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Proverbs 3: 1-8, Romans 6: 12-14
Good morning and welcome to our Fall theme – Looking in the Mirror.
Every time I have mentioned the title of our fall theme to some one, the immediate initial reaction is nervousness. We’re going to, “Look in the mirror?” My sense is that we have this love/hate relationship with mirrors. We do and we don’t want to see the image that is reflected back to us. We wonder if the image in the mirror although it reflects back to us something of who we are, is it reflecting back to us all of who we are.
This choice of our fall theme unfolded during a preaching team conversation about the very real concern and questions we have about our bodies. Our society is pretty fixated on human bodies and not always helpfully. We admitted to being worried about how media portrays both women and men and the effect that has on us. We talked about how human limitations and the abilities/disabilities of our bodies are experienced and viewed helpfully and unhelpfully. We wondered about ways in which we abuse our bodies or are abused and why? We pondered how our communication with each other electronically has become disembodied and what that might mean positively and/or negatively. As you might imagine it took no time at all to come up with an entire fall series where we will ponder some of these questions.
We live and move and see the world through our bodies. Christian faith, tradition and Scripture have lots to say on this topic. From the apostle Paul to Augustine to Luther, to Menno to recent scholarship, there are almost as many views of how to view our bodies, as there are persons to ponder the question.
And so what is it about our Christian life and faith and Scripture that can help us to understand our earthiness, our embodied humanity in the light of Christ and as followers of Jesus. This is the task of our fall theme.
This fall we will look in the mirror and talk about what we see there in the light our Scriptural witness.
This morning I begin with Paul in Romans with his flesh and Spirit language. We joked at preaching team meeting about this being the topic with the most unanswerable questions.
Is this apparent dichotomy between flesh and spirit helpful or unhelpful?
How do we understand Paul here?
Listen for a moment to Romans 8:1ff
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do; by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law – indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Sprit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Now there is no question that Paul’s thinking in Romans is fairly complex and much effort has been spent trying to dissect and understand it. I admit that this was a difficult sermon for me because at times my mind kind of bogs down in the fog of repetition and argument and language that was meant for a 1st century audience and not a 21st century one, but if you’ll bear with me – we may yet find a way to see some of the shapes in this fog.
A less than helpful way to view this passage includes dividing flesh and spirit into two diametrically opposed substances in which flesh is bad and spirit is good.
Throughout the centuries we have seen and experienced the destructive fruit of this interpretation when the human body is tortured and mutilated because all that matters is the immaterial spirit that is somehow encased in this body. Or the thinking that if bodies are bad, then sex is worse, and that bodies must be denigrated or restrained or sloughed off so that our spirits may be freed. It may seem like this is what this passage is saying but when we look at Paul’s words carefully and more broadly and the Hebraic understanding behind them – what Paul can be understood to mean by flesh is simply our natural human abilities and inclinations. Flesh in and of itself is not bad and not part of a fallen or sinful human nature. Paul would have known and believed that our bodies were created good and in the image of God according to the creation story in Genesis.
However what Paul understood in a helpful way about flesh – this body of ours – is that the inclinations of the flesh can become enslaved. It is Sin or the powers of evil that can enslave our flesh and our minds and it is this enslavement that we need to be freed from.
Let me say more about our modern understanding of “the flesh” and see if Paul’s words here are still helpful.
In our current understanding of the way our brains work you may be familiar with the part of the brain called the amygdala, some people call it our reptilian brain, that houses our quickest reactions, strongest emotions and our most impulsive desires.
Think road rage or the time you ate a whole carton of ice cream o
r a whole bag of chips. These actions are based in our impulsive will and desires and not normally accompanied by thoughtful reflection. If we manage to control our impulsive will and desires and apply thoughtful reflection which is housed in other parts of the brain, we can then make choices between good and bad or good and better or best.
Both our desires (our natural inclinations) and thoughtful reflection (the power of choice) are part of what it means to experience and live in this body of ours, or in Paul’s words to live with “flesh.” Another word for desire would be covetousness, something the gift of the law from Mt. Sinai attempts to restrain with its “Thou shalt not… but it seems that no matter how much we use even our reflective will we are not always successful at restraining our desires and appetites; our covetousness. We remember Paul’s words in Romans 7, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” The problem for Paul comes when our will, whether it is driven by desire, Paul would say lust, or by our reflection, becomes our only moral compass. Paul calls this being enslaved by Sin.
Let’s think about our modern or should I say post-modern context again for a moment. In general – what comprises society’s primary moral compass – that which generally guides behaviour?
I would dare to say that our greatest difficulty today is no longer a restrained understanding of our flesh, desires and appetites as might have been the case 30 or more years ago. Our difficulty today is that we are encouraged to know our deepest desires and act on them. We are encouraged to move with what feels good to us, what gives us pleasure and what we find the most entertaining. You may have heard the phrase, “if it feels good, do it.” With this moral compass in place the will becomes identified with ones desires and “freedom” equals doing what one wants. If we are mature and have learned to use our reflective will – this won’t be our entire enslavement, but we can’t help but be touched by it in some areas of our lives. Being a slave to our desires is known in some circles as addiction and who hasn’t been touched by an addiction to something the brings death instead of life. And the answer is not only use of reflective will because even this (the thinking we can be in charge and figure it all out and live a purpose driven life, or master our lives with the use our own will power) all of this human effort can also be enslaved by the power of sin and darkness.
But what if we submit our desires and our reflective will to the power of the life, death and resurrection of Christ – to the power of the Spirit of Christ that can live in us.
This is the truth that Paul knows intimately and lives out in his own body and what makes him so fundamentally joyful in this letter to the Romans despite the complexity of what he’s trying to explain with all his flesh and Spirit language.
I’m going to read another passage for us starting at chapter 6:3ff.
I invite you to listen to these words of Paul and not so much to try to figure them out as roll with them and let them wash over you.
I invite you to hear in Paul his desire that baptized Christians realize the freedom their baptism means – freedom from the power that sin has over their flesh.
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that,
just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.
What does Paul know and want us to know? Paul knows and wants us to know that the Christ story – the person, the death and burial and resurrection of Christ, God’s saving act in Jesus, is what makes it possible to be free from enslavement to our desires. We are not to be freed from our flesh, so that we can live as disembodied spirits, rather we are to be freed from enslavement to sin that has its hold on our flesh so that we can live fully embodied – transformed lives. You may remember Romans chapter 12:1ff.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Somehow our task is to allow ourselves, individually and corporately to be transformed so that we may discern the will of God. We’ve been allergic to the “will of God” language for a while in our church and in our society because of its association to deterministic language. As well, this kind of deterministic language goes against our personal and individualized sense of strength and purpose, but true sanctification, or transformation or Christ-likeness demands that we know something of what God is like through Christ and what God wills or desires for us and the whole creation that has been groaning from the beginning of creation until now. We need to not only know these things but also through the power of the Holy Spirit be willing to imitate or embody or put on these things.
As we practice willing what God wills, as we are empowered by the Spirit to imitate Christ through the disciplines of prayer and study and regular worship and acts of service we find that our embodied life looks more and more like Christ’s. In Romans 13:13,14 Paul continues his plea – in summary – do not let desires rule your life, instead put on Jesus Christ –as the ruler of your life, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
And we are given glimpses of what that kind of life is like in the joy that permeates Paul’s words when he talks of the work of God through Christ. In Paul’s words we regularly hear the joy of life in Christ, the peace of Christ, the height and depth of the love of God in Christ. In Romans and elsewhere Paul demonstrates for us a life that is led, guided, permeated and ruled by the Spirit of Christ that lives in him. Forgetting for a moment that his arguments are complex, that the language is sometimes difficult to understand, and we may not even always agree with him what do we think Paul saw when he looked in a mirror, if they had mirrors in the 1st century CE. Certainly he saw his weak and unimpressive body, thorn in the flesh and all, but I also suspect that what would have radiated back at him from the mirror is the Spirit of Christ that lived in him and the robe of Christ-like actions that had become inseparable from the life that he lived. And I know that same Christ-likeness is not only available to but infuses and radiates from many who are present here today. I see it in your faith and faithfulness, I see it in the way you face adversity and crisis, I see it in the way you so often selflessly love and serve your neighbour. May the Spirit of Christ who is in you
sustain you
and transform you
and bring you to even greater works than these. Amen