A Higher Lifestyle
Sermon
ACCESS TO HIGH HOPE
Second Lesson Sermons For Lent/Easter
A gripping and extremely well told story of how the law works out in the lives of people is Midwives, a novel by Chris Bohjalian. The principal character in the story is Sibyl Danforth, an unlicensed Vermont midwife. Isolated and trapped by an unwelcome ice storm, Sibyl is not able to reach the hospital with a patient having great difficulty during her labor. Sibyl performs a cesarean section on the patient when she believes the mother has died of a stroke in trying to give birth to her child. Sibyl does save the child, but she immediately becomes the subject of investigation by the law for liability malpractice and more. The account of that investigation, which results in a trial, gives us insight into the nature of the law.
The law is persistent, fastidious, and tenacious. The law is demanding and protective. The law produces guilt. The novel helps us to recognize how helpless one is before the law, as the law works through its accusatory role. Midwives is not simply about the debate over the practice of the legality of licensed or non--licensed midwives. It is an excellent case history about law. If you can gain some insight into the nature of the law from such a story, then you can deepen your understanding of how the Apostle Paul realistically assesses the function of law in our lives and makes an appeal for a lifestyle higher than one lived under the law. That is the subject of the Second Reading appointed for today.
The Struggle With The Law
One must understand at the very beginning that the Apostle Paul is not opposed to the law. Very often people who want to stress the importance of love and freedom are opposed to the law. They are called "antinomians." That means, they resist the functions of the nomos, the Greek word for "law." That can take many different forms of resistance. In counseling, some therapists may make the client feel as though there is no reason for feeling guilt. There are times when people do have a false sense of guilt. However, most of the time people feel guilt because they are guilty under the law and recognize their guilt. However, some people identify themselves as libertarians. People who make libertarianism a political stance want government to function as little as possible on the basis of law.
Socially people may be libertarian to the extent they feel they should be able to live in total freedom. The sexual revolution that began in the sixties in this country is one form of that kind of antinomianism. There are people who organize themselves against the law. We think of the communes of the sixties and seventies that attempted to develop ideal forms of communal living without the benefit of the law. A recent novel by Ken Follett titled The Hammer Of Eden treats the matter of antinomianism. Members of a commune, called the Hammer of Eden, threaten to cause earthquakes to make the Governor of California refrain from destroying their valley by creating a dam as a source of power. The leader of the commune meditates on five maxims of the commune: Meditation is life, Money makes one poor; Marriage is the greatest infidelity; When no one owns anything, all own everything; Do what you like is the only law. That is organized antinomianism. Generally, the most common form of antinomianism is the final maxim of the commune, "Do what you like is the only law." We are all guilty of that, and we do struggle with the law every day.
A Legalistic Society
Our struggle with the law is intensified by the fact that we live in a legalistic society. The laws begin at home with the do's and don'ts parents must establish for their children. Children who fail to learn discipline at home will have difficulty with discipline at school, at work, and within the community. It is no secret that a major problem in our society today is that too many parents have not disciplined their children and are in reality afraid of their children. Our national debates also focus on the fact that we must reestablish authority within the schools so that there can be more discipline within the classrooms, beginning with dress codes, and the like. We have complicated the problems of discipline within the homes and school by making laws about discipline that is regarded as child abuse. In the work place and in the community, relations between peoples are also regulated more and more by laws. Union and management have made their own laws. Now much of that is also governed by state and national laws.
The unprecedented growth of our technology and media of communication call for constant vigilance and observation for the manner in which the growth of problems in these areas can be regulated by law. Our national debates about laws and regulations are also intensified by the increases in our population. It is a matter of more human behavior having to be controlled in more densely populated areas. Then, of course, we find our national debates focusing more and more on ethical issues like drug abuse, abortion, bearing of arms, and racism. At every turn we take, new laws and regulations have to be made. Of necessity we must live within a legal community.
The Flesh Is The Problem
The Apostle Paul recognized that the law has to perform this kind of function in the world. God is very much involved in this business of regulating human behavior in the creation. God is in charge of it all. Luther would call it God's Kingdom of the Left Hand in which God rules with the stuff of the law. The Law is God's wrath at work in the world. God wants to push down on the world to make the world behave. However, Paul also saw that as God pushes and pulls on people with the law to make them sweat, people ought to look up to get some help from God. In this endless struggle with the law, we ought to recognize where the problem lies. In the previous chapter, Paul placed the blame where it belongs. The fact that things are still unruly in the world is because people are what they are. It is not the weakness or the fault of the law. The faultiness is within us.
Every one of the Ten Commandments and every law no matter how small or large promises that if we love our neighbors as ourselves, everything will be okay. Yet it isn't, because we struggle with our own sinful selfish flesh. The law, Paul says, promises life, but because we do not keep it, the law punishes us with death. The National Rifle Association has it right. It isn't that guns are bad. The bad people abuse the use of guns. But if we follow that argument, we have to get rid of everybody, because all people are bad. It is within ourselves that the real struggle with the law goes on, because we have a struggle within our own flesh. The law says one thing, but our selfish flesh wants to do something else. The law, Paul says, is spiritual. It is holy. However, it is weakened by our flesh that wants things its own way. Paul says it is as though we are enslaved to our own flesh and to sin. We know better, but we find ourselves choosing do to the wrong or the forbidden thing. What we need is to find a way of responding to what our mind says rather than obey what our flesh says. Paul had a way of talking about our weaknesses as a catering to the flesh. When Paul speaks about the flesh, he is not writing about flesh as in flesh and bones. Rather Paul means the total person opposed to God.
Stuck With The Flesh
Paul sees that the problem about the flesh, a life lived apart from God's Spirit, is compounded by the fact that the flesh is stuck on or with the flesh. Paul writes, "Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh." We cannot expect otherwise. Jesus talked about the unproductive vine (John 15), and Luther noted that a bad tree brings forth bad fruit. The problem is not a minor flaw. The nature of the flesh is that it is a defect that contaminates the whole being. The total being is preoccupied with the things of the flesh. Some rich insights into just how perversely the flesh is oriented to the flesh can be found in Tuesdays With Morrie. The book is a record of conversations between Mitch Albon and Morrie Schwartz. Morrie is a professor of sociology dying from Lou Gehrig's disease. Mitch Albon is a sports writer for the Detroit Free Press and one of Morrie's former students.
When Albon learns of Morrie's illness, he makes it a point to fly to Morrie's home each Tuesday morning for a dialogue with him about his illness and impending death. Morrie observes how differently people would live if they knew they were dying. People could forego many pleasures, the pursuits of their greed, their need to amass material things, and they could concentrate on loving others. However, he noted that all people know they are going to die. The problem is they do not believe it! That reveals how badly people are hooked on their own flesh. The one thing that is the most certain in their lives, and they know it to be so, is death. Yet somehow they are so preoccupied with the flesh they do not believe in the reality and the consequences of their own death.
The Flesh Is Hostile To God
Because people are so preoccupied with the preservation of their own flesh, it is understandable they would like to think as little as possible about death as the worst that happens to them. Who wants to think about death? Yet the greater problem is that the preoccupation people have with their flesh makes them hostile to God. Paul explains that the problem is that people should know they are not just putting off the question of death. They are putting off God. God is the One who gives life. God is the One who also takes life. People have invented their own platitudes about death. Even Morrie, the sociology professor at Brandeis, could say while he was dying that the only life worth living is the one worth dying. Existentialist philosophers have surmised the only legitimate question to contemplate is the question of death. Yet that is wrong, and far from what is absolutely basic, which is, to think about God. That is why Paul says people who set their minds only on the flesh are hostile to God.
People refuse to submit to God's law, which ends in death to those who do not love God. Paul says it is so bad that they cannot think properly about God. The flesh is so warped that they cannot submit to God's law. Paul writes, "The mind that is set on the flesh ... does not submit to God's law - indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God." What Paul is explaining to us helps us to understand why things in the world are as they are. Judged from the side of God's law, the world is all upside down. The cultures of the world run counter to the will of God and have always done so. Left to their own resources, people do not make their way back to God on their own. However, it does not have to be that way. Paul's reason for stating the reality of the human condition is to point out the fact that God does give a way out of the human predicament by sending to people the gift of the Spirit. Paul's appeal to us is that we accept the higher lifestyle possible for us because of the presence of God's Spirit.
You Are In The Spirit
In spite of a realistic and hopeless view of life lived under the influence of the flesh, or the mind hostile and helpless before God, Paul reminds us we live on an entirely different plane. Paul writes, "You are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you." He goes on to explain that because the Spirit of God lives within us, the body has already been put to death because of sin. We have to understand that correctly. Some older people are likely to think they understand that well, because there are days when one can wake up in the morning feeling like death warmed over. Paul does not mean that. He means that our lives no longer have to be controlled only by what the body or flesh dictate. The flesh does not have to have control of us. In the Spirit, we are alive to righteousness, not to sin.
We seek to do that which conforms to the will of God, not simply to our own selfish dictates or what other people who live after the flesh dictate. That begins with young children. They not only learn how to obey the will of God by being obedient to parents, but they learn how to say, "No," to the temptations of playmates. Later on they are equipped by the Spirit to say, "No," to the temptations of the teen years, to drugs and to all the lures that are present in growing to adulthood. Life in the Spirit continues this struggle against the flesh through all the periods and ages of one's life until one comes to the end of life in this world. One experiences this sensitivity to the struggle the life of the Spirit has over the life of the flesh sometimes with pain and heartache. However, one also has the rewards of joy and pleasure in a life that is able to act without the pressure of the law or the pressure of peers and the world. It becomes a higher lifestyle, because it is life from above.
You Are Alive To God
There is a popular Hebrew book called The Hesed Boomerang. The message of the book explains the rewards and blessings of living under divine mercy. The business of living by the Spirit of God is not to be a spoilsport and to live under wet blankets. The life of the spirit is filled with joys, laughter, and confidence. The reason for this is the Spirit of God who dwells in us. Paul says, "The Spirit of him who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you." The life, the passion, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ give life to us. We do not have to say only that our Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again for us. The effects of his death and resurrection are within us. They have achieved a death within us. We are dead to sin means that sin does not control or condemn our lives.
That the Risen Christ lives in us means we are alive to God. We live to God by the manner in which our lives are directed to serve God by serving and living in others by love and grace. One does not have to read far to discover many writers and observers of human nature who believe that the crises of our age are disconnection and discontinuity. People sense this on all levels of relationships. However, they discover it also within themselves. We see the problem as the disconnection that people have from God. For us who know God's grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness in our Christ, we need not suffer such disconnection and discontinuity. By the faith through the gift of God's Spirit, we achieve wholeness with our God and with all eternity. This truly is a higher lifestyle. We do not have our heads in the clouds, but the Spirit from on high lives within us. This lifestyle in the Spirit of God is not a hands--off every day affair or reserved only for high holy days or Sundays. This is the application of the Spirit of God to the common, the nitty gritty, and the ordinary. We are not living high off the hog. We are living high off the Spirit.
The law is persistent, fastidious, and tenacious. The law is demanding and protective. The law produces guilt. The novel helps us to recognize how helpless one is before the law, as the law works through its accusatory role. Midwives is not simply about the debate over the practice of the legality of licensed or non--licensed midwives. It is an excellent case history about law. If you can gain some insight into the nature of the law from such a story, then you can deepen your understanding of how the Apostle Paul realistically assesses the function of law in our lives and makes an appeal for a lifestyle higher than one lived under the law. That is the subject of the Second Reading appointed for today.
The Struggle With The Law
One must understand at the very beginning that the Apostle Paul is not opposed to the law. Very often people who want to stress the importance of love and freedom are opposed to the law. They are called "antinomians." That means, they resist the functions of the nomos, the Greek word for "law." That can take many different forms of resistance. In counseling, some therapists may make the client feel as though there is no reason for feeling guilt. There are times when people do have a false sense of guilt. However, most of the time people feel guilt because they are guilty under the law and recognize their guilt. However, some people identify themselves as libertarians. People who make libertarianism a political stance want government to function as little as possible on the basis of law.
Socially people may be libertarian to the extent they feel they should be able to live in total freedom. The sexual revolution that began in the sixties in this country is one form of that kind of antinomianism. There are people who organize themselves against the law. We think of the communes of the sixties and seventies that attempted to develop ideal forms of communal living without the benefit of the law. A recent novel by Ken Follett titled The Hammer Of Eden treats the matter of antinomianism. Members of a commune, called the Hammer of Eden, threaten to cause earthquakes to make the Governor of California refrain from destroying their valley by creating a dam as a source of power. The leader of the commune meditates on five maxims of the commune: Meditation is life, Money makes one poor; Marriage is the greatest infidelity; When no one owns anything, all own everything; Do what you like is the only law. That is organized antinomianism. Generally, the most common form of antinomianism is the final maxim of the commune, "Do what you like is the only law." We are all guilty of that, and we do struggle with the law every day.
A Legalistic Society
Our struggle with the law is intensified by the fact that we live in a legalistic society. The laws begin at home with the do's and don'ts parents must establish for their children. Children who fail to learn discipline at home will have difficulty with discipline at school, at work, and within the community. It is no secret that a major problem in our society today is that too many parents have not disciplined their children and are in reality afraid of their children. Our national debates also focus on the fact that we must reestablish authority within the schools so that there can be more discipline within the classrooms, beginning with dress codes, and the like. We have complicated the problems of discipline within the homes and school by making laws about discipline that is regarded as child abuse. In the work place and in the community, relations between peoples are also regulated more and more by laws. Union and management have made their own laws. Now much of that is also governed by state and national laws.
The unprecedented growth of our technology and media of communication call for constant vigilance and observation for the manner in which the growth of problems in these areas can be regulated by law. Our national debates about laws and regulations are also intensified by the increases in our population. It is a matter of more human behavior having to be controlled in more densely populated areas. Then, of course, we find our national debates focusing more and more on ethical issues like drug abuse, abortion, bearing of arms, and racism. At every turn we take, new laws and regulations have to be made. Of necessity we must live within a legal community.
The Flesh Is The Problem
The Apostle Paul recognized that the law has to perform this kind of function in the world. God is very much involved in this business of regulating human behavior in the creation. God is in charge of it all. Luther would call it God's Kingdom of the Left Hand in which God rules with the stuff of the law. The Law is God's wrath at work in the world. God wants to push down on the world to make the world behave. However, Paul also saw that as God pushes and pulls on people with the law to make them sweat, people ought to look up to get some help from God. In this endless struggle with the law, we ought to recognize where the problem lies. In the previous chapter, Paul placed the blame where it belongs. The fact that things are still unruly in the world is because people are what they are. It is not the weakness or the fault of the law. The faultiness is within us.
Every one of the Ten Commandments and every law no matter how small or large promises that if we love our neighbors as ourselves, everything will be okay. Yet it isn't, because we struggle with our own sinful selfish flesh. The law, Paul says, promises life, but because we do not keep it, the law punishes us with death. The National Rifle Association has it right. It isn't that guns are bad. The bad people abuse the use of guns. But if we follow that argument, we have to get rid of everybody, because all people are bad. It is within ourselves that the real struggle with the law goes on, because we have a struggle within our own flesh. The law says one thing, but our selfish flesh wants to do something else. The law, Paul says, is spiritual. It is holy. However, it is weakened by our flesh that wants things its own way. Paul says it is as though we are enslaved to our own flesh and to sin. We know better, but we find ourselves choosing do to the wrong or the forbidden thing. What we need is to find a way of responding to what our mind says rather than obey what our flesh says. Paul had a way of talking about our weaknesses as a catering to the flesh. When Paul speaks about the flesh, he is not writing about flesh as in flesh and bones. Rather Paul means the total person opposed to God.
Stuck With The Flesh
Paul sees that the problem about the flesh, a life lived apart from God's Spirit, is compounded by the fact that the flesh is stuck on or with the flesh. Paul writes, "Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh." We cannot expect otherwise. Jesus talked about the unproductive vine (John 15), and Luther noted that a bad tree brings forth bad fruit. The problem is not a minor flaw. The nature of the flesh is that it is a defect that contaminates the whole being. The total being is preoccupied with the things of the flesh. Some rich insights into just how perversely the flesh is oriented to the flesh can be found in Tuesdays With Morrie. The book is a record of conversations between Mitch Albon and Morrie Schwartz. Morrie is a professor of sociology dying from Lou Gehrig's disease. Mitch Albon is a sports writer for the Detroit Free Press and one of Morrie's former students.
When Albon learns of Morrie's illness, he makes it a point to fly to Morrie's home each Tuesday morning for a dialogue with him about his illness and impending death. Morrie observes how differently people would live if they knew they were dying. People could forego many pleasures, the pursuits of their greed, their need to amass material things, and they could concentrate on loving others. However, he noted that all people know they are going to die. The problem is they do not believe it! That reveals how badly people are hooked on their own flesh. The one thing that is the most certain in their lives, and they know it to be so, is death. Yet somehow they are so preoccupied with the flesh they do not believe in the reality and the consequences of their own death.
The Flesh Is Hostile To God
Because people are so preoccupied with the preservation of their own flesh, it is understandable they would like to think as little as possible about death as the worst that happens to them. Who wants to think about death? Yet the greater problem is that the preoccupation people have with their flesh makes them hostile to God. Paul explains that the problem is that people should know they are not just putting off the question of death. They are putting off God. God is the One who gives life. God is the One who also takes life. People have invented their own platitudes about death. Even Morrie, the sociology professor at Brandeis, could say while he was dying that the only life worth living is the one worth dying. Existentialist philosophers have surmised the only legitimate question to contemplate is the question of death. Yet that is wrong, and far from what is absolutely basic, which is, to think about God. That is why Paul says people who set their minds only on the flesh are hostile to God.
People refuse to submit to God's law, which ends in death to those who do not love God. Paul says it is so bad that they cannot think properly about God. The flesh is so warped that they cannot submit to God's law. Paul writes, "The mind that is set on the flesh ... does not submit to God's law - indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God." What Paul is explaining to us helps us to understand why things in the world are as they are. Judged from the side of God's law, the world is all upside down. The cultures of the world run counter to the will of God and have always done so. Left to their own resources, people do not make their way back to God on their own. However, it does not have to be that way. Paul's reason for stating the reality of the human condition is to point out the fact that God does give a way out of the human predicament by sending to people the gift of the Spirit. Paul's appeal to us is that we accept the higher lifestyle possible for us because of the presence of God's Spirit.
You Are In The Spirit
In spite of a realistic and hopeless view of life lived under the influence of the flesh, or the mind hostile and helpless before God, Paul reminds us we live on an entirely different plane. Paul writes, "You are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you." He goes on to explain that because the Spirit of God lives within us, the body has already been put to death because of sin. We have to understand that correctly. Some older people are likely to think they understand that well, because there are days when one can wake up in the morning feeling like death warmed over. Paul does not mean that. He means that our lives no longer have to be controlled only by what the body or flesh dictate. The flesh does not have to have control of us. In the Spirit, we are alive to righteousness, not to sin.
We seek to do that which conforms to the will of God, not simply to our own selfish dictates or what other people who live after the flesh dictate. That begins with young children. They not only learn how to obey the will of God by being obedient to parents, but they learn how to say, "No," to the temptations of playmates. Later on they are equipped by the Spirit to say, "No," to the temptations of the teen years, to drugs and to all the lures that are present in growing to adulthood. Life in the Spirit continues this struggle against the flesh through all the periods and ages of one's life until one comes to the end of life in this world. One experiences this sensitivity to the struggle the life of the Spirit has over the life of the flesh sometimes with pain and heartache. However, one also has the rewards of joy and pleasure in a life that is able to act without the pressure of the law or the pressure of peers and the world. It becomes a higher lifestyle, because it is life from above.
You Are Alive To God
There is a popular Hebrew book called The Hesed Boomerang. The message of the book explains the rewards and blessings of living under divine mercy. The business of living by the Spirit of God is not to be a spoilsport and to live under wet blankets. The life of the spirit is filled with joys, laughter, and confidence. The reason for this is the Spirit of God who dwells in us. Paul says, "The Spirit of him who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you." The life, the passion, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ give life to us. We do not have to say only that our Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again for us. The effects of his death and resurrection are within us. They have achieved a death within us. We are dead to sin means that sin does not control or condemn our lives.
That the Risen Christ lives in us means we are alive to God. We live to God by the manner in which our lives are directed to serve God by serving and living in others by love and grace. One does not have to read far to discover many writers and observers of human nature who believe that the crises of our age are disconnection and discontinuity. People sense this on all levels of relationships. However, they discover it also within themselves. We see the problem as the disconnection that people have from God. For us who know God's grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness in our Christ, we need not suffer such disconnection and discontinuity. By the faith through the gift of God's Spirit, we achieve wholeness with our God and with all eternity. This truly is a higher lifestyle. We do not have our heads in the clouds, but the Spirit from on high lives within us. This lifestyle in the Spirit of God is not a hands--off every day affair or reserved only for high holy days or Sundays. This is the application of the Spirit of God to the common, the nitty gritty, and the ordinary. We are not living high off the hog. We are living high off the Spirit.
