“Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.” Romans 8: 12-17
Next Sunday is Advent Sunday and our text from Romans fits nicely into the stirring rhythms of Advent that remind us that this world, as it is presently ordered, is not our home, but it shall be our home one day. All the traditional themes of Advent unmistakably declare a future that belongs to the Church and her members. Both, the one and the many, are true and we have to emphasize each truth, as Paul does so frequently, that it is both the collective House of God, Body of Christ, the Church of the First Born, as well as the individual persons who have been incorporated into the Church that are being saved. That truth is embedded in the text: we are to mortify the deeds of our bodies – each of us – knowing as well that we share a common destiny to be glorified together. And we know from chapter 6 that the manner and means by which we are joined together in the first place is by our being incorporated into Christ and Christ also incorporated into us. Thus the closer we grow to Christ, the closer we grow to one another, even if we are separated by oceans or even if our separation is by time and dimensions of being we don’t fully understand. So the closer you grow to Christ, the closer you are to your children and loved ones who are growing close to Christ whether they are in the same room or another country. Furthermore it is also true that the closer one grows to Christ the closer one is to loved ones who have slipped loose of this space/time continuum and are with our Lord in the heavenly kingdom.
But of course as you already know it would be a mistake to think that this drama we call our life is all about us slipping loose of gravity and going to heaven. God has created us not for life in the clouds but rather he has made us out of the material of this earth for life on this earth. And yet we Churchmen have to always be alert, attentive and intelligent about what we believe and how we behave:
“Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”
I have said this so often in the past that I’m pretty sure you know what is coming. It is so easy to fall into dualism if we are not careful to understand as precisely as we may what St. Paul is saying when he seems to be setting the flesh against the spirit, the deeds of the body against our life in Christ; indeed it has been a slippery slope for the Church through put the ages. More than one time people driven by a desire to please God have mistaken “mortifying the deeds of the body,” to mean “mortifying the body.” We have seen another slippery slope in the introductory verses of chapter 8:
“God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh…”
Well intending folk have too often misread that to mean that flesh in itself is sinful and that God condemned flesh on the Cross. But it does not mean any such thing; it means nearly the opposite of that. It means that God sent his only Son into this world as a real human being, flesh of our flesh from the Blessed Virgin Mary. As I have said before the Church Fathers universally placed great stress upon this phrase, “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” and universally they understood it to mean that Christ was like us in every way, yet without sin. Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, Athanasius and Cyril all believed that our Lord assumed, not pristine human nature, but “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” our nature not because human nature is naturally sinful, but because that is in fact our condition. But as one man put it in summing up the Father’s: “Christ took not the nature of Adam unfallen, but fallen, such as ours” and by assuming our nature into the Godhead, he healed it of all the wounds of the fall so that the Person of Jesus Christ is truly God, truly man, and without sin.
And we see that very promise laid out in the Lesson given for the Epistle today from Jeremiah:
“Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.”
The righteous Branch that would rise up out of David was of course our Lord since he was of the house and the linage of David and David of the house and linage of Abraham.
And what we will once again hear during Advent is that it is time for us awake and prepare not only to celebrate Christmas, but above all it is high time to prepare to meet our Lord either when he returns or at the moment of our own death, knowing full well that our Judge is also our Savior who loves us. But we need to be careful not go off the rail and begin spiritualizing this too much. What is Christ to do upon his return?
“I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.”
Yes indeed, he will not come to snatch us away to some nebulous kingdom in the sky, but rather to do exactly he had promised to Abraham: in a manner of speaking to turn over the promised land to Abraham and his heirs and thus pass judgment and to execute justice in the earth. You see that the patch of ground promised to Abraham and his Seed so many years ago has undergone a good deal of annexation. The blessedness of David and his Branch has overflowed the boundaries of the Jordan River and spread over the whole wide world. And this is exactly what St. Paul means in Romans 4 when he insist that the promise God made to Abraham – the promise of a Seed from his own body, as well as a place we call the Promised Land – now means not seeds, but Seed and the Promised Land is not just a patch of real estate in Israel, but the whole wide world. And of course that is the New Covenant in the faith of Jesus the Messiah.
So here we are today, a motley remnant of the New Covenant in this particular place, at this particular time and it is our job to keep on doing what we have learned to do so well which is to stay awake, be attentive, be responsible, celebrate the sacraments, tell people about Jesus and wait. And yes it is true that we are the children of Abraham, but we are more than that, we are siblings of Christ and members of the New Covenant and the way Paul talks about that is to say that we are “children of God.”
“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.” Romans 8: 12-17
The Promised Land is no longer a circumscribed piece of ground in Israel, but rather the whole world. Furthermore, in light of the death and resurrection of Christ, while it is true that we are the children of Abraham, that does not come close to exhausting our identity because we are now the very children of the God of Abraham. There are circles within circles and wheels within wheels. In the beginning God said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” and God created us in his image and his likeness. Then when God sent his own Son, made in the likeness of sinful flesh, made like you and me, God’s only Son became incarnate, made flesh, made in our likeness. And now St. Paul tells us in Romans 8 that God not only has destroyed sin and death through the incarnation and faith of his only Son Jesus, but we human being, again through the incarnation have been lifted higher than we could have imagined. Through baptism we are grafted into Christ and now partake not only of his healed and perfected humanity, but we have also become partakers of his divine nature as well. We have been born again with God as our Father and Jesus as our elder brother. One would almost think that old shady serpent might have been offering Adam and Eve a shortcut to something that God planned to give them all along which is in some real sense his very own divine life. Those old Church father I mention earlier had two theological sayings they used as a compass to keep the Church on the right track: “That which is not assumed is not saved,” which means that the Son assumed all of our humanity, body and soul, flesh and spirit. The second saying is, “God became man that man might become God.”
“Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”
Paul calls upon the Romans to live as men and women who are bound together for a common destiny as children of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Our common destiny obligates all of us to an ascetical way life that owes nothing to the flesh, indeed an asceticism that requires us to put an end to the reign of flesh, to end the tyranny of our bodies over our lives. What do I mean? Your body is not your enemy, that is true, but the body is a poor master of the person because of the wound of concupiscence. What is that? It is “the disordered desire to satisfy our sensual needs.” But what does that have to do with our bodies? Concupiscence is a wound quickly experienced in our flesh. One moment you are not hungry, and then suddenly you feel you are starving to death and you feel it unmistakably in your body. Same thing with lust. Same thing with a sore throat or the flu. The body is a poor master because left to itself it is immediate and essentially registers what frequently feels like urgent needs or desires. Without a life that reaches beyond our bodies without rejecting our bodies
Paul makes it crystal clear that baptism is we are buried with Christ, we join him in the tomb; his funeral is our funeral. Living according to the flesh is a direct contradiction of the state of being that baptism brings about, which is, our union in Christ. Simply put, incorporation into Christ conforms one to the moral life Christ. You were in Christ when he was crucified, in Christ when he died, when he was buried and you were in Christ when he was raised from the dead. With the reality of the resurrection of Jesus those of us who are in Jesus are walk, to live in accord with his resurrection. This present age in which we live is still in the grip of sin and death but it is passing away and we have already been empowered to live in accordance to our new status in Christ because no other way of life makes sense. Thus our bodies are destined not for death, but for the Lord himself. In Christ our bodies are destined for resurrection and we exist for the Lord and our destiny makes it possible for us to use our bodies as instruments of the righteousness of God.