Sermon: Spirit and Flesh

Spirit and Flesh

Christ Frees Us

Romans 8:1-11

Rev. Tim Callow

Preached Sun. July 12th, 2020

Paul sets out two ways of living. He says there are those who live by the way of the flesh, and set their minds of the things of the flesh. Then there are those who live by way of the Spirit, and set their minds on things of the Spirit. Paul doesn’t immediately elaborate on what it means to set your mind on the flesh, or what it means to set your mind on the Spirit. So what does he mean? How do I know when my mind is on the flesh, or when my mind is on the Spirit? What is flesh? What is Spirit? What does it mean that “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death?”

Paul sees all of human history divided into two ages. There is “the present evil age” as he puts it in Galatians, which is ruled by the flesh, sin, and the Law. But then there is the New Creation. The New Creation is characterized by the Spirit and God’s grace. In the New Creation Christ reigns, in the Spirit. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.” Jesus is the fulcrum between those two ages. When Jesus was crucified “the world was crucified to me and I to the world,” as Paul puts it. Jesus’ resurrection marks the beginning of a New Creation. He is, after all, the first fruits of the new creation. And God is giving birth to this New Creation, in the Spirit, in the world today. So the Flesh characterizes the realm of the fallen world, while the Spirit characterizes the realm of life in Christ.

What does it mean to live according to the flesh then? Living according to the flesh means living according to our basest desires. The fleshly life looks like this: “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” We know we will all die. So those who live according to the flesh try to make the most out of a short life. Either we make the most money, or have the most sex, or gain the most power, or watch the most movies, or find the finest cuisine. In the flesh that’s all there is to life.

The flesh sees happiness as the fulfillment of base desires. The purpose of life, then, is to fulfill those desires. It’s like the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, for those who’ve seen it. Willy Wonka has creatively removed all the kids who showed different vices that, in the end, frustrate their desire to own the factory and know true happiness. Augustus Gloop is gluttonous and gets stuck in a tube, Veruca Salt is greedy and ends up in the trash heap, and all that. But Charlie Bucket is moderate in his desires. At the end of the movie Wonka gives him the factory and they fly off in a glass elevator. While they’re hovering over Charlie’s new factory Wonka says, “don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.” Charlie asks, “What happened?” And Wonka says, “He lived happily ever after.” 

I never agreed with that. If we suddenly got everything we always wanted, I think we’d be bored after awhile. Or we’d grow paranoid, afraid we might lose it. We weren’t made to have all our bodily desires satisfied. This is why Paul often characterizes life in the flesh as a life of competition and divisiveness. “But if you bite and devour one another,” he says, “watch out that you are not consumed by one another.” When he lists the works of the flesh, they are things like “enmity, strife, jealously, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy…” and so on.

Now, this isn’t to say that our physical needs are bad. We ought to meet our basic needs, there are people who are unjustly condemned to poverty and oppression, who are without the basest rights and dignity. This isn’t to say that we should tell them, “you just want to live by the flesh, you ought to live by the spirit.” But God didn’t make us to be animals, like dogs who eat a nice juicy steak, and are happy enough to sleep. Our lives cannot be about meeting the needs of the flesh. We are made for more. God made us to live in fellowship with him and with one another. He made us to love. And our capacity to love means that we have a higher purpose that cannot be met if we live according to the flesh. 

After all, the flesh tends toward death. We all know this. We’ve all felt aches and pains. If we live for the flesh, and the flesh alone, we won’t have much to show for it. Think of all the people we alienate and hurt because we are so self-protective. But love is outward focused, it’s wanting what’s best for someone else as we want it for ourselves. It means being willing to make sacrifices for another not because we would get anything out of the deal, but because we love them. 

Paul tells us love never ends. (1 Cor. 13:8) Love is a force stronger than death, it is love that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, the love of the Father that would not let his Son see corruption in the grave. When love is at the forefront of our lives we’ll discover that we are no longer living for the self, for our flesh, for our own desires. We’ll discover that suddenly getting everything we ever wanted” doesn’t lead to happiness after all. Because once we have everything we need to keep it. We need to protect it, and we fear losing it. But we don’t need to fear losing love, particularly the love of God. 

Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit is the love of God poured into our hearts. When we know that love, when we see by the Spirit, we are made participants in the New Creation, we experience eternal life, the whole world is made new. Paul calls this setting the mind on the Spirit, and this leads to life and peace. 

The life of the flesh is self-preservation, self-satisfaction, fear, and death. The life of the Spirit is love, peace, and abundant life. If you want a model of what it means to set your mind on the Spirit we ought to always think of Jesus Christ, who lived according to the Spirit. Jesus showed love to others by teaching, by hanging out with the downtrodden and outcast and despised, by healing others and by giving people purpose in life they had long lost. He didn’t come to rule over others, but to serve others. He came to free us, to give us life again.

Jesus not only forgives our sins, but he frees us from our sins. He frees us from sin. He calls us to a life not focused on death, but eternal life in him. “There is therefore,” Paul says, “now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” We are set free. Set free from our fears. Set free from our anxieties. Set free from our guilt. We are free to set our minds on the Spirit, to live a new and joyous life. This is Christ’s gift to us, offered without price. 

Making a Mark

Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh, because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh on the sinew of the hip.- Genesis 32:32

A holy struggle.

I’ve been studying Jacob’s bout with the angel. It’s a powerful and evocative story, and there are a lot of ways to read it. Jacob spends the night alone, waiting to meet his brother Esau for the first time since he stole his blessing. Last he knew Esau vowed to kill him. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to that meeting, and had little reason to expect a moment of reconciliation. But in that dark night of emotional struggle, he faces a struggle of a different sort. A mysterious man appears and begins to wrestle him through the night. “When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob,” we are told, “he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.” But Jacob doesn’t let go, and forces from the mysterious man a blessing. That blessing is his new name. He would no longer be known as Jacob, which means supplanter or usurper. He would now be known as Israel, which means “God strives" or “he who struggles with God.”

That is where the lectionary account leaves us. And that is where most commentaries I’ve read leave the story. But the story doesn’t end with Jacob’s new name. The story ends with us being told that Israelites do not eat from a certain sinew because that is where God touched Jacob’s hip.

This is not an insignificant report. Though I get it might be difficult to preach on, and it’s certainly no command for us to avoid eating this particular sinew. It’s not insignificant because it shows us how Israel chose to commemorate the encounter of their patriarch with God. As his wrestling with God left Jacob limping, so too Israel at the time Genesis was written sets aside the same sinew as a reminder.

What are the marks God leaves on our lives? I don’t mean a limp, or a forbidden food. But what are the daily reminders we set to turn ourselves to God? How does our faith in Christ make our lives different than someone who doesn’t believe? If we follow the crucified messiah, it will leave a mark. There are things we will do that do not compute, or that seem strange or peculiar. Perhaps we set aside a time for prayer, or set times of fasting or other forms of abstinence. Or maybe we set aside a portion of our finances for the work of the Kingdom. What are the regular, ordinary, ways that the rubber of our faith meets the road of our life? As the Israelites remembered their father’s struggles on that lonely and dark night by setting aside the sinew of the thigh.

Sermon: Striving

Life in the Spirit: Striving

Grace is Given, not Earned

Romans 7:15-25a, Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Rev. Tim Callow

Preached Sun. July 5th, 2020

When someone wants to get to know you they want to know what you do. They don’t start out asking for your favorite sports team, or favorite sundae. They don’t ask what tv shows you watch, or whether you’re a morning or evening person. By and large they’ll ask you “what do you do?” And when they ask “what do you do” they usually want to know your occupation. Like, I’m a pastor. It’s only after that we might ask “what do you do for fun?” You know, like I like to read, sing, walk the dog, and so on. Then we might get into sports teams and sundaes.

It’s actually considered rude in many parts of the world to ask “what do you do?” I’m thinking of France especially. You could ask “what do you do for fun?” and people wouldn’t bat an eye. But asking “what do you do” implies you want to know about their work life. And they don’t want to talk about their work life, by and large. They think work is boring and don’t want to be defined by it. It’s pretty unique to America that we define ourselves and others by the work we do, and don’t bat an eye. 

I think the reason we don’t think it’s rude to ask “what do you do,” by and large, is that we are a nation of strivers and go-getters. We Americans have always prized hard work and a can-do attitude. We are a pragmatic and inventive nation, always hopeful in our future. It’s part of why we’ve always thought of ourselves as an exceptional nation. We are the nation of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs. We built the railroads, the dams, the skyscrapers, the internet. We have made wonders all by a little hard work, ingenuity, and a dream. 

I’m a striver too, or have been. All my life I knew I was called to pastor. It was a sense that was always with me. So from high school I was making decisions that would benefit me in my steps toward, God willing, being ordained in The United Methodist Church. I participated in extracurriculars, in church committees, went to a Lutheran undergraduate institution where I got my major in religious studies, went to seminary, and all of the sudden my striving had come to an end. The study, the tests, the internships, had all paid off. My call was recognized. I got ordained. And when you get ordained people ask you “do you feel any different?” I don’t know why. They just do. In the weeks and months afterward I felt at a loss. A sense of emptiness came over me. So much of my life had been built in the striving, in the work of becoming a pastor. And I learned how while my striving led me to accomplish a lot, striving alone can make us feel empty if we ever get what we’re chasing after. But God’s grace is not a matter of our striving.

Being a go-getter is so baked into our culture that we may be tempted to think we need to strive for our own salvation. I remember hearing one person tell their kids how they need to do good things in order to get to heaven. We might feel, like John Wesley the founder of Methodism felt, that there is so much more we could or should be doing. John Wesley once engaged in an experiment to see how much money he could save by eating nothing but turnips. He wanted to give his savings to charity. We may not take things to that extreme. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who has felt I need to pray more. I’m not the only one who has felt that I need to give more. I’m not the only one who has felt that I have these nasty attitudes that won’t go away, or these sins it’s up to me to overcome. We take the need to strive and we apply it to our own faith. The trouble is, it just doesn’t work that way.

It doesn’t work that way because of how sin works in our lives. Sin enslaves, and sin corrupts even our best intentions. Paul speaks very powerfully of the reign of sin in our reading this morning. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He says. Despite all his striving he finds “in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” He knows the Law, he was an expert in it. He knows what the Law demands. He loves the Law as the very gift of God. And yet, he finds that despite all his striving he is incapable of obeying the Law. Though he knows what is good sin is close at hand, and it has held him captive. If Saul the pharisee, Saul the expert, was caught up in the power of sin who could be set free?

Paul knows how sin works in our lives. Sin radically roots itself into us, so the more we strive the more power sin has. In Paul’s case, he may have had in mind his persecution of the Church. It was precisely out of his zeal for the Law and love for God that he persecuted Christ! “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Jesus asks on that Damascus road. Paul strove to follow the Law, in his own words he was blameless. But in his zeal his went against the will of God. Sin had done its work. Sin makes it impossible for us to reach, or be satisfied in, the things we strive for. Paul says elsewhere in Romans that the wages of sin is death. Sin demands work, it demands striving, and it leads to a great deal of unhappiness. It is sin that commands us like a slavedriver, and reminds us of our guilt.

The things of God do not come by our own work. God does not bestow his blessings on those who’ve earned it, or the ones who scored the highest on their final exams or can bench the most or are the most popular. God bestows his blessings on anyone and everyone. “He makes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike.” In fact, let’s go farther. Paul specifically says God justifies the ungodly. God forgives precisely those who don’t deserve forgiveness, bestows grace on precisely those who don’t deserve grace. If we deserved grace, would it still be grace? God’s grace does not come by earning it. God’s grace comes by faith. And not just any faith. We who put our faith in Christ and his cross and rest in him, and he grants eternal life. Not just life in the hereafter, but life now. A blessedness now. Joy now. 

Jesus says, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Who among us does not carry a heavy burden? Who among us does not bear the burden of sin? Or who among us does not bear that burden of striving, of seeking to justify ourselves before others. The burden of sin, the burden of striving, the burden of having to rely on ourselves, Jesus wants to take away. Come to me, he says, all. All you that are weary. All you that are carrying heavy burdens. Come to me, and I will give you rest.

Jesus promises rest from our striving. How? “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus’ yoke is not like the yoke we put on ourselves. His yoke is easy. His yoke is the yoke of his gospel. His yoke is the yoke of his grace. As the old hymn goes, “O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be.” It is not the harsh yoke of servitude. But the gentle yoke of God’s blessing and grace. We take that yoke on ourselves when we say “Jesus is Lord.” When we know Jesus as our Lord. When we know he lays down his life for our sake. When we know that he died for me, even me. When we put our whole trust in him, his salvation, his leading. Then we find our burdens gone, then we might shout with Paul “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”