So now there isn’t any condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. 3 God has done what was impossible for the Law, since it was weak because of selfishness. God condemned sin in the body by sending his own Son to deal with sin in the same body as humans, who are controlled by sin. 4 He did this so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us. Now the way we live is based on the Spirit, not based on selfishness. 5 People whose lives are based on selfishness think about selfish things, but people whose lives are based on the Spirit think about things that are related to the Spirit. 6 The attitude that comes from selfishness leads to death, but the attitude that comes from the Spirit leads to life and peace. 7 So the attitude that comes from selfishness is hostile to God. It doesn’t submit to God’s Law, because it can’t. 8 People who are self-centered aren’t able to please God. 9 But you aren’t self-centered. Instead you are in the Spirit, if in fact God’s Spirit lives in you. If anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ, they don’t belong to him. 10 If Christ is in you, the Spirit is your life because of God’s righteousness, but the body is dead because of sin. 11 If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you. (Common English Bible)
“With Sighs too Deep for
Words: Verse-by-Verse Through Romans 8,” Week One
The
38th Parallel goes by many names today. The Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Panmunjom, the town on the parallel. A Cold War relic. And ultimately, the border between North and
South Korea, a border drawn out of the same American-versus-Soviet
brinksmanship that gave rise to the proxy wars of capitalism against communism
throughout the world in the latter half of the 20th century, from
Vietnam to Central America to the Korean peninsula.
When
the sun fell on the 38th parallel and the border was closed for good
as a result of the Korean War in the early 1950s, the stories of families being
rendered apart as a result are absolutely wrenching. Suki Kim, a writer who taught English in
North Korea, recounts in her memoir Without You There Is No Us her own family’s harrowing experience of trying to escape
to South Korea on June 25, 1950 when the border closes:
The goal is to get the
hell out…if only the truck would move…
Shouts are coming from
somewhere. Somebody, some panicked
mother or father, a desperate voice pleading with young men to give up their
spaces to women and children. Before the
shouts register, before my grandmother has a moment to ponder the words or
protest, (her) seventeen-year-old (son) rises.
“I’ll go,” he says, then reassures her: “I’ll find another ride,
Mother. Don’t worry.” Then, just as quickly, he is out of sight, followed
by the sound of the engine. It all
happens in a blink, and my grandmother, bewildered by this unexpected twist,
turns frantically in the direction of where her son has gone, and the truck is
moving suddenly, too fast for her to think clearly…this is war, and a
split-second decision is costly. There
she is, my grandmother, dumbstruck on a speeding truck, without her oldest
child…
Seoul was captured three
days later…
My mother’s family stops
in Suwon to wait for my uncle, but he never arrives. Some days later, they run into neighbors who
report seeing him dragged away by North Korean soldiers…the road back to Seoul
is blocked now, and my grandmother waits in vain.
The
line demarcating North and South Korea remains today as impregnable and lethal
as it ever was. But, on occasion, there
is still hope. This past week, four
hundred South Koreans, chosen by lot, crossed the DMZ to reunite for a fleeting
72 hours with their relatives in the North for the first time in a
year-and-a-half after the North finally agreed to another reunion.
And
in 1983, thirty years after the war ended, the national broadcast station in
South Korea aired an hour-and-a-half long segment designed and intended to
reunite families who had been separated by the war, as sort of a
face-on-the-milk carton campaign, but on television. Originally only scheduled for those 95 minutes,
it ended up instead airing continuously for 138 days. Some 10,000 families were reunited as a
result, three decades after stories like Suki Kim’s.
10,000
families. We’re talking a population in
the neighborhood of Kelso and Longview combined of people once separated, now
reunited. Once apart, but now reconciled.
Such
is the way of goodness when we allow it to reign in our lives. And it is that way because so too is such the
way of the Holy Spirit when we allow it to reign in our lives, as Paul exhorts
us to in Romans 8 as he swings us on the pendulum between being ruled by sin
and being ruled by the Spirit.
This
is a new sermon series that will take us all the way to Advent—otherwise known
as the Christmas season (holy cow). Of
course, we’ll be talking about the Christmas story then rather than now, which
is still firmly rooted in the Halloween-and-Thanksgiving season. In that spirit of not only looking at what we
have to be thankful for but also what cause we have to be loving and to
experience such great love, we’ll be taking on a verse-by-verse treatment of
the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Why this particular chapter? Well, for one thing, it simply has been a
while since we’ve had a series on Paul or his letters, and much like the USDA’s
ubiquitous (when I was a kid, anyways) food pyramid, I strive to provide a
balanced preaching diet for y’all; I’m like a spiritual lunch lady, doling out
the religious Sloppy Joes.
However,
Paul is also a very dense, sometimes esoteric, theologian, especially in
Romans, but when it comes to actually talking about the nature of God’s love,
Paul’s prose genuinely begins to soar, and we’ll be spending this plus the next
four Sundays trying to unlock exactly what the Holy Spirit has placed within
Paul for this extraordinary chapter, beginning with its first eleven verses, which may sound circuitous at first, but try imagining it as a pro/con list where on the pro side you have the work of the spirit, and on the other side you have the work of the sin, and it becomes much easier to grasp, I think.
Paul’s
letter to the church in Rome is a bit of a unique beast. Firstly, it’s the longest letter of Paul’s
that we have in the New Testament, and secondly, it reads almost more as a theological
treatise rather than a pastoral response to the concerns and obstacles that the
church was facing—read through any of Paul’s other letters, especially the
letters to Corinth or Galatia, and you’ll see the stark difference in subject
matter and tone almost immediately.
Perhaps
more than anything else, Paul—not just in Romans, but in all of his letters—is insistent
on avoiding division and strife within the church, and to instead approach it
with an eye towards unity and reconciliation, for we are led by the same Holy Spirit
after all (except for when he sarcastically tells the opponents of the
Galatians on the matter of circumcision to go castrate themselves, but that’s
another kettle of fish).
The
eighth chapter of Romans is a core part of this theological treatise because
Paul really begins to explain how the Holy Spirit is meant to work in us. The end product of the Spirit’s work, of
course, is that famous passage from the aforementioned crankypants letter to
the Galatians, contrasting the sinful fruits of the world with the virtuous
fruits of the spirit. But how we even
get to these virtuous fruits, well, that is what Paul is trying to answer here,
by basically saying that selfishness, that age-old characteristic that is
laying deep within each of us, that selfishness that dwells within us is what
has dominated us for so long. It had
dwelled in our hearts for so long, all the way back to the most ancient of
times, to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, that its hold on us was impossible to
uproot.
But
then Jesus arrived. And the possibility
of all that changing arrived with Him, ironically because the world largely
refused to reconcile itself to Him.
Jesus wasn’t welcomed in with open doors, arms, hearts, or minds, He was
welcomed with insults and threats from the powers that be that were all
eventually made very, very real.
And
those threats and insults came from a place of selfishness, from powerful
people who wanted to hang on to their power and position, from wealthy people
who wanted to hang on to their wealth and status, and from prejudiced,
narrow-minded folk who just could not bring themselves to believe that the
Messiah, the son of the living God, could ever have crawled out of a backwater,
Podunk hole like Nazareth in the boondocky backwoods of Galilee.
Jesus’s
resurrection, then, is not *only* a triumph of life over the grave and love
over hate, it is also a triumph of selflessness over selfishness. The ancient dweller of our hearts, as ancient
as the words the serpent spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden, that selfishness
had finally seen its winning streak come to an end.
The
problem, then, is not that our selfishness is invincible or unbeatable, because
we know that it can be beaten. The
problem is that it so often truly is, and that it rarely really has been ever
since that first Easter when the stone was rolled away and the tomb was
discovered empty. Over the course of the
subsequent 2,000 years from that day to this, selfishness has another pretty
epic win-loss record. It has picked up
some pretty substantial, shameful victories from massive, worldwide sins like
the crusades and the transatlantic slave trade to even the tiny stuff between two
people that nobody else sees, but that one person can end up crushed by another
for.
And
there’s no excuse for that. There really
isn’t. We’ve had 2,000 years to get our
houses in order; that we have not is emphatically on us. Which means it is way, way past time for more
caring and less fighting. More praying
and less bickering. More loving and less
hating.
It
is time for all of that because it has always been time for all of that. When Adam and Eve took from the tree, they
gained the knowledge of good versus evil, they were able to tell the difference
between right and wrong. We are, in that
singular sense, their heirs, for we know the difference and then refuse to act
on our knowledge of that difference.
If
we are genuine Christians, then, if we truly do follow Christ not only to the
cross but to the empty tomb that follows, then our refusals and protestations
must end here. No more exclaiming that
it is too hard, too difficult, too impossible for us to comprehend, much less
live out.
We
know what we must do, because Jesus Himself told us: love the Lord our God with
all our heart, soul, and mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
On
these, He says, hangs the entirety of the Law and the Prophets.
And
Paul follows this up by saying, in its purest essence, may the God who gave you
the Son to tell you these things also give you the Holy Spirit by which you
shall have the strength to do these things, strength enough to let selflessness
rule so that you may indeed be reconciled to one another, for if reconciliation
can happen across the most heavily-guarded border in the world, with sixty-some
years of complete separation layered on top, then reconciliation is indeed
possible anywhere.
And
may the same Spirit that gave Paul so much strength to do the great and
story-changing things that he did indeed give you that same strength as well.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
October
25, 2015
Original image courtesy of pixabay.com
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