"Heirs of God."

Romans 8:1–17

May 27, 2018 + Trinity Sunday

I.

The apostle Paul insists, here and in many other places, that human nature is torn between two influences or impulses.  One he calls the “flesh,” and connects very strongly to our physical bodies.  The other he identifies as the Spirit, by Whom we are integrated into God through Christ.

In our blind, unconscious, sleepwalking existence, the shallow excuse for life we normally know from birth, we automatically “walk according to the flesh.”  That is, we follow the dictates of our ego-centric impulses, informed merely by the abilities and senses of our physical bodies.  We see ourselves as tiny, vulnerable, at-risk, individual, separated entities, thrust into a large, uncaring  and even dangerous world.  Thus we are driven by negative emotions — shame, anger, and especially fear — to generate mechanisms for our defense, and to get what we need to survive.  

All of us doing this together spawns the world as we experience it, a place riven by fear, violence, threats, scarcity, competition, hostility, and rage, characterized more than anything by a universal selfishness in which everyone is basically at war with everyone else.  

The tragedy of this situation is that it doesn’t have to be this way.  Indeed, it isn’t this way at all… we have all just made it this way by reacting according to the limitations of our own bodies, senses, and consciousness.  The word for these limitations and their consequences is “sin.”  It means we are off the mark of who we truly are and don’t perceive the world the way it truly is.

God responds to this catastrophe first by liberating the people from bondage in Egypt, which is intended as a metaphor for the liberation God brings into all our our lives in which we are carried by grace from this situation of bondage to sinfulness and self-destruction.  God then gives the people a written Law, the Torah, to reshape their lives according to God’s truth.  The Torah is about community, equality, humility, forgiveness, and shalom or peace.  Preaching and teaching the Torah had been Paul’s whole career.

The problem was that this didn’t work in actually opening people up to the truth.  People found ingenious ways to use the Bible as a way to do just the opposite of what it is about: to keep people in bondage to their own ego-centric selfishness, and to unscrupulous, unenlightened leaders.  The Torah didn’t necessarily make people any better, and it didn’t open their consciousness to the truth of who God really is and what the world is really like.

Albert Einstein once said that a problem is never solved at the level of consciousness that created it.  In other words, it’s not thinking different things that makes a difference, it is thinking differently.  Paul sees that simple, literal, technical obedience to the words of the Torah, as implemented by the priests, rabbis, and scribes of his time, were being twisted to serve the same corrosive nationalism, elitism, cruelty, wealth, and power that had kept people enslaved in Egypt, that is to say, in sin.  The Torah had been coopted as a tool to keep people in oppression.

II.

Paul comes to see that God sends the Son to deal with sin by the offering of his own flesh on the cross, thus showing us that forgiveness is won through a suffering that absorbs, neutralizes, and negates the violence of the world.  Once that happens, and we see that we are not limited, but that we are actually connected to and in everything by our union with the One who made all things, we find ourselves free from fear and therefore suddenly open to the Spirit.  

So it is not about punishing and causing pain to our physical bodies.  But it is about seeing beyond them, not being limited by them, and becoming aware of how our bodies connect us to others, the whole creation, and to God, rather than cutting us off from them.  That’s why authentic Christianity immediately follows Jesus into the service of people’s bodies, through ministries of healing, liberation, and justice with those who are suffering or in need.

Paul’s point is that Jesus Christ has exploded our narrow, limited, distorted, blind, fearful focus on our physical nature.  Instead of the flesh, we now see by the Spirit.  The Spirit reveals that Christ, by his cross and resurrection, proves that we are much larger and more integrated into all of life.  Even the inevitable wearing out of our physical bodies does not mean that we perish or are no more.  It simply means we are welcomed — adopted, is Paul’s word — into the fullness of our larger true nature as “children of God.”

Therefore, we may live now according to the Spirit of God, whom we perceive as active and present everywhere and in everything.  Don’t live according to the flesh, he says, which is a mindless swirl down a dark drain to death.  Do not live according to fear, shame, or anger; do not live according to the demands of selfish sinfulness making you enemies of each other, in competition for scarce resources.  You don’t have to live that way because Christ reveals that who we truly are is not limited by the boundaries of our skin.

We may “put to death the deeds of the body,” which is to say, not act according to our small-minded limitations and by our fear, hostility, and violence.  Instead, we truly live in relationship with God and with all.  We are, he says, nothing less than “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”  We inherit the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus gives us a particular way to activate all this: the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  In this way we remember and participate in his self-offering, receiving his life into our bodies, and become one with him.  In this way we affirm our place at the Lord’s Table, as God’s children, with all the benefits and requirements thereof.

III.

Finally, Paul says that all this happens only “if.”  “If, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”

Historically, some concluded from this that we are obligated as followers of Jesus to do intentional harm to ourselves.  As if “suffering with him” meant causing ourselves physical pain and discomfort.

But Jesus himself does nothing of the sort.  With the possible exception of his severe fasting in the wilderness after his baptism, Jesus nowhere deliberately afflicts himself.  In fact, his ministry is known for just the opposite.  His enemies accuse him of being a glutton and a drunkard.  He is known for not engaging in acts of rigorous asceticism like other rabbis and spiritual teachers.  His disciples are known for not fasting as much as other groups.  

If anything, it is his reticence about such practices, and the consequent perception that he and his disciples are kind of hedonistic libertines, that contributes to the circumstances that get the authorities angry enough with him to arrest and execute him.  That is what Paul is talking about.  We don’t need to deliberately cause ourselves physical pain.  Following Jesus’ example of love and service, equality and compassion, justice and peace is inherently countercultural enough that the suffering will likely come by itself.  The authorities and elites, and often even a majority of normal people, will often feel themselves obliged to make that happen to some degree.  That’s what it means to “suffer with him.”  

There are places in this country where it is actually illegal to feed a homeless person!  If we really dedicate ourselves to living by the Spirit of Christ and therefore welcoming the weak, the sick, the lost, the marginalized, the despised, and the condemned, we will run afoul of the armies of people who still live according to the flesh, under the sway of fear, sin, and death.   

We see how it works for Jesus.  On the one hand he gets himself crucified for his transgressions against the accepted authorities, norms, and traditions.  On the other hand — and the whole point is — he is resurrected from the dead by God who vindicates his life of reconciling, inclusive love.  Paul is saying we get the resurrection and we get to be called God’s children… to the degree that we accept for ourselves the cost accepted by God’s Son, the cross of unpopularity, rejection, mockery, suffering, and even sometimes death. 

“You did not receive a spirit of slavery,” Paul writes.  God is not calling us to “fall back into fear.”  If God is our Father, and we are God’s adoptive children in Christ, then we cannot fall back into bondage.  We cannot fall back into blindness.  We cannot fall back into the fear, anger, and shame, the sinfulness that characterizes normal sub-human, in-human existence.  

IV.

For we have been welcomed by God and this changes everything.  The Spirit calls us to a life above what is normal, with its loyalties and allegiances, its habits and traditions, its in-groups and outsiders, what it values and what it condemns.  The Spirit calls us to life in a holy and beloved community utterly distinct from a pit of hostile and competing individuals where only bullies thrive.  The Spirit calls us to a better way of life than selfish consumerism, mindless nationalism, and cynical inequality.  

The Spirit calls on us to realize now, today, in our lives and relationships, the blessings of justice and love, the glory of forgiveness and peace, and the joy of communion.  For in Jesus Christ, we have been made God’s children and heirs, the gentle peacemakers who inherit the earth.    

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