Law, Grace, Flesh, Love and many other things

Romans 8:6-11

This morning's lesson from Paul's letter to the Romans is rich enough, complex enough, that I could talk about it all day long. Do not under any circumstances allow me to talk about it all day long. Use physical force if necessary.

To help you make sense of things, I want to give you an overview of the lesson before we zoom in one particular aspect, one particular word, actually.

First, however, I want to give you an image to keep in the back of your mind as we go through the lesson. We will return to it later. That image comes from, of all things, an online comic strip I used to read years ago. It was written as more or less the diary of the artist, and in one installment, she talked about studying meditation with a Buddhist monk. The monk taught her at one point that finding the correct posture for meditation and learning to breathe properly were in themselves enlightenment.

Paul, God bless him, has a much more detailed answer to the question. As you may have heard at some point, Paul is writing to introduce himself to the church in Rome before a planned visit, in which he intends to hit them up to fund missionary work in Spain. He wants to let them know who he is, and what his theology is all about, sort of like the prospectus in a grant application. So he spends the first seven chapters of the letter laying out a debate between the concepts of Law and Grace.

Very much oversimplified, he's trying to answer the question, "How do you get right with God?" One option is by following the checklist of do's and don'ts in Jewish law. The other is to have God say essentially, "You know what? Good enough." His point of comparison for that second option is Abraham, who's a bit dubious about God's plan to give him a son at age 99, but goes along with it, which God "reckons to him as righteousness."

Now, Paul definitely knows between Law and Grace which option he'll take. But it's important to note that his views on Jewish law, or Torah, are not at all the way most modern Jews think about it. And the Christian preference for grace is no reason at all to think that Christianity is better than Judaism, or has surpassed it somehow. It's just two options, Christians took one, Jews took the other.

In any case, in today's lesson, Paul is transitioning to look at the broader question on a more individual level. Which is to say, how do we as Christians get hold of the offer of justification? To put it another way, when God says "Good enough," how does that actually lead to our being accepted into the ranks of the saved? How does grace work, anyway?

Working more or less backwards through the lesson, the answer Paul comes up with is this: Jesus chooses to die on behalf of sinful humans — that choice is very important to Paul. Because Jesus does make that decision, God says "Good enough." Abraham had to have faith that his life would not end because he was unable to have children. Jesus has to have faith that his life will not end on the cross. That faithfulness to God mirrors God's own faithfulness to humanity, and it is very powerful. It allows Jesus to overcome the power of sin and death. The proof of that victory is of course Jesus' resurrected body. You don't get raised from the dead if you are not right with God.

We of course do not have the luxury of being resurrected as proof of our righteousness. But Jesus gave his Spirit to his disciples, and those disciples have passed it on to us, through baptism and the laying on of hands.

In fact, according to Paul, this is what makes a Christian a Christian: "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him."

Because we do have that little bit of Christ within us, we have eternal life, or the promise thereof. And we have life enough in the here and now to choose to follow Jesus' example — or not.

In other words, we can have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he existed in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death —
even death on a cross.

as the Christ hymn in Philippians famously has it. Or as Paul puts it in today's lesson, we can have our minds set on the Spirit, or on the flesh.

This isn't a mind/body duality, and it is not a condemnation of what we used to call "carnal pleasures." You know, the stuff the preacher used to like to go into great detail on? Say, for example, "sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like." That's from Galatians, where "sins of the flesh" really does mean just that. But here, in Romans, the choice is really between living as though God were your antagonist, whom you would do anything to rebel against, or living as though God were your loving parent.

And it is a live choice! Jesus was free to decide against his ultimate fate, but he didn't, because of his deep and abiding trust in God his Father. Likewise, we can choose to live by the standards of a world deeply hostile to God and God's intentions, or we can choose to live in the life and peace promised to us in the Spirit.

Paul's point isn't to set up a new system of rules. It's to announce a fundamental freedom Christians have been granted in the Spirit. The upside to that freedom is that we don't have to live up to the arbitrary nature of the Law, or all its many rules. The downside is that it is therefore on us to decide again and again and again, in each and every situation, what the moral and ethical decision is. Because if no one is telling you what to do, you have to figure it out for yourself. That is anxiety-provoking. Fortunately, Christians believe, we have that little bit of Jesus' Spirit to guide us through troubled waters.

Let's pause here for a moment to review what we've heard:

• Jesus chooses to die so that human sins can be forgiven.
• God accepts that as righteousness, for Jesus and for everyone.
• The proof of that acceptance is Jesus' bodily resurrection.
• Jesus gives his Spirit to the disciples, who give it to us.
• That Spirit makes it possible for us to live, not according to a set of rules, but as friends and children of God.

Got it? Good, because I don't have on me my confirmation materials on the Holy Spirit.

We are almost ready to come back to our dear monk. If you look carefully at our passage, you'll notice that Paul uses some version of "to set the mind on" fairly frequently. It's often translated as "to live according to" flesh or Spirit, but I'm told "mindset" is actually pretty accurate. We're talking about people's attitudes, their habitual orientation or way of thinking.

The Greek word is "phronēma," which means something like the outward behavior corresponding to your inward understanding. It ultimately comes from "phroneó," thinking or adopting a view, which in turn comes from "phrén," the midriff of the body, because that's where Greeks understood thinking to take place. (I have no idea what they thought the brain was for.) In other words, if you really want to get down to it, you could say Paul is telling the Romans that if your "gut instinct" is to follow the ways of the flesh, that's no way to live. If your "gut instinct" is to follow the Spirit, however, that means peace and life, even after death.

But! And! That Greek word "phrén" is the root of the English word "diaphragm," from where you do your breathing, from where the "pneumatos," the breath, the wind, the Spirit originates. Remember in the gospel of John, Jesus gives his Spirit to the disciples by breathing on them.

If you really want to abuse poetic license, then, you could say that if what comes as naturally to you as breathing is that life of the flesh, with all its rebellion and self-centeredness, you're headed for a brick wall. But if what comes as natural as breath is Spirit — if you want to live faithful to God and one another, as though life itself were a precious gift from God, that opens up a whole lot more possibilities. So go forth and breathe like Jesus.

No, really — breathe like Jesus. Sit up straight, and relax your shoulders. Put your legs out about hip-wide, with your knees level with or just lower than your hips. And now, take a deep breath and exhale. Breathe in the Spirit, breathe out the pain, the suffering, the way the world tells you life must be.

And there you go: your Lenten journey is over. You can decide if you want to take your Lenten discipline all the way through to Easter. But if you feel more at peace, more able to make the same compassionate choices as Jesus, then: Good enough! Welcome to enlightenment Christian-style, and thanks be to God for that!