A Sermon on Romans 8: 1-11

Romans 8:1-11

8There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3For 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, 4so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5For 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. 6To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7For 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, 8and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11If 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.

When I was 4-years-old my dad befriended a man while jogging in our neighborhood. The man, Mr. Jim, turned out to be a Presbyterian minister and my dad’s and his friendship led us to start worshipping at the church where he was the minister. Mr. Jim retired eight years ago and still lives in that neighborhood where he met my family. Meanwhile, my parents and I all live in different states from one another and time and distance has changed many of our relationships. Yet, Mr. Jim has been a constant and my mom, dad, and I are fortunate to still be able to claim him as a friend. In addition to being a minister, Mr. Jim is also a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Over the 25-years my family has known him, he has counseled all of us and helped us dramatically. He is a man we are blessed to have in our lives.

Though he had always been an active man-he played football for LSU while a student there and rode horses and motorcycles into his early 60s-his body began to betray him in recent years. Due to a condition in his spine, he was frequently unable to stand, much less walk. The condition worsened and surgery became the only solution. In October of last year he had surgery to relieve the pressure on his spine that was limiting his mobility and causing him great pain. By all accounts the surgery successfully relieved his spinal condition. There was only one problem: when he awoke from the surgery, he was blind.

Initially there was some hope that his vision would return and that the blindness would be only a temporary side effect of the anesthesia or the trauma of the surgery. Five months later there has been no improvement. It appears that Mr. Jim will live the rest of his life in darkness.

Can you imagine what that must feel like? Everything that was once assumed and taken for granted is gone. He will never see his granddaughter’s face again. He will never see another of his wife’s paintings. He will never see the view from outside the cabin he owned in Colorado. He can’t read. He can’t watch movies. He can’t read his e-mail. He can’t watch football. All of it gone.

Mr. Jim is having to re-learn everything and it is hard and it is exhausting and it is frightening. Simple things like learning to navigate his home, which he has lived in for over 30-years, have become great challenges. Changing his clothes. Going to the bathroom. Making a sandwich. Think about it-how would your life change if suddenly your vision was gone? Would not the daily routines of life sometimes feel as if they were insurmountable obstacles?

It seems, then, that as a resultMr. Jim had two options: give up or learn to see with new eyes. Admittedly, there have been days where he has wanted to give up. Days where he was so depressed that he couldn’t eat. But there have been other days, days when he has fought and refused to let the darkness take his life. There are small steps he takes, like being brave enough to eat out at a restaurant despite not being able to see his plate. And then there are major steps he takes, that are simply remarkable: After retirement, he took a call serving as a very part time minister for a tiny church. His main responsibility is to lead worship on Sunday mornings. Not too long ago, only a matter of weeks following his surgery, Mr. Jim headed back to that church and preached, and has been doing it every Sunday since then. If, while preaching, he forgets his next point, his wife prompts him from the manuscript she has written from his dictation. He has refused to allow his blindness to prevent him from following God’s call.

He is learning to see the world in a new way. The world is harder for him this way; there is no doubt about that. But it is the only world he has and the only life he has and Mr. Jim has decided to find his way through it, even if that means relying on new and different guides. He has decided to set his mind on living life in a new way. He has faced the choice of life or death head on and he chose life.

That is what Lent is about, I think. In the face of death, a death we know is coming, a death that can’t be avoided, do we choose to let death win or do we stand with our God and choose life. Or, as Paul puts in this morning’s Romans passage, do we choose life of the flesh or life of the Spirit?

It is important at this point to be clear about what Paul meant when he spoke of life in the flesh. Paul Tillich, one of the 20th century’s “outstanding and influential thinkers” in matters of theology and philosophy, puts it this way:

‘Human flesh’ does not mean human body. Man’s body, according to Paul, can become a temple of the Spirit. But ‘human flesh’ means the natural human inclinations, man’s desires, her needs, his way of thinking, the aim of her will, the character of his feelings, in so far as it is separated from the Spirit and is hostile to it. ‘Flesh’ is the distortion of human nature, the abuse of its creativity, the abuse, first of all, of its infinity, in the service of its unlimited desire and its unlimited will to power.

In short, life in the flesh is a life based on human desires with frequent disregard to God’s call to us, God’s call to open our eyes and see the new life in the Spirit.

Now of course it is easy to stand here and discredit life in the flesh and uplift life in the Spirit. But choosing to live a life led by the Holy Spirit, even knowing what that life is, is not easy. I think in some ways trying to discern God’s will is somewhat like a visit to the eye doctor. One of the first things I am asked to do when I get to the eye doctor is look at the Snellen chart, which is the chart with the big E at the top and then the rows of letters beneath that decrease in size. Seeing that big E is easy. Those little rows at the bottom are a lot tougher, at least for me. It seems to me that the biggies of Christianity are like the big E on the top of the chart. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. Rest on the Sabbath. No problem. Pretty cut and dry. Easy to understand, easy to follow. The little rows at the bottom of the Christianity chart are a little tougher. They are the rows that represent life in the Spirit. They are the rows that we have to squint to see, the ones that require work to figure out what they mean, how God would have us live.

Right now, Mr. Jim is living life in the little rows. Things are tough. Figuring out the right step is hard work. Similarly, we are living Lenten lives that require work—lives that require serious focus; lives that require the willingness to see anew; lives that require rededicating ourselves every moment. And just as we are given glasses to correct our vision deficiencies at the eye doctor, God gives us Christ to correct the vision deficiencies in our lives, enabling us to look to Christ and receive support as we grope through the darkness and the dimly lit path.

God gives us Christ to serve as our guide, our leader, our hope as we approach the foreign and sometimes murky waters of faithfully living in the Spirit. God gives us Christ to wake us up to our callings, to our true selves. As Richard J. Foster says,

Jesus is a living Savior and the salvation that is in him includes teaching us how to live and re-forming our very selves. Remember, we are not learning how to live Jesus’ life (that has already been done); we are learning how to live our lives as Jesus would live them, if he were us. Jesus is the master Teacher. He knows how our lives should be lived, and he can provide the resources, insights, and strength we need…

I think this is a brilliant and rarely made point. God is not calling us to be Jesus. God is calling us to be the individuals we are and in being those individuals to remember what Jesus has taught us and to seek the Spirit’s guidance to show us how to live our lives in this time and place.

In 1990 an amazing film, called Awakenings, was released. If you haven’t seen it, please go straight to Blockbuster after church. The movie is based on the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose name in the film is changed to Dr. Sayer and is played by Robin Williams. Robert de Niro plays a man named Leonard, one of a group of people institutionalized because they have lived most of their lives in a catatonic state due to childhood encephalitis. Dr. Sayer treats Leonard with an experimental and controversial medicine and, amazingly, Leonard wakes up. Leonard, who fell into his catatonia in his teens during the late 1930s, is now an adult and decades have passed since he last interacted with the world. Leonard awakes and it is 1969. What a year to wake up in after missing the previous three decades! The world is a new and amazing place. Cars have changed. Music has changed. The way people dress, women especially, has changed. Leonard is enamored by all that he sees. He is able to break the binds of his catatonia and freely engage the world. Meanwhile, the other patients suffering from the same catatonia are experiencing their own awakenings through Sayer’s experimental drug. Suddenly there is dancing and laughing on the hospital ward. There is swimming and movie watching. These people, who slipped away through no fault of their own, are awake for the first time in years and they are drinking it all in with a previously unseen voracity.

Sadly, the experiment is only temporarily successful and the patients all eventually return to their catatonia. But the world is changed for their having been awake. People are given hope, and the impossible seems possible. Dr. Sayer in particular is able to see his life through the eyes of people who will never have his opportunities. He is able to live with gratitude, with bravery, with hope. His life has been awakened because his patients were awake, if only for a moment.

Friends, this is what living life in the Spirit can do for us. We can be awakened to a world that is God’s world, a world where there is no judgment, no doom, and ultimately no death. We can be awakened to a world where, while physical death is a necessity, there is no spiritual death. We are free to settle for a life that is not a life in the Spirit, a life ruled by our own wishes and desires—but why would we want to when something wonderful is there for the taking? Life in the Spirit is a life of wholeness, a life of confidence that our sins have been forgiven, and a life where we can awake each day as beloved children of God. Choosing to live in the Spirit requires hard work, for sure, and it requires our asking for forgiveness, many times over perhaps. And yet a life of freedom and grace is there waiting for us—all we have to do is open our eyes and look for it.