughters and sons of God. It is in loving that we are found by God.
In those places where we groan in travail, in those places where our inward groaning causes us to begin to lose hope and not know what or how to pray, may we, too, find the intercession of the Spirit who moves with sighs too deep for words. Amen.
These closing words of Romans 8 remind us of the mighty power of God, which we know through the Spirit of God. On this Day of Pentecost we recall that same mighty power who drove those first men and women disciples out into the streets of Jerusalem to proclaim a new and inclusive vision of what it means to be a child of God. On that day 2,000 years ago, God's Spirit filled up the men and women who had been waiting in fear and in hope.
Twenty years after the Day of Pentecost, Paul is writing to the church at Rome, and he is able to connect with the struggles of those first disciples because he has known them, too. In Romans 8 he recalls the power of the Spirit who came to the men and women in the midst of their struggles, came to them in their fear and their hope. It was this Spirit who came to them and sent them out into the streets to astonish the Jewish pilgrims from all over the known world who had gathered for the Festival of Weeks called Pentecost. In these particular verses for today in Romans 8, Paul reflects upon God's Spirit moving in the midst of our struggles and our longings, moving in those places where we dare to hope but also where we are not certain that there is much hope. Paul has known these struggles -- he has participated in the murder of Stephen, he has been knocked down by the Spirit on the road to Damascus, and he has wrestled mightily with his fellow Jewish Christians and with the Gentiles who are beginning to stream into this new community called the Way.
Paul himself is not certain what the finished product will be. He compares this painful process to a woman giving birth -- it is filled with pain and hope. It is not clear what the baby will look like or act like. Though he has never given birth to a baby, he has given birth to many churches, churches such as the one in Corinth that has given him so much trouble and yet he loves so dearly. In the midst of this kind of birthing process, Paul asks the Romans and himself (and us) to trust in this process of the Spirit of God producing that which we need and desire: to be grounded in the presence of God.
In these verses, Paul emphasizes that it is the Spirit of God who will keep us grounded in the presence of God. It is the Spirit who will give us hope and life. The Spirit has many manifestations, but we should note that the essence of Spirit is God working in our lives -- calling us, seeking us out, wanting us to know that we are loved, that we are known. This is the vision of the Spirit that Peter notes in his quote from the prophet Joel when he speaks on Pentecost. "Spirit" is not another god, nor an angelic messenger from God. "Spirit" is God, longing for us to see and to experience and to live in a new reality, the reality established in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
One characteristic of the Pentecost experience of God's Spirit is reorientation. Paul urges us to be reoriented to a different way of life in the midst of our lives. Paul knows that one of the powerful threats to the Pentecost vision is the continuing power of chaos and death in our lives. The groaning in travail that begins today's verses is Paul's acknowledgement of the deep struggle for power in our hearts. He asks us to hear that God has come among us in Jesus Christ to give us a glimpse of hope and freedom. He urges us to hear and see that there is a whole different way of perceiving ourselves and perceiving reality, and he emphasizes that God has come among us in Jesus Christ to help us to understand who God is and who we are.
It is what Jesus meant in the first chapter of Mark when he burst upon the scene proclaiming the arrival of the reign of God: "The time is fulfilled, and the reign of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news" (Mark 1:14-15). The word "repent" means to "turn around," to reorient ourselves and our lives. It certainly means that we should change our behavior, but it also means something deeper and even more difficult. It means a change in our attitudes, to change the way we perceive reality and ourselves. Jesus (and Paul) urge this shift not because we are so bad but because we have such limited imaginations. It is difficult to imagine life without the power of the idols of the world in our consciousness. That difficulty is what Paul means by "flesh," and we will look at that concept more in depth in the next sermon.
In chapter 8 of Romans, and especially in today's verses, Paul urges us to hear about the power of the Spirit, to hear the good news: In Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity to see that God loves us and wants us, that God knows us -- all the parts of us -- and still God loves us. Life in the Spirit, then, is characterized first of all by a reorienting of ourselves toward God.
The problem for us, of course, is that we are mired down in the struggles inside ourselves and outside ourselves. We groan inwardly and outwardly -- our own motives are complex, and the world seems to be filled with death and destruction. Our anxiety gathers strength, and we lose our grounding, giving ourselves over to the powers of death. Paul thus emphasizes a second characteristic of life in the Spirit: hope. This sprinkling of hope gives us a bit of room to wiggle -- we gain a glimpse of freedom and possibility. We are not totally defined by despair and death, for God's Spirit is moving in our lives. By using the ideas of hope and freedom, Paul does not mean a lack of constraints. In today's world of talk radio and television, we have come to believe that hope and freedom mean that there is no one to bother us, that we are disconnected and disengaged from everyone. In his use of hope and freedom, though, Paul means room to move in our consciousness -- room for us to move, and room for God to move.
For Paul, the hope that is not seen is the idea that we are not tied down to the idols of the world, that we can imagine ourselves and the world and God differently. Paul proclaims to the Romans and to us that God's Spirit is moving in our lives, at precisely the times when we groan in travail, at precisely the times when we see very little hope or possibility on the horizon. He proclaims this not because he wants us to be unrealistic but because he wants us to be realistic -- that life is much deeper than we have previously imagined. He asks us to hold on to that which we cannot see, not by repressing our lives or our passion but rather by reorienting and expressing our passion. Paul emphasizes that because of God's Spirit we can never be confined to the world's definition of ourselves or even to our own definition of ourselves. Because of God's Spirit, there is always the possibility of discovering God's definition of ourselves: children of God.
This is not a particularly new insight, but the church has often proclaimed it by urging us to withdraw from the world and its troubles and struggles. Yet, here in these verses in Romans 8, Paul emphasizes that a third characteristic of life in the Spirit is a commitment to staying in the world, staying in this life. Paul reminds us that we are called to stay in the world -- that is our calling from the Pentecost experience. The goal of God's Spirit is not to get us out of the world so that we can be free of anxiety and struggle. The goal of God's Spirit is to get us back into the world in an authentic way, finding our roots and our place not in the demonic powers but in the power of God, who is the center of our own particular lives and indeed is the center of all life.
Paul is not asking us to escape from the struggles of the world but to go back into those struggles, go back to them with a renewed sense of God's love for us and for the world, with a renewed sense of hope and possibility. Because we are asked to stay in the world, Paul reminds us that life in the Spirit will be characterized by struggle. Life in the spirit is not all sweetness and light -- it is often marked by struggle. The power of the idols is so deeply rooted in our view of ourselves, and our view of God and the world, that we will often find ourselves in dilemma. This is not news to us -- we know what Paul means when he says, "we groan inwardly while we wait for adoption." Paul's point here is not that we will fly away from our groaning but that God knows our struggles and our groanings, and that God is moving in our lives to help us find hope and possibility, to help us recover that vision of the Day of Pentecost.
It is in this description of the movement of the Spirit of God in our struggles that Paul's language is most powerful. He speaks of the Spirit interceding in our prayers, in our longings, in our fears, in our hopes, and in our inability to pray. In those places that are so overwhelming and scary that we can hardly articulate them -- in those places, Paul emphasizes God's movement, the Spirit moving in us "with sighs too deep for words." I remember one such moment in my ministry, although there have been many similar moments. One of our elders in his forties was near death in the hospital, dying from a rare blood disease that would not allow his blood to clot. This disease had thinned his blood so much that it was coming out of his body in many places. On this particular day, as the nurses and doctors worked frantically to save him, his wife came and pleaded with me to go to the hospital chapel and pray with her. We went, and she fervently prayed for God to spare her husband's life. We held hands, and I did not know what to pray. I groaned inwardly -- her husband's death was imminent, yet his wife and I both wanted him to live. So, I prayed, too, for his life to be spared, though I felt inwardly that this prayer would not be answered in this way. At that moment, I felt the sting of death in his wife's despair, and I felt my own weakness that Paul describes in these verses -- I did not know how or what to pray at that moment. I hoped that God's Spirit would intercede -- the situation was clearly beyond my control; indeed it was beyond my power to comprehend enough to even know what to pray.
Our elder died a few minutes later. I discerned the intercession of God's Spirit in his room after his death. His mother came in to view his body and to say, "Good-bye." I sought to console her by saying that her son was a good man and that we would all miss him. She thanked me, and then the Spirit spoke through her to me and to his wife and to many others. She prayed with the power of the Spirit, thanking God for this son, thanking God for all the gifts that she had received from God through her son's life, and asking now for God to give her son safe passage into the arms of Jesus. As the tears flowed down my cheeks, I thanked God, too, for this reminder that death is not the final word, that loving is the final word. Here in this most painful moment of the death of her son, this momma had reminded us all that the point and the meaning of life is loving, is engaging, is the connection. In that very engaging comes pain because of the power of death, but the promise of the Spirit is that it is in the loving and the engaging that we find our lives and that we find our meaning as the adopted daughters and sons of God. It is in loving that we are found by God.
In those places where we groan in travail, in those places where our inward groaning causes us to begin to lose hope and not know what or how to pray, may we, too, find the intercession of the Spirit who moves with sighs too deep for words. Amen.
