Spiritual Resuscitation
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
One spring when I was about ten, I was home alone after school. I don't know where the rest of the family was, but I did my chores as quickly as possible so I could join the rest of the neighborhood boys in our field for a baseball game. As I was dashing through the house and yard doing my jobs, I worked up an early appetite and thought I should prepare some nutritious morsel before the ordeal of a baseball game.
In the refrigerator I found frankfurters. Not hotdogs. These were the fat -- literally fat, I'm sure -- tubes of meat strung together. You bought them at a butcher's shop, and these were wrapped in the butcher's white paper. So, I threw a pan on the stove with some water and tossed in the frankfurter to boil while I got an inning of exercise before my snack.
It was a clear day, the air just washed clean by a rain. I don't remember the score or who had the best hits. I do remember the state of the house when I entered two hours later. I opened the door to the smell of a burning butcher's shop. I could hardly see. The pan had boiled dry and that luscious frankfurter was a thumb-sized hunk of carbon in a pan emitting vast amounts of acrid, gray vapors. I rushed outside to toss the pan onto the lawn to cool.
I thought I had run fast to first base, but I ran faster to open every window and door in the house. I retrieved the pan and scraped and scrubbed on it furiously; then I'd switch to swinging the outside door in and out to fan the smoke -- in comes the good air, out goes the bad air. Then I'd go back to attacking the pan with steel wool. I labored desperately in the sphere of smoke, coughing and hacking through the sweat of pure terror, trying to do the equivalent of resuscitating a house.
I recall that smoke-filled house when I ponder Paul's statement that we live either "in the flesh" or "in the Spirit." Paul contrasts two spheres, two domains in which people live, one as energizing and life-giving as clear, spring air; the other as oppressive as a house filled with smoke that's sure to get you punished. We live in one or the other. Paul calls them Spirit or flesh. He can sense these two contrasting realms operating in people's lives. Paul sees the realm of the flesh as it resists the realm of the Spirit -- like they are opposing force fields. Either the flesh or the Spirit will determine and dominate the direction we face in life and the values we hold. We're either in the healthy, fresh air or in a tragically smoke-filled house.
Different people express different meanings by the same word and an individual in different contexts uses one word to mean different things. A friend of mine gave an introduction to new Boy Scouts in his group by talking about "the spirit of scouting." One boy's father, a religious zealot who seemed unable to understand a dictionary, protested the use of the word "spirit," claiming there are only two spirits: that of the Lord Jesus and that of the devil. Paul uses a number of words to describe God's activity and a number of other words to describe the power that oppresses and captures humans into a negative pattern of life. At times he'll mention "sin," "law," or "death" for the same reality he attacks here as "flesh." By "flesh" Paul doesn't mean our human bodies or our sexuality. Flesh signifies our weak and mortal human nature. He explains in a different letter that "the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these."
In our text, Paul grasps hold of this word "flesh" and beats on it until we understand that he's talking about a life turned just into oneself. By "flesh" Paul describes a life aimed toward mere earthly goals, which leaves God waiting on the doorstep of the heart and which chooses one's own benefits instead of the needs of others. "Flesh" identifies the negative resistance to God that Christians must acknowledge, whichever word at the moment Paul slaps onto that smoky, choking, doomed reality of living apart from God.
As with everything that Paul teaches, he always ends up pointing us toward the positive life with God and usually he spends much more time and energy on what's constructive. Here he directs us to the realm of God's Spirit. In youth groups, I often call God's Spirit "The Alien Invasion." This benevolent, invisible sphere infiltrates our lives and surrounds us for good. This is the fresh air that's pushing out the original, acidic smoke that Paul calls the "flesh." The Spirit may be invisible but it's as real as love. The Spirit often motivates the good we do even when we don't think about it.
God's all-permeating Spirit is responsible for bringing you to worship today. The Spirit was active in you before you knew it, even today. The Spirit surrounds you and fills you so quietly that it's almost, as Paul would say, a part of you. You are in the Spirit and the Spirit is in you, like air. You can say just like air because "air" is the Bible's word for Spirit. The Old and New Testaments each have one word that means wind, breath, or spirit. God's Spirit can affect us like a giant windstorm that shakes all the trees in the forest of our lives or God's Spirit can affect us like a gentle summer breeze that blows beneath the awning of our soul.
You can think of God's Spirit in us as something like seeing your breath in the winter. For those raised in southern climates, you missed that thrill as a child of first stepping into the cold and actually seeing your breath. We get used to such things in the northern US. If you remember what it was like as a child, or if you'd imagine a child who for the first time sees air coming from within, you get a sense of the miracle that Paul considers to be almost touchable -- this Spirit that's like air around us and within us.
The Spirit is Jesus' contact with us. It's our experience of God now, as God summons us to Jesus' higher, better life. God's Holy Spirit animates us with hope and energizes us with love to live as Jesus did. It oxygenates with faith that part of our lives that's created to respond to God. It directs and redirects us to cooperate with God, as it displaces that evil orientation within us, which Paul names the "flesh."
Have you been through job retraining? The Holy Spirit carries on the ultimate retraining within us, turning us into people who show a family resemblance to Jesus.
If we're to choose which of these spiritual realms to live in, what's the better choice? Paul encourages us to set our mind on the Spirit, which means to have the mentality and outlook that turns us toward God's Spirit for comfort, inspiration, and the strength to live as God leads. The Holy Spirit is busy turning us into little Christs, as Martin Luther put it.
If you've wondered about God or religion or, using today's buzzword, if you've been interested in spirituality, that interest is God's Spirit within you. God's presence within you makes you wonder: What's going on in here? I had a dear professor who said, "Do I love God? That's pretty frightening. Gives me goose pimples all over. I don't know if I can say I love God. But the longer I've been a Christian, the more interested I am in God." I hope in your marriage you are more and more interested in your spouse, and in your family, more and more interested in your children and grandchildren. If you're too embarrassed to admit that you're passionate about God, it's okay to say you're greatly interested. The Holy Spirit can use your interest, because the more you set your mind on the Spirit, the more you become aware of the Spirit and the more the Spirit does in your life.
It's our choice, however. God starts the relationship with us. Then we must respond. What sphere will you give your allegiance to and take your orders from? We must choose. It's like being in the US in 1863. The Civil War is raging -- the time has come and gone when you can be neutral. You need to decide what side you're on.
God doesn't always bowl us over. God certainly pressures us at times but mostly, God invites. Jesus invited people to follow him. He commanded them with an invitation, if you want to state it as the paradox it is. God invites you and commands you to respond. You're not some kind of a wrench that God picks up, adjusts, uses, and puts back on the workbench. God wants you for a living, spirit-breathing partner, someone who can follow God's lead.
In Lent, we try to concentrate upon God's new life, not in order to become more and more aware of how sinful we are, but to become more and more aware of what God helps us to be and to do in Christ. Lent isn't to frighten us into being more faithful Christians but to summon us to the goodness of Jesus who still, as he promised, draws us, compels us, attracts us to him as he is lifted up on the cross.
Now's a time to become more aware of how God the Holy Spirit helps us to corral the evil desires that Paul calls the "flesh." We meditate upon Christ's turning us toward a new direction in life, eternity's direction. As we follow Jesus, we'll never become totally free of what Paul calls the "flesh." We remain contaminated. I think of the farmhouse I grew up in, the one I filled with frankfurter smoke. Some of that carbon must still be lodged in my lungs, and I'm sure some still impregnates the house's ceiling. Yet, by the miraculous gift of God's Holy Spirit, we are incorporating more of God's life within us, slowly, daily, year by year, Lent by Lent, Easter Sunday by Easter Sunday.
God helps us to increase the rate that the Holy Spirit becomes part of our spirit and that we are assimilated from time into eternity. In order to appropriate more and more of God into more and more of our lives, we worship and obey God as Jesus did. In prayer we practice setting our mind upon this new reality in which we live, and the Spirit retrains us with instincts toward faith and habits for service. We struggle for justice for the oppressed and care for the needy. That's setting our mind on the Spirit.
If it helps you in your following Jesus to think of seeing your breath as you speak to God, picture air leaving you as you speak to God in prayer. In prayer, exhale your bitterness, fears, laziness, sin, and disobedience. Then inhale God in prayer and receive the energy, inspiration, and more and more of God's loving Spirit into your life.
Let us pray. Loving God, thank you for the new life that you've started in Jesus and that you continue within us by your Spirit. Help us respond to you so that more and more of you becomes part of us. We ask your help as we promise, again by your grace, to follow our Lord Jesus. In his name we pray. Amen.
In the refrigerator I found frankfurters. Not hotdogs. These were the fat -- literally fat, I'm sure -- tubes of meat strung together. You bought them at a butcher's shop, and these were wrapped in the butcher's white paper. So, I threw a pan on the stove with some water and tossed in the frankfurter to boil while I got an inning of exercise before my snack.
It was a clear day, the air just washed clean by a rain. I don't remember the score or who had the best hits. I do remember the state of the house when I entered two hours later. I opened the door to the smell of a burning butcher's shop. I could hardly see. The pan had boiled dry and that luscious frankfurter was a thumb-sized hunk of carbon in a pan emitting vast amounts of acrid, gray vapors. I rushed outside to toss the pan onto the lawn to cool.
I thought I had run fast to first base, but I ran faster to open every window and door in the house. I retrieved the pan and scraped and scrubbed on it furiously; then I'd switch to swinging the outside door in and out to fan the smoke -- in comes the good air, out goes the bad air. Then I'd go back to attacking the pan with steel wool. I labored desperately in the sphere of smoke, coughing and hacking through the sweat of pure terror, trying to do the equivalent of resuscitating a house.
I recall that smoke-filled house when I ponder Paul's statement that we live either "in the flesh" or "in the Spirit." Paul contrasts two spheres, two domains in which people live, one as energizing and life-giving as clear, spring air; the other as oppressive as a house filled with smoke that's sure to get you punished. We live in one or the other. Paul calls them Spirit or flesh. He can sense these two contrasting realms operating in people's lives. Paul sees the realm of the flesh as it resists the realm of the Spirit -- like they are opposing force fields. Either the flesh or the Spirit will determine and dominate the direction we face in life and the values we hold. We're either in the healthy, fresh air or in a tragically smoke-filled house.
Different people express different meanings by the same word and an individual in different contexts uses one word to mean different things. A friend of mine gave an introduction to new Boy Scouts in his group by talking about "the spirit of scouting." One boy's father, a religious zealot who seemed unable to understand a dictionary, protested the use of the word "spirit," claiming there are only two spirits: that of the Lord Jesus and that of the devil. Paul uses a number of words to describe God's activity and a number of other words to describe the power that oppresses and captures humans into a negative pattern of life. At times he'll mention "sin," "law," or "death" for the same reality he attacks here as "flesh." By "flesh" Paul doesn't mean our human bodies or our sexuality. Flesh signifies our weak and mortal human nature. He explains in a different letter that "the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these."
In our text, Paul grasps hold of this word "flesh" and beats on it until we understand that he's talking about a life turned just into oneself. By "flesh" Paul describes a life aimed toward mere earthly goals, which leaves God waiting on the doorstep of the heart and which chooses one's own benefits instead of the needs of others. "Flesh" identifies the negative resistance to God that Christians must acknowledge, whichever word at the moment Paul slaps onto that smoky, choking, doomed reality of living apart from God.
As with everything that Paul teaches, he always ends up pointing us toward the positive life with God and usually he spends much more time and energy on what's constructive. Here he directs us to the realm of God's Spirit. In youth groups, I often call God's Spirit "The Alien Invasion." This benevolent, invisible sphere infiltrates our lives and surrounds us for good. This is the fresh air that's pushing out the original, acidic smoke that Paul calls the "flesh." The Spirit may be invisible but it's as real as love. The Spirit often motivates the good we do even when we don't think about it.
God's all-permeating Spirit is responsible for bringing you to worship today. The Spirit was active in you before you knew it, even today. The Spirit surrounds you and fills you so quietly that it's almost, as Paul would say, a part of you. You are in the Spirit and the Spirit is in you, like air. You can say just like air because "air" is the Bible's word for Spirit. The Old and New Testaments each have one word that means wind, breath, or spirit. God's Spirit can affect us like a giant windstorm that shakes all the trees in the forest of our lives or God's Spirit can affect us like a gentle summer breeze that blows beneath the awning of our soul.
You can think of God's Spirit in us as something like seeing your breath in the winter. For those raised in southern climates, you missed that thrill as a child of first stepping into the cold and actually seeing your breath. We get used to such things in the northern US. If you remember what it was like as a child, or if you'd imagine a child who for the first time sees air coming from within, you get a sense of the miracle that Paul considers to be almost touchable -- this Spirit that's like air around us and within us.
The Spirit is Jesus' contact with us. It's our experience of God now, as God summons us to Jesus' higher, better life. God's Holy Spirit animates us with hope and energizes us with love to live as Jesus did. It oxygenates with faith that part of our lives that's created to respond to God. It directs and redirects us to cooperate with God, as it displaces that evil orientation within us, which Paul names the "flesh."
Have you been through job retraining? The Holy Spirit carries on the ultimate retraining within us, turning us into people who show a family resemblance to Jesus.
If we're to choose which of these spiritual realms to live in, what's the better choice? Paul encourages us to set our mind on the Spirit, which means to have the mentality and outlook that turns us toward God's Spirit for comfort, inspiration, and the strength to live as God leads. The Holy Spirit is busy turning us into little Christs, as Martin Luther put it.
If you've wondered about God or religion or, using today's buzzword, if you've been interested in spirituality, that interest is God's Spirit within you. God's presence within you makes you wonder: What's going on in here? I had a dear professor who said, "Do I love God? That's pretty frightening. Gives me goose pimples all over. I don't know if I can say I love God. But the longer I've been a Christian, the more interested I am in God." I hope in your marriage you are more and more interested in your spouse, and in your family, more and more interested in your children and grandchildren. If you're too embarrassed to admit that you're passionate about God, it's okay to say you're greatly interested. The Holy Spirit can use your interest, because the more you set your mind on the Spirit, the more you become aware of the Spirit and the more the Spirit does in your life.
It's our choice, however. God starts the relationship with us. Then we must respond. What sphere will you give your allegiance to and take your orders from? We must choose. It's like being in the US in 1863. The Civil War is raging -- the time has come and gone when you can be neutral. You need to decide what side you're on.
God doesn't always bowl us over. God certainly pressures us at times but mostly, God invites. Jesus invited people to follow him. He commanded them with an invitation, if you want to state it as the paradox it is. God invites you and commands you to respond. You're not some kind of a wrench that God picks up, adjusts, uses, and puts back on the workbench. God wants you for a living, spirit-breathing partner, someone who can follow God's lead.
In Lent, we try to concentrate upon God's new life, not in order to become more and more aware of how sinful we are, but to become more and more aware of what God helps us to be and to do in Christ. Lent isn't to frighten us into being more faithful Christians but to summon us to the goodness of Jesus who still, as he promised, draws us, compels us, attracts us to him as he is lifted up on the cross.
Now's a time to become more aware of how God the Holy Spirit helps us to corral the evil desires that Paul calls the "flesh." We meditate upon Christ's turning us toward a new direction in life, eternity's direction. As we follow Jesus, we'll never become totally free of what Paul calls the "flesh." We remain contaminated. I think of the farmhouse I grew up in, the one I filled with frankfurter smoke. Some of that carbon must still be lodged in my lungs, and I'm sure some still impregnates the house's ceiling. Yet, by the miraculous gift of God's Holy Spirit, we are incorporating more of God's life within us, slowly, daily, year by year, Lent by Lent, Easter Sunday by Easter Sunday.
God helps us to increase the rate that the Holy Spirit becomes part of our spirit and that we are assimilated from time into eternity. In order to appropriate more and more of God into more and more of our lives, we worship and obey God as Jesus did. In prayer we practice setting our mind upon this new reality in which we live, and the Spirit retrains us with instincts toward faith and habits for service. We struggle for justice for the oppressed and care for the needy. That's setting our mind on the Spirit.
If it helps you in your following Jesus to think of seeing your breath as you speak to God, picture air leaving you as you speak to God in prayer. In prayer, exhale your bitterness, fears, laziness, sin, and disobedience. Then inhale God in prayer and receive the energy, inspiration, and more and more of God's loving Spirit into your life.
Let us pray. Loving God, thank you for the new life that you've started in Jesus and that you continue within us by your Spirit. Help us respond to you so that more and more of you becomes part of us. We ask your help as we promise, again by your grace, to follow our Lord Jesus. In his name we pray. Amen.
