"God's Spirit and Us" - May 31, 2015

Romans 8:12-17

“God’s Spirit and Us”

May 31, 2015

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.  [Romans 8:14-17]

The people to whom Paul wrote those words were the Church in Rome, and what they had to fear was an emperor named Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Nero to his friends).  In the year 64 A.D., a large section of Rome was destroyed by a fire and some people blamed him because he was known to have wanted to redesign the city, and nobody put it past him to use a little arson to clear out the slums.  Nero tried to clear his name by pointing to a scapegoat in the form of a new cult that had arisen among the Jews, and who, like them, refused to worship the Roman gods in the accepted and respectful way.  According to Roman historians of the time, he rounded up some of these Christians, dipped them in oil, and used them as human torches to give light in his garden at night.  That had not yet happened when Paul wrote his letter to the Roman church, but he and they both knew what kind of terror could lie ahead, and that when he talked about suffering with Christ, he meant the sort of creative torture that the Romans exceled at.

Under those conditions, it was of no small importance to know with full conviction that when you stand up for what is right, that the Holy Spirit will speak to your own spirit with the assurance that you are doing no less than you should, and that you can be confident of God’s care in all things, no matter what.  I wish I could say that once Nero was gone, that lesson was unnecessary, but it’s one that every generation has had to learn in its own way.

Times of testing and trial come to everyone.  Sometimes they are part of large, national decisions.  In 1845, James Russell Lowell wrote:

“Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.”

Russell was expressing his opposition to the Mexican-American War, which had been declared under the pretext of protecting democracy in the Western Hemisphere but which he understood as being fought in order to expand slavery into Texas and the southwest.  He wasn’t alone in his judgment.  His friend Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay a tax to support the war.  When Ralph Waldo Emerson showed up, unasked, to bail Thoreau out, Emerson looked at him in his cell and said, “David, what are you doing in there?” to which Thoreau replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

            The Holy Spirit gives the human spirit a moral courage that helps the faithful stand against the crowd when they have to.  The picture that is painted of Martin Luther King, Jr. most of the time is of someone who bravely led a coalition of people in opposition to segregation.  At the end of his life, though, there were big chunks of that coalition that had begun to drop away because he pushed for more than that.  He drew the connection between segregation and unjust labor practices and the war in Vietnam in ways that made some of his allies very, very uncomfortable and a lot of them had begun to pull away.  But he kept on pressing the point.  In his last speech he said that he understood that he might get taken out for what he was doing, but that his confidence came from his relationship to his Lord.  The Spirit was bearing witness with his spirit.  You’ve heard the speech:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life–longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” [1]

            Those moments to decide do come, and they come more than once, to everyone.  The thing to remember is that in the midst of it the Holy Spirit is right there to support and guide the believer.  The Spirit, above all, speaks to us of Jesus and reminds us of the faith he held and the faith in God that we hold through him.

“Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.”

That is why when even on the immediate and personal level we are forced to make difficult and terrible choices that nobody should ever have to make, we do it with the awareness that there is a greater glory awaiting than this world has yet seen.

            A friend of mine tells the story of how she was with a family whose wife and mother had had a heart attack while she was on the operating table.  The surgeon stepped out to talk to them, to ask what to do.  Should they let her go, or leave her on life support?  The children looked at their father, who looked at my friend and said, “What does the Bible say about this?”  She says that she shook her head and told him it was a situation that the Bible writers never faced.  But then she added, “It does say this, though:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” [Ecclesiastes 3:1]

She said he took a deep breath and nodded, and knew at that moment what to tell the surgeon.

“There is a time to be born, and a time to die.” [Ecclesiastes 3:2]

They didn’t like their choices, but they were at peace with the decision to let her go.

            There is no telling what choices you or I may ever have to make.  But when we make them in the full awareness of the way that God’s Spirit speaks to us of all that Jesus taught and all that he underwent, not leaving out either his crucifixion or his resurrection, then we will choose rightly.

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”  [Romans 8:14-17]

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[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968.