(This sermon is written as part of a service being led by the youth group.)
Romans
8:6-11
It’s possible to take this morning’s
epistle lesson, where Paul sets “the flesh” on one side and “the Spirit” on the
other could leave you feeling like the rope in a tug of war.
“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.”
[Romans 8:6-8]
On
the one hand, our physical being was made by God and called good along with the
rest of creation. Even more than that,
John tells us that, in Jesus, God
“became
flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”
[John 1:14]
So
it cannot be that our bodies are somehow evil.
On the other hand, though, when physical impulses get out of hand, something
is definitely wrong, usually with more than the physical side of our being.
In confirmation class, I often ask
the kids to memorize the list of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, wrath,
sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. When
you hear the phrase “sins of the flesh”, most minds go immediately to “lust”,
and ignore the gluttony part of it. It
isn’t that overdoing the Doritos and Dr. Pepper is somehow a sign of
unfaithfulness to God, but it is wrong if it takes the food out of someone else’s
mouth or if the long-term effects of things that endanger your health mean that
you will be impaired in ways that hamper your service to God.
“The flesh”, as Paul names it, isn’t
so much our physical being and its needs and wants as it is an attitude toward
God that looks only to those things and forgets that they are from God and for
God. There was a line in one of the
prayers in the old communion service (words that go directly back to Thomas
Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII) that said,
“We here present ourselves,
our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto
thee.”
That
gets at what the right relationship should be.
Everyone – child, youth, adult –
gets messages from the culture that say, “If it feels good, do it. You deserve a break today. You only live once. Go for the gusto. Have it your way.” Most people learn early on to recognize
advertising for what it is, an attempt to sway the consumer using the mild or
serious insecurities that everyone has. The
problem is that people become accustomed to thinking of themselves as
consumers, rather than as caretakers, both of themselves and of God’s
world. Consumers act for
themselves. Caretakers act on behalf of
someone else. In the case of the world,
that someone else is the Lord.
A
lot of what youth ministry amounts to is helping people get a handle on how to
serve God at a point in life where the possibilities stretch out on all
sides. Those possibilities themselves
can seem overwhelming, and it takes a few years to sort through them. At the same time they’re eager to get
started. Teenagers have a lot of
energy. They not only want to be
active. They have to be active. They cannot help it. If it isn’t their bodies that are moving,
it’s their minds. One of the things that
the church does is provide healthy activities to engage in, and healthy topics
to think about. Otherwise, all that
energy that has to go someplace will go into some less than positive
directions.
In
the wider picture, we try to teach how to use that energy for caretaking. Whatever career they follow, whatever
personal choices they make, wherever they decide to live, whatever challenges
they accept, we try to make sure that they are done as a whole person who is
loving God with heart and mind and soul and strength.
Service projects can be a big part
of that because they involve using our bodies for God, foreshadowing the way
that a life can be lived in service, doing any honest work. Painting someone’s house or packing shoes
that are going overseas or planting a community garden – none of those things
sound especially “spiritual”. However,
if a coat of paint helps someone to see that God has not given up on them, then
it is not just a coat of paint. Occasionally,
things come together in the middle of some seemingly insignificant project and
the distinction that says, “Physical over here, spiritual over there,” goes
away. Suddenly, it makes sense that we
need all sides of ourselves to be whole and that they are not so much in
competition as needing to learn to cooperate.
Paul said that
“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.” [Romans 8:11]
It isn’t just about resurrection following death that he
speaks. These words were written to the
living, who have the experience of the Spirit directing their lives here and
now, giving life in the fullest sense to those who otherwise would only exist. Richard Rohr talks about how he, as a
Franciscan priest, often meets people who were part of the charismatic movement.
“Their ‘baptism
in the Holy Spirit’ [and he puts that in quotes] was an experience of God
actively involved in the world. I’m
amazed how many people I meet today, in various social ministries throughout
the country, who will reveal, sometimes after a beer at night, that they were
in a prayer group some years ago. They
say it almost as if they’re ashamed. Yet
for many people that experience helped them get the gospel out of their heads
and into their guts.”[1]
We need both head and guts,
spiritual and physical, working together to be whole people and to proclaim
that Jesus is Lord of both. Our prayer
needs to be the one that the choir sang at the start of the service today:
“My heart, my mind, my body, my soul
I give to You, take control.
I give my body a living sacrifice.
Lord, take control, take control.”
I give to You, take control.
I give my body a living sacrifice.
Lord, take control, take control.”
[1] Richard
Rohr, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The
Sermon on the Mount (Cincinatti: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1996), 116.
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